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School Sends Child's Lunch Home After Determining it Unhealthy
halfEvilTech writes "A North Carolina mom is irate after her four-year-old daughter returned home late last month with an uneaten lunch the mother had packed for the girl earlier that day. But she wasn't mad because the daughter decided to go on a hunger strike. Instead, the reason the daughter didn't eat her lunch is because someone at the school determined the lunch wasn't healthy enough and sent it back home. What was wrong with the lunch? That's still a head-scratcher because it didn't contain anything egregious: a turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice. But for the inspector on hand that day, it didn't meet the healthy requirements."
Actual story:
- Lunch was not taken away from the girl; she was given extra food because they were worried she might not have enough.
- A standard form letter was sent to the parent, which said that she may be charged for the food - in fact, since the child was enrolled in the right program, she was not actually charged for the food
- The food given was milk and vegetables, not chicken nuggets.
http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2012/02/15/a-north-carolina-non-troversy/
The parent states she received a note and bill, where exactly is someone taking the 4 yr old's word on anything?
http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2012/02/15/a-north-carolina-non-troversy/
And I must say, it is rather embarrassing for this site to be spreading such sensationalist garbage around, especially when no one's done the background research to verify it. We all love knee-jerk reactions induced by rantings from a personal blog, but come on.
I presume the letter the school sent home with the child, explaining their reasoning and charging the parents $1.25 for the chicken nuggets - which was provided to the original reporter - was enough for the original and more reputable news source to go ahead and print the story.
Exactly, though there are much better write ups out there but letâ(TM)s go with a NBC channel in order to be more neutral.
http://www2.nbc17.com/news/2012/feb/16/hoke-county-school-lunch-issue-sparks-controversy-ar-1939456/
More importantly, if anyone in the process of getting this on the front page had say .. googled it. We might have avoided this. Spin baby spin.
Just twisted to support the usual right-wing scare agenda.
By and large, what this story boils down to is that a low-income child whose tuition is fully subsidized by the state under a program her mother opted into was offered some additional food to supplement the boxed lunch she brought from home. This option was provided not because of some overarching, generally applicable law or regulation, but because the program in which her mother and school voluntarily participate requires such an option be available.
http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2012/02/15/a-north-carolina-non-troversy/
Hey! But don't let that bit of reality disturb the rest of your enjoying the fine entertainment provided on Fox News!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Prisons have better food then some schools and prisons have a store where you can buy pop and candy as well.
http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2012/02/01/prison-food-is-better-than-japanese-school-lunches
http://www.cari-fit.com/2011/06/school-lunches-worse-than-prison-food/
Check out other great stories with the nottrue tag: http://slashdot.org/tag/nottrue
My favorite is "Michigan Teen Creates Fusion Device."
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Apple juice is terrible for you. It's just flavored sugar water. See for yourself. The fact that it comes from a fruit doesn't automagically make it healthy.
From the article:
The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs — including in-home day care centers — to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home
Sandwhich was turkey and cheese and was made of bread, so that's the meat, the dairy and the grain, and the banana covers the "fruit or vegetables". A reasonable quantity of potato chips isn't unhealthy, and neither is apple juice. Also, the alternate meal that the girl was given apparently consisted of chicken nuggets.
The USDA requirements are a bit of a joke anyway. They're not really based on particularly good dietary science, they mostly conform to politics rather than real nutritional standards. Meat, vegetables and fruit sure, but dairy and grains? They're not necessarily bad for you, but they're also not requirements. Calcium is important, but you can get it in other ways than dairy, and you can certainly get better sugars, proteins and fats from other sources once you're no longer an infant. Pretty much anything you could get from "grains" (which covers a range of things that are mostly nutritionally just carbohydrates) you can get from a larger vegetable serving.
There are certainly meals that can be put together that aren't healthy, but you probably have to put a lot of effort into doing worse than the typical school lunch in the first place. If the mother in the story had sent her child to school with a big cube of liver, a raw brussels sprout and a bottle of beet juice it would have been a lot healthier than the USDA requirements or the school lunch. Her child would probably beg to be taken away by social services, but the meal would be healthy.
The people behind Carolina Journal are the John Locke Foundation, not exactly an unbiased source.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
It's about as un-healthy (or healthy, as it may be) as eating the equivalent amount of sugar and washing it down with water. I'd take the water without the sugar, please.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
The mother was NOT charged. She received a form letter, sent to all parents, that the school might start charging for extra food given to students at some point in the future. However, since she is voluntarily enrolled in a program for poor parents, she would be exempted from paying regardless.
Please stop repeating these right-wing, scaremongering lies.
So this is a clear message to the middle class parents then: "Don't send your kids to school with a lunch. We'll be charging you $1.50 no matter how nutritious the homemade lunch is."
rather I doubt that a four-year-old girl is capable of giving a completely accurate account of what happened
OK. I've give you that.
It's refreshing to see someone approaching this from a reasonable standpoint. Most people thus far who have disagreed with me have not wanted to meet anywhere in the middle. I thank you for not being one of them.
But if start with that as an assumption, then I think that you also have to accept that a 4 year old is NOT capable of understanding when teacher / other school official says (with dramatic license) "That lunch does not meet the appropriate nutritional guidelines. We are not replacing your lunch that you brought from home, but merely supplementing it in order to ensure you have the proper diet of a child of your age."
