The food nannies strike again.
The Blaze reports:
North Carolina officials have said there was a misunderstanding when a preschooler’s homemade lunch was sent home for not meeting certain nutritional requirements, but now a second mother from the same school has come forward exclusively to The Blaze to say the same thing happened to her daughter.
Diane Zambrano says her 4-year-old daughter, Jazlyn, is in the same West Hoke Elementary School class as the little girl whose lunch gained national attention earlier this week. When Zambrano picked Jazlyn up from school late last month, she was told by Jazlyn’s teacher that the lunch she had packed that day did not meet the necessary guidelines and that Jazlyn had been sent to the cafeteria.
The lunch Zambrano packed for her daughter? …
If you notice, none of the children’s lunches met the guidelines, and all were forced to purchase additional food.
The entire idea is asinine. It reminds me of the “part of this complete breakfast” stubs that the government required cereal makers to put at the end of their ads. The requirements were so large and varied that the result invariably was more fit for a lumberjack than a child.
The child’s lunch actually met the guidelines; Turkey (meat), cheese (dairy), bread & chips (carbohydrates) and bananna and apple juice (2 servings of fruit). I suspect that they had quota to meet and the lot fell to this student.
One of my renters works at a local school cafeteria here in Knoxville, TN. She tells me that 1) most kids now bring their own lunch because they do not care for the food the school serves and 2) those who do take lunch from the school waste most of what is put on their plates. She claims that never in her many years of service have they thrown away so much food. I guess that is how Michelle My Belle is fixing childhood obesity.
As long as schools see free government money — $10.8 billion in 2010 for the school lunch program — they will continue to promote the Administration’s agenda and greater government control in telling people how they should eat and raise their children. Never mind that their politically correct edicts have gone well beyond sound science or good nutrition, let alone stepping on parental rights. A program meant to help feed hungry poor children has grown into a huge money maker. Unbenownsed to most taxpayers, school lunch program guidelines has been influenced by a large array of special interests, most notably PCRM and the organic industry, who have marketed the idea that children were being fed bad foods and becoming fat and diseased. (Never mind that childhood obesity rates have been unchanged for decades and children are living healthier and longer lives than ever before.) Now, lunches must contain locally grown organic produce, no canned or frozen produce, vegan offerings, and diets more geared to elderly cardiac and diabetic patients rather than growing children (low in salt, sugar, fat, and high in fiber and nutritionally nondense foods). The costs to taxpayers is not appreciably healthier school lunches or children, but a 10-fold increase in tax moneys to pay for it all.
Sure sounds like it happened. Twice. You just know that however this turns out, a lot of schools will outlaw homemade lunches to “ensure health” in a “manageable manner.”
Who is that caped crusader? The grown-ups have no idea who the lunch inspector actually is. I thought there was a policy about no unauthorized persons allowed on school property. This is a severe security breach and the violators should be prosecuted.
If you read the Blaze and the Times-News link the school denied knowing anything about it, pretty much denied it happened (even with the Jan 27 letter) and then blamed a 4-year-old for misunderstanding. A little light and they run an hide. Way back when, the kids took milk money because parents didn’t want warming half-pints of milk. No inspections. No food nannies other than teachers making sure they didn’t destroy the place. My kids seem to have done pretty well with that and I don’t recall any reports of kids dying from lack of a government approved lunch at their school. I’m pretty sure if anyone had tried that with my kids we would have had a terse and very frank conversation about such non-sense.
This happens regularly in the UK, and has for some time. Makes a change for the US to be lagging behind?
If I were one of those mother’s that would have been the last day my child spent in that school.
Schools have been trying to replace parents for decades and this is just the latest. If I had to do it over again, I would homeschool. My kids would have had a much better education and I wouldn’t have had to deal with school nannies.
As for lunches, per my doctor, no one has to eat a balanced diet at every meal, as long as you get the general food requirements over time, even if it’s over a week, rather than a day. My youngest son was a picky eater, the only fruit OR vegetable that he would eat was pears and apples. I made sure he had one or the other or both as many times a week as I could and supplemented with children’s vitamins. When he got older, he finally started adding more variety to his diet. Today he’s 19 years old and quite healthy, despite the somewhat unbalanced diet during his early years.
Trying to force kids to eat is a losing battle and just makes for poor eating habits.
Another first for America: Forced handouts for those who refuse government handouts. Reeducation camp for this lady, how dare her prepare a home-made lunch for her kid, she must be bleeping mentally ill. The nerve.
// sarc