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Big Brother In the School Cafeteria?
AustinSlacker writes "An Iowa school district's lunch program asks children as young as 5 years old to memorize a four-digit PIN code so it can monitor what they eat in the school cafeteria - prompting some parents to claim it's an unhealthy case of 'Big Brother.' An over reaction by parents or an unnecessary invasion of privacy?"
By who's definition of healthy?
If only there was some group somewhere, maybe part of the government, who employed nutritionists and could use peer-reviewed science to separate what's healthy from diet fads. You know, like a department of health or human services or something?
And as science changes, they could maybe update the guidelines on a periodic basis.. like every 5 years or so.
You're right. My reaction to this was, "This is news?"
They've had this at our local elementary school as long as I've had kids there, which has been 10 years. The kids each have an ID number they enter when they purchase lunch and we write checks for lunch money. They get to keep the same ID number all through their school "career" (my oldest is in 11th grade) and it saves them the trouble of having to deal with money for lunches and saves us the trouble of dealing with it too.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Ftfa: the number will pull up the child's photo so the cashier can verify the identity.
That little check is in place at least.
That said children can go and purchase meals for each other. But it's pretty hard to purchase meals on someone else's account.
"Some adults I know would pay for this service in the real world..."
In the 60's we had a thing called a "lunch order". The parent would write the lunch order on a plain envelope and put the money inside. This was given to the teacher in the morning and at lunch time the lunch would be delivered to class with your name on it.
The results were; Kids didn't spend half their lunch time waiting in line, nor could they blow their money on sweets. Parents knew exactly what their kids were getting for lunch, and bullies had little opportunity to steal the money.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
For the most part, red meat has only been really bad for you since the end of World War II. A glut of manufacturing capacity and petroleum lead to a massive increase in the mechanization of grain farming (especially corn) in North America. This led to a precipitous drop in price due to over-supply, and farmers turned to feeding it to livestock to produce a "value-add" via conversion to more-valuable animal protein.
The problem is that the digestive systems and metabolisms of grazing animals are suited to forage diets (grass), not grain. Grain has much higher ratios of Omega-6 fatty acids compared to the mostly Omega-3 fatty acids found in the non-grain parts of grasses, so feeding grains to grazing animals greatly elevates the Omega-6 fatty acids that then end up in the meat (and have other health consequences for the grazing animals). Eating the meat from animals fed this way ends up having health consequences for humans.
I would recommend meats such as pastured poultry and grass-fed, grass-finished beef (in addition to fish) to reduce the Omega-6 fatty acids compared to the typical American diet.
Yesterday it worked; today it is not working; Windows is like that...