That is pretty much where I was going with it. I'm not trying to accuse the girl of lying or trying to pull one off on someone. I figured she was probably told to get something (maybe something specific) from the line - or given something from the line by an adult - and misinterpreted what she was said.
Someone else pointed out that the whole story has already pretty well been debunked:
a north carolina non-troversy
If a teacher / school official really believed the child's lunch was inadequate, was it absolutely essential that action be taken immediately / that day?
As I read it, apparently the girl was instructed to get some milk from the line, and - I would wager through confusion and nothing more - grabbed chicken nuggets, milk, and some other items.
So basically, someone felt she either didn't have enough dairy in her lunch, or not enough to drink in her lunch, and suggested she get some milk. I don't think that is any kind of grave or sweeping action being taken.
I'm assuming these people at the school are themselves educated past the high school level, but perhaps I am wrong.
It's a North Carolina pre-school program. I have no idea what kind of qualifications the people there do or do not have. One would hope they at least graduated high school though we certainly know that is not a prerequisite for having children...
Given the description of what the kid brought from home, though, if I were the parent I would probably tell them to pound sand.
I could understand the frustration, if the incident actually occurred as suggested by the article that slashdot posted to.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The ICC would not be at issue in this case, because such a bulb would be exempted from the law. There are a tremendous number of exceptions in the law, the most significant probably being "rough service bulbs", which can be manufactured and sold legally. In addition, anything not in a right-handed thread Edison base, any appliance lamp, essentially any specialized lamp.
I see this as similar to the ban on DDT. It pushes you to make a choice that is good for society in general. It is at times inconvenient, it has exceptions.
I'm not for "Libertarian Totalitarianism", in which every person would be a soverign. We need to have a balance between everybody's freedom to live in a healthy society together and your freedom to do what you wish. Unfortunately, we don't have convenient planets for Libertarians to live alone upon, and the sad reality is that things you do do sometimes effect me at a distance, like profligate use of energy.
If you're really the sort of person who would "un-respect" me over this, you would not be the sort of person who I would want to be respected by.
Bruce Perens.
I just read through all the comments scored 3 or higher. Several of you said, sometimes in exactly these words, "Nothing to see here, move along."
Shame on you!
You are prepared to dismiss this story as being lies made up by a 4-year-old, or lies made up by crazy right-wing biased news sources? You can't be bothered to research it a little bit?
Put the words "West Hoke Elementary School" into Google News. Ignore Fox et. al. and look for local sources. Oh wow, looks like Google has started categorizing the links, and there is a link labelled "Local:" right near the top:
http://www.wcti12.com/news/30472198/detail.html
Or, if you can disdainfully read that horribly biased right-wing nutty web site The Blaze for a little bit, you can find their own link to the local newspaper story on the incident:
http://www.carolinajournal.com/exclusives/homemade-lunch-replaced-with-cafeteria-nuggets.html
So unless you are now going to tell me that the local news outlets are part of a vast right-wing conspiracy, I think it's clear there is indeed something to see here.
Now it does look like there is some backpedaling going on. This has embarrassed the authorities and they are downplaying it. But here are the facts as I understand them:
Now, as it happens, I heard the mother being interviewed on the radio yesterday. Her comment was that she can't afford to buy vegetables that won't be eaten and will be thrown away, and she can't afford to have the school charging her extra if the school doesn't like a lunch brought by the child.
She was also furious that the state officials implied that she is doing a poor job of looking after her child, and extra furious that they are confusing her 4-year-old daughter into thinking she packed bad food: "You're telling a 4-year-old. 'Oh, your lunch isn't right,' and she's thinking there's something wrong with her food."
Tell me, honestly. If you saw a news story on the Huffington Post that some right-wing outrage had been perpetrated in Alabama or something (I don't know, maybe paddling a child for not reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or something) would you immediately assume it was all lies because Huffington Post is a biased left-wing site? "Nothing to see here, move along"?
Don't blindly accept or blindly reject any news based on where you saw it. It has never been easier to check for alternative sources to corroborate a news story.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
The USDA has been setting guidelines for decades. Those % of your recommended daily intake charts on everything in the store: USDA. Food pyramid and whatever it's been replaced with now: USDA. The program in question: State 9NOT FEDERAL) program which is using the USDA guidelines to assist in making healthy meals.
Source: http://eatdrinkbetter.com/2012/02/16/school-lunch-uproar-in-north-carolina-preschool/
But the USDA isn't involved. Even the original scare mongering story didn't mention the USDA. It was a North Carolina program, open only to volunteers who opt in, and only to poor at-risk children.
However did the parent actually say this? So far the school has said no one is being charged for the food. Original pseudo-journalist probably just making a bunch of stuff up, the mother is angry and shouting about having to pay (there is a hint in the rules of the voluntary program that they might have to pay for extra food the child takes).
The story has been corroborated by the Hoke County Assistant Superintendent.
http://www.wxyz.com/dpp/news/childs-lunch-allegedly-taken-by-teacher-told-it-wasnt-healthy-enough
It appears that it wasn't the "pseudo-journalist" just making a bunch of stuff up. I can't say the same for you.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
The USDA has been setting guidelines for decades.
An activity which is not at all inconsistent with the prior poster's assertions.