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Primary School Girl Told To Stop Photographing and Blogging School Meals
JamieKitson writes "British primary school (elementary to those of you in the U.S.) pupil Martha/'Veg' has been taking photographs of her school dinners and writing about them at her blog Never Seconds since April. The blog has become popular, and Martha decided to do something with the popularity: namely, raising money for an international school dinners charity. Unfortunately, the local council, Argyll and Bute, having apparently not heard of the Streisand effect, didn't like the publicity that her blog was generating and have shut her down. They said the blog made the catering staff fear for their jobs. There is a happy ending though: donations have gone through the roof and she has already passed her target."
Well yes and no. How much do we hear about people in prison in China for political "crimes".
That's good news. I wondered why they told this girl to stop in the first place because the food she photographed actually looks both healthy and tasty, so what was the problem?
-- Cheers!
To be honest, all the British (and the foreign food) all looked fairly decent. Really the only terrible looking food was the "foreign" (being as she is from the UK) US meals. If anything it is a good showcase of what school lunches are from around the world and honestly I'd say it puts the British in more favorable light than the US.
The public have a fundamental right to see what their tax dollars (or pounds in this case) are doing, whether that is detailed information about Afghanistan and Iraq or school lunches.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Exactly. I mean how is it so terrible that the cooks "fear for their job" of course they should fear for their job! Everyone "fears for their job" if they don't do well at their job. Perhaps incompetent IT guys should call up Oracle and tell them never to post any bug reports and sue any security blogs that post bug reports and security flaws, after all, if they installed an insecure program on a critical computer that can be exploited they'd fear for their job.
More transparency is always a good thing.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Nobody else reads the articles, why would you expect the person who wrote the summary to have read it??
Often the actual "staff" in the cafeteria have no control over how much money gets allocated to them or the mandates being forced on them like "use less empty calories and have more wholesome foods" or "encourage kids to develop healthy eating habits". In these days of budget cuts, I would not blame the kitchen staff alone for poor fare in school cafeteria.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If this girl had been here in the U.S., she'd probably already be charged with some form of terrorism by DHS and thrown in a cell with murderers, rapists, and people that upload HD rips of hit movies to the internet.
C'mon dude, you made a lot of good points, why did you have to spoil it with outrageous hyperbole? It's one of the most obvious rules of trying to prove a point - people judge your argument as a whole, so if you throw in a crapton of obvious nonsense, people don't take the good parts seriously.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Do the same thing I did in the days before ubiquitous mobile devices: walk.
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.-Ecclesiastes 1:9
Yeah, the British authorities shouldn't be forced to work with a "looking over your shoulder" effect on them. That situation is very stressful and will make you paranoid. I'm glad the British authorities understand the awful stress of constantly being monitored and surveilled.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Congratulations on growing up middle class. Many kids, especially inner city kids, don't have responsible parents to pack their lunch for them, let alone the money to buy twinkies or fruit-roll-ups. Many schools in the US also serve breakfast, and many kids qualify to receive both for free.
School lunches are a surprisingly powerful tool against malnourished kids in deprived areas. Getting a decent meal into deprived children is both good for their general health and for their ability to absorb the education the school is offering. Therefore it is a policy aim that all schools be able to offer a quality meal to any deprived children in the area (since deprivation occurs in wealthy areas as well as poor). In fact, the percentage of children entitled to such meals for free is used as a metric of the school's intake, those with a higher level of free lunches being assumed to have a less well supported intake. Given that such a meal must be offered to those entitled to it free, it makes economic sense to offer it to all children. It doesn't stop children bringing their own lunches to school as you describe, and many do. In my experience in comfortably off areas, about half of all children bring their own lunches and half have school lunches.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Not saying banning the girl's camera was a good move or that something productive could not come from scrutiny, just saying I could see why they would be worried even if they had done nothing wrong/bad/poor.
Protip - If you have a problem with the general public scrutinizing your every action at work, don't work for the general public.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
>which means that somebody needs to be fired.
Why is it that the answer to everything seems to be to fire someone?
If the cafeteria equipment is sub-par, why can't the person in charge simply be told to get better equipment instead of being fired?
Is this a common approach to problem solving in most companies?
Bug tracker not easy to use? Fire someone.
Windows has an occasional crash? Fire somebody.
There was a brownout and you didn't have enough diesel for the backup generators? Fire the whole IT dept.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog