My school didn’t serve lunch or breakfast at all. We sat in the gymnasium in the bleachers-that was our “lunchroom”.
Then I think your situation is so anomalous now as to be irrelevant.
As for Dangerosa’s point – one, whether the kids are embarrassed to accept the school lunch is not an argument in support of Czarcasm’s point, because in the situation he’s proposing, they would have no option to brown bag it instead. I’m not sure it’s a great argument in favor of the necessity of peanut butter even outside of that. Two, again, I doubt very much that your hypothetical food bank yet no free lunch family is common, or that they would have absolutely no other options than peanut butter. WhyNot mentioned soup in a thermos; it’s possible that given how much you can make from how little, soup might actually be cheaper than peanut butter and (presumably store bought) bread.
IANAL and IANA Paralegal but I looked at Wikipedia and found:
Examples of rights and freedoms which are often thought of as human rights include civil and political rights, such as the right to life and liberty, freedom of expression, and equality before the law; and social, cultural and economic rights, including the right to participate in culture, the right to food, the right to work, and the right to education.
The term “right to food”, and its variations, is derived from the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food in 2002 defined it as follows:
Right to adequate food is a human right, inherent in all people, to have regular, permanent and unrestricted access, either directly or by means of financial purchases, to quantitatively and qualitatively adequate and sufficient food corresponding to the cultural traditions of people to which the consumer belongs, and which ensures a physical and mental, individual and collective fulfilling and dignified life free of fear.
In a similar fashion, the Children’s Rights Information Network categorizes rights into two groups, including:[16] [17]
Economic, social and cultural rights, related to the conditions necessary to meet basic human needs such as food, shelter, education, health care, and gainful employment. Included are rights to education, adequate housing, food, water, the highest attainable standard of health, the right to work and rights at work, as well as the cultural rights of minorities and indigenous peoples
So there are some rights but as to the other part of your question (pb vs gum) I’ll have to think about that.
And to the posters in general: IANA Dietician but the lunches served at school today don’t seem to compare to those of yesteryear. I can’t speak to the national condition, so YMMV and I’d be curious to know what it’s like in your neck of the woods.
I’m sure our school had free lunches; I wasn’t on the list. But there was one line and we all ate the same thing, so I know what free lunch kids ate. In those days, we’d get something like a slice of ham, half a baked potato, peach slices, and a rice krispie cookie and milk. School lunches where I’ve taught have gone a lot more toward burgers, tacos, pizza etc. to get the kids to eat. Usually there are some healthier alternatives that kids could choose but most don’t.
And of course the whole vending machine flap came along…kids skip lunch for a bag of chips and a soda. We had one vending machine in my school: it sold milk. Put in your nickel, get two pennies change.
I’m just pointing at that saying “You don’t have a legal right to eat PB&J sandwiches” isn’t going to cut it.
Marc
No. If you are claiming there is a right underpinned by the 9th Amendment to send your child to school with a peanut butter sandwich, you have to justify it. A right is not just something you are at present allowed to do because there is no law against it, but is, in this circumstance, something that it would be unconstitutional for a law to prevent you from doing. You simply can’t say that because the ninth has been held to protect certain actions, it therefore protects all actions.
lobotomyboy63
I think we are on the same page now. There is certainly an argument that there is a “right to food.” Many would disagree, but the case can be made out for it. The next stage of course (and you mention this) if you want to claim there is a right to peanut butter, is either to argue there is a right to send all foodstuffs to school if they are legal outside school, or to argue there is something different about peanut butter to foods that can be banned in school. I’m not sure either is a practical argument, though.
What we need to do now is find a religion that has peanut butter as a sacramental requirement, and claim that school bans are a violation of the Free Exercise Clause… 
I have not seen any good evidence that this is the case.
Our immune systems are still bombarded with lots of potentially infectious agents every day, even without a relative handful of once-common childhood diseases. You could argue that with the prevalence of day care and kids starting school earlier than in past times, diseases are spread around even more now due to increased exposure. So childrens’ immune systems have quite enough to handle (by the way, contrary to antivaxer propaganda, the number of antigens kids are exposed to from vaccines now is actually less than in the old days when there were fewer shots but cruder, more antigenic vaccines).
