The Fat Diaries: Boot the Brown Bag Lunch Ban
A public school in Chicago has instituted a ban on lunches from home. But is dissing parents really the way to push healthy eating?
If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding!
How can you have any pudding, if you don't eat yer meat?
- Pink Floyd, Another Brick in the Wall
A public school called “Little Village Academy” on Chicago’s West Side has instituted a ban on lunches from home. Unless the child has a note from a doctor, they are required to purchase food from the school cafeteria. The policy was instituted by the school principal in order to “protect” students from unhealthy food choices.
First of all, the idea that lunches are the students’ choice in the first place is nonsense. In all the years I went to public school, I don’t think I made more than 20 school lunches in those 12 years. It would have taken a gun, or perhaps tickets to a Weird Al concert, to make me voluntarily get the bread and peanut butter out every morning. A statement about “protecting the children” seems a thinly veiled insult to the parents and indeed some of the Little Village parents are hopping mad about it.
Is it me or does this show blatant disrespect for the office of parenthood? “Attention parents. You are too stupid to make smart decisions for your own children, so we are taking parental privileges from you with policy. Welcome to the machine, peons.”
First of all, if this school’s lunches are anything like most of American school lunches, the word “healthy” is highly subjective; corn chips, greasy ground beef, nacho cheese, and French fries taking the fore. Fruits and vegetables are wilted iceberg lettuce salads, mushy sub-juicing-grade Red Delicious apples, and fruit cocktails with more sugar than a box of Milk Duds.
Is an enchilada topped with refried beans and fake nacho cheese really healthier than a ham and cheese sandwich on whole wheat bread from home? And the big question is which will a kid actually eat? No matter how many children this program is trying to save from the clutches of ignorant parenting, a healthy lunch is only healthy if it’s EATEN.
The article states that many kids balk at eating cafeteria food and a lot of lunches end up in the wastebaskets uneaten. I can’t decide if this is a bigger waste of food or of parents’ money, especially since most home-lunches cost less than the $2.25 a day school-lunches cost. The fact that the parents are required to pay for this lunch (unless exempt from payment under WIC guidelines) seems more suspicious than it is laudable. I also noted as I read the article that there was no mention of repealing this policy for religious reasons. Since the school lunches are neither Kosher or Halal, this is another thing to consider.
Now while I do disagree strongly with this totalitarian control over students’ diets (which only seems to be benefiting the school food service providers) I have seen some good examples of healthy rules in public schools. Some schools in Virginia have a “no swapping food” rule. Most have taken away soda and candy vending machines, or replaced those unhealthy items with healthier options. Most schools at least ask that parents not include soda and candy in lunches from home, and some have even banned those items.
These rules still allow the parents a wide margin of control over creating a lunch that their kids will eat, while trying to reign in the habits that are detrimental to kids’ health. But if Virginia ever proposes (and there have been NO rumors to that effect) such a policy in their schools, I might lose it. Heck it might even spur me to activism, and you all know how much I try to avoid that nonsense.
Personally, I’m hoping for a student’s revolt in the cafeteria to squash this nonsense, or at least a demonstration or protest. Show them that you’re not just bricks in the wall, kids.
Tweet
