Ah, I should have specified “public school.” I understand that parochial and private schools are often exempt from facilities standards.
I don’t think that’s what even sven meant. Poor parents are already in the system, because their children get free school meals - so they (at least theoretically) already have a say.
I believe the point was that middle class parents (who may have the financial background to have experience of making healthier food choices) would be added into the system.
As the parent of a school age child, I find myself getting a bit more bristly about the concept of the school taking away my ability to choose for my child.
Offer me a free lunch, and the cheapskate in me is going to be very happy for him to eat school lunch every day.
Take away my right to pack a lunch, and I’m going to get a little irritated. If my son doesn’t like Taco Tuesday, I should be able to feed him something he does like.
Well put.
School to me: Your child can’t bring his lunch to school because we don’t trust you to supply a lunch that he wants to eat and is good for him to eat.
Me to school: STFU.
Regards,
Shodan
I’m sorry, Even, but your first sentence has nothing to do with the rest of your post, nor has the rest of your post anything to do with what I wrote. If you think they’re somehow related, please explain, and I’ll do my best to clarify what I wrote; as it is, I’m having genuine trouble seeing how you think what you wrote is related to what I wrote.
(I’m not really singling you out, but the way you worded the “offer” made me think of this …)
I work at a college, and there are a number of programs (none related to meals) that are mandatory for all students. Some of these programs are mandatory because it isn’t cost effective to make them opt in. It’s not so much that every single student needs the program, it’s that it costs us less in terms of money, time, staff, and facilities resources if the usage is essentially 100%. In many ways, it’s a simple business decision.
I’m curious if the idea was presented that 65% of the kids at your child’s school would not have a healthy lunch unless it was provided by the school - let’s accept that as a fact. YOUR child is in the other 35%, the children who could get a healthy lunch from the family. However, the school can only implement a healthy lunch program with 100% participation. Would you go for a mandatory program in that case?
These two sum it up for me. I know there was a post saying that kosher and vegetarian would be an option, but I can imagine the option being either wrong or badly done or both, especially at small schools who only have one or two outliers.
Full discolsure: my kids are old enough to complain about how old they’re getting. When they were young I was stoney broke and they got free lunches. They knew not to complain about them. I have no idea if they ate them. I remember visiting during lunch and there was a lunch aid by the trash can collecting the untouched whole apples and oranges that would have been thrown away.
I still wouldn’t support mandatory no lunches from home unless they could make a case that there was a clear case of nutritional hazard. And I’m not sure how they’d do that unless there were cases of food poisoning from, say, chronically unrefrigerated chicken salad.
This was apparently the initial impetus for the ban, not that they posed a direct hazard in terms of being unsafe, but nutritionally deficient;
“…a visit from The Children’s Food Trust Agency found less than 1% [of packed lunches] had enough nutrition.”
even sven, I also don’t quite understand how your reply relates to LHoD’s answer, but in any case, I think his first point works for me without even having to go to points two or three.
There is no way in the world I would let kindergarteners in a public school system, with one adult per many kids, have access to salt shakers. Some, as he says, would be able to use it competently; I know some kindergarteners who would have no trouble. I also know quite a few who would love to have salt shakers so they could unscrew it and dump it all out on the ground, or shake way too much onto their food because it’s fun! or shake it onto the table. Teachers have a hard enough time as it is without having to clean up salt every freaking day and/or deal with the fact that Little Bobby can’t eat his meal anymore because it has an entire shaker’s worth of salt poured on it.
I think we need more information about just how nutritionally deficient these lunches were and just how good the replacement meals will be. If they were sent to school with a bag of fritos and a can of soda then yes, obviously almost anything would be an improvement. But if we are looking at a turkey sandwich on white bread with a banana and a juice box that they decide that isn’t healthy enough to meet their standards and they replace it with a salad, baked chicken and and a roll that all go in the garbage untouched how is that better? It doesn’t matter how healthy it is if you can’t get it into the kids. They absolutely should not be snarfing down junk, of course, but there needs to be a middle ground where food is healthy enough to meet their needs and tasty enough for them to actually eat it.