What’s a more likely explanation for the seeming rise in allergies is that there are more potential allergens in the environment, and greater sensitivity (or over-sensitivity) to the problems of those with allergies.
Hymn #32: What a friend we have in peanuts…
As I described, it seems to me that school lunches have degraded. Taste has steamrolled nutrition. In my day, you could bring a sack lunch. Or, you could have the hot lunch, same as the kid next to you: if you don’t like the hot (but nutritious) lunch, go hungry.
In this case I think the school had the high ground, but it seems more and more that we cater to the kids, who don’t really know what’s best for them. As obesity figures grow, we should be rethinking this. After they leave the school is something we don’t control. But while they’re there, some may be getting their only meal of the day and it ought to be a nutritious one.
A parent would probably have a legitimate complaint about school lunches on the basis of nutrition (not allergies or anything like that). Too much fat, sodium, too many calories etc. And if that parent is poor, with the child captive to free lunch, it seems they would have grounds to say that the school is forcing nutritionally inadequate food on their child (but IANAL).
As I stated earlier I think schools usually have a nutritional choice on the side, which is probably how they skirt the issue. And if the parent said, “But my kid is sick of eating the same salad every day,” maybe could cite the lack of variety as inadequate. I bet the school would accomodate the parent before a lawsuit was filed, however.
One tricky bit about public schools, IMO, is that the parent pays for it and the child receives it. I had a principal who was fond of calling the students “the customers” because if our business is education, they’re the ones whom we serve.
There’s some truth there, but I mostly disagree. The student doesn’t pay the taxes that pay my salary, for one thing. For another, the parent is supposed to be the adult who decides what’s best for the child, not the child. So the parent may think, ‘I pay for a nutritious lunch for my child…after all, the school sanctions it so it must be good for them.’ But if lunch is tasty and nutrition be damned, the kid who eats it isn’t going to complain.
You can joke, but my wife has a wicked (though not fatal) soy allergy. There’s a good chance she miscarried a few months ago because of that.
The difference is, someone eating tofu across the room an hour ago isn’t going to trigger a reaction.
The government now supplies, and has supplied for a couple of years, keypads and swipecards. Students now prepay for lunches, or have them added credit-card like to a tab, and students with free lunches are given a code or a card. Then every kid types their code in or swipes their card. Kids can still pay with cash, but believe me, parents like the prepay method because then they know their kids aren’t pocketing the money and not eating.
Since every kid does it, nobody knows who is or isn’t…if kids want to tell each other, that’s fine, but then that kind of negates the embarrasment factor. Of course, when 85% of your school is on the free lunch program, it’s really not much of an issue.
I was joking mostly because it’s nigh impossible to trigger a reaction from soy products eaten across the room. I just have serious doubts that there are enough people who have the degree of severity of an allergy to peanuts that we need to create “peanut free zones” until we actually encounter an individual with that degree of severity.
My son’s elementary school prohibits sending soft drinks in their lunches. Ok, he doesn’t have any “right” to take Coke or Pepsi or Mountain Dew, any more than he has a “right” to take a peanut butter sandwich. There are plenty of better, healthier lunch and drink options.
I’ve always been cautious, because he went to a preschool for special-needs kids. A lot of those kids had compromised immune systems, and some had bad reactions to various foods. When the administrator sent a letter about a student who had a peanut allergy, I was far more careful about what I sent in his lunch. It wasn’t that difficult, really.
I don’t know if you’re aware, but British pregnant women with a personal or family history of allergies (or if the unborn baby’s father has a personal or family history of allergies) are advised to avoid peanuts during pregnancy. Nursing mothers with the same history are advised to avoid nipple creams containing peanut oils as well as peanut containing foods and people with atopic family histories are advised not to give peanuts to the under threes.
This is controversial advice, but it is still the offical government advice to British women.
True, but many wouldn’t be that careful. And in our highly litigious society, it’s easy to see how a school district would prefer to take no chances, than to take some relatively small risk.
I can’t see banning pb because there are too many potential products that can have peanut oil in them. It turns parents into the food police. Good luck with that.
It makes sense to have a pb free zone where those affected are isolated and the lunch tables are scrubbed in accordance with whatever safety features are dictated.
I would have starved to death. My mom couldn’t get me to eat anything but peanut butter sandwiches for lunch in elementary school.