Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Rant 4/12/11

I always figured that if a parent wanted to send their kids to school with lunch, it was their right since they are responsible for the child’s livelihood. It’s just common sense to pack your food and bring it to school/work if you can’t afford to eat out all the time.

So, it’ll eat me alive if I don’t ask, but… what the hell are our leaders thinking? Banning homemade lunches to help with nutrition issues is something I don’t understand. Let’s forget the fact this is one of the last things they should be worrying about. This issue, if you will, is nothing more than a mystery for fiction writers. When I say that, I mean that the article posted below can only be read as fiction because of how ridiculous it is. And if you read it as fiction, you deserve a medal for reading it completely without suffering an aneurism.

They’re trying to protect students from their own unhealthy eating habits if they were to bring lunch from home versus eating a school lunch. And I thought I was being idiotic. How can you protect someone from unhealthy eating habits if you don’t live with them and are not their primary caregiver? How can you protect someone from unhealthy eating habits… period? We pump our foods with enough chemicals that if concentrated, they could be used to kill prisoners on death row.

But I digress; restricting homemade lunches seems a bit excessive if you consider the fact that every human vessel is different. We’re like whiskers on lions; no pair of whisker patterns is alike. Trying to create general health guidelines is impossible because there are no set guidelines we can follow. If there is anything I took away from watching ER, one extra aspirin tablet might be the difference between relieving a headache and passing a bloody stool. And if that’s the case, please call your doctor immediately for medical advice about the side effects.

We can’t predict the healthiest course of action for our kids anyway because no kid (who is adept at eating mom’s peanut butter and jelly with the crust cut off) will go for it. The only way administrators can get this ‘only in school’ initiative to pass is if they have a gigantic buffet. In undergrad, I couldn’t get enough of the cafeteria because they had everything: stir fry, pizza, stuffing, salad, kosher, burgers, and eight flavors of ice cream to take the edge off.

If students had a buffet line waiting for them at lunch period, I don’t think parents would have such a problem with the Brown Bag Ban of 2011 (I dubbed that myself). If not, there is no reason to restrict students from bringing lunch from home. I guarantee that no one is going to agree with the reasoning behind it since schools are already serving unhealthy solutions to the problem. I’m not sure if they still have them, but along with pizza and hamburgers, my high school had a separate counter for big chocolate chip cookies, candy bars, and funnel cake… FUNNEL CAKE! And let’s not forget the extra vending machines that also served candy bars and Snapple. The only way I could possibly make it worse is by saying that they occasionally served brownies with globs of chocolate frosting. Sometimes they had macadamia nuts in them with no warning label… because if you’re trying to control what kids eat, don’t forget to ignore the ones with severe nut allergies.

After learning that, there is no way you can tell me that the diets of our children can be entrusted to any school administration. Keep in mind that I’m not a spokesperson for being fit and eating healthy, but it seems to be something we can wait on in the United States, especially in New Jersey. I just went to a Board of Education meeting where they voted on who received raises and who get fired. It wasn’t pretty, but can we divert our attention to hiring more teachers instead of this? Figuring out a healthy diet for students should be a job for parents. And in The Book of Things We Need to Worry About, banning homemade lunches is on page 137 after “Which Jersey Shore Cast Member Gets Paid The Most”?


Check out the article here:

http://www.foodconsumer.org/newsite/Politics/Politics/lunches_from_home_banned_in_public_school_0411110350.html