When I was eight years old and in third grade (many, many, MANY years ago), we moved, and I went from a school with a sit down cafeteria where I took money to buy my lunch every day, to a school that had no cafeteria. Nobody bothered to tell us this apparently when my parents registered me, they gave me money to buy lunch. But there was no lunch to buy. (once a week they brought in hot dogs). So as everybody in class pulled out their lunches, I sat at my desk and cried. The teacher asked me where my lunch was, and when I didn’t have one, she sent me home (it was a walk of a few blocks). When I got home, I was so upset, my mother kept me home for the rest of the day.
The research was apparently carried out by the Children’s Food Trust, so presumably wasn’t just pulled out of someone’s ass. Their website isn’t responding right now though, so I can’t get at the report.
And, of course, family traditions and obligations. Sometimes, kids get something special on a birthday, as mentioned on a previous page. Sometimes a grandmother is in town and makes cookies, and if you don’t eat your grandma’s cookies what kind of heathen are you?
You can argue that these things don’t need to be in school lunches, but I’d argue that there’s no good reason they shouldn’t be, and that the family’s wishes are a more than sufficient reason they should be.
The upshot is, there would be so many individual exceptions that it couldn’t possibly be universal after all, and that to remove those exceptions would be deeply dangerous to allergy sufferers and deeply disrespectful to cultural and religious traditions. And, yes, culture and religion can be limited to one family, especially in a small town.
Sorry, maybe I seriously misread what you wrote. My only point was that a high salt diet is an acquired taste.
And what is Big Brother School District going to do about THAT?
I have so many other things to cope with as a parent of three children that I actually could not give less of a rat’s ass about whether the school wants to provide my kids with healthy free lunches and ban me from the joyful daily task of making their brown-bag lunches or whatever.
Generally speaking, I think people should be allowed to pack their kids’ lunches if they want. Also generally speaking, I think that free healthy lunches provided by the school are a good thing. I also think that if teachers notice that a kid is showing up every day with a bag of chips and a can of pop for his lunch, they should be able to step in and give him some additional food, because that shit ain’t right. I don’t care if he immediately runs to the bathroom and flushes the healthy food down the toilet. At least he’ll have been given the opportunity.
I disagree with this policy. If it was me, I’d tell all the parents that free lunches would be provided and give them the menu, but if they chose not to take advantage of that and sent a packed lunch, I would not force the issue.
I’ll happily stipulate that for certain values of “high salt diet” you’re right. I once had a roommate who made fun of me for how much butter I used in cooking, meanwhile she made everything almost inedibly salty for my tastes, like burn-your-tongue salty.
But I’m not suggesting that level of salt. Rather, there’s a level of salt that draws out food’s flavor that’s fairly standard for our culture’s non-fast-food and junk-food. It’s broadly appealing. And our school’s offerings don’t come close to this level: they’re specifically low-sodium in accordance with federal guidelines. I think that given the low-fat and low-sugar guidelines, which are great ideas, relaxing the low-salt guidelines would be a wise move to encourage more kids to actually eat school lunches.
Which, we should remember, is the ultimate goal. Offering healthy lunches isn’t the goal. If kids aren’t eating the healthy meals, all research about low-sodium diets and acclimating to them is beside the point, unless we figure out some way to acclimate kids.
A lot of vegetarian meals are going to be kosher by default, and there are a lot of vegetarian meals that are kid-friendly, such as pizza, pasta, and bean burritos, among others, that are also cheap and easy to make in large amounts. In any event, if a family keeps glatt kosher (i.e. two of everything) or are strictly halal, they’re probably not going to send their kids to public school or they’re probably going to live in a community where the public school is majority Jewish or Muslim.
I have friends who have two of everything at home and send their kids to public school in a community that it definitely not majority Jewish. (They are somewhat less strict about kosher for food eaten out of the house, but they keep a kosher home.) Their kids do not eat school lunches, and they would probably have to remove their children from school if they were not allowed to bring a packed lunch. I don’t see how that serves anyone’s purpose.