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?"

Comments

Re:Big Brother? Not Quite.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

What happened to lunch orders?

[TapeCutter]

"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.