The idea behind the lunch entitlement is that poor people can not afford to buy food or they care so little about the kids they have they choose not to feed them or they lack the training on how to purchase and prepare food. Seeing how kids are required to go to school, this makes it a logical place to feed these poor starving kids, who must be thinking about their empty stomachs instead of learning reading, writing and arithmetics.
That is to say your brain needs calories to function. Add to that the fact that hunger is a distraction and you have a prime example of the Government aiding education!
One of the primary problems with the above idea that people are starving. No doubt there are people in the US, who cannot access the cornucopia of goodness. If someone is starving the human thing to do is to get them fed, then have them to feed themselves. Finally have them help feed those who are starving.
So holding a parent responsible for providing for their child gets jettisoned. Having a community wanting to help the less fortunate is also jettisoned. And the chance of the child learning to feed themselves is shunted towards letting the government feed you.
Case in point: If you are on food stamps the USDA added incentives and other changes that targets the link between Obesity and Food Stamps with an idea to trim rampant obesity rates among low-income groups. Obesity is not caused by starvation... Right?
So we know that food stamps, from the government, are making poor people fat. Now I read that school lunches are not just making sure that hungry kid has sustenance to insure better performance. No our School lunch program, from the government, are making hungry kids Obese.
I never got\purchased school lunches. My mom made me a sandwich with some fruit and veg for quite a number of years. Sadly, many of those lunches were never eaten. Sometime around third grade I was responsible for my own lunch. Which means I had breakfast and dinner at home and ignored lunch. In HS I was on swim team and had instant breakfast (beats upchucking). Again, if I did have some lunch it was not everyday.
Basically, I was too lazy to make a lunch and too busy to bother with lunch. When I did eat, I made up for the missing meals. I did a pretty good job of burning off any extra calories as well.
Now my daughter needs to have regular intervals of food intake or she gets listless. My nephew would have to eat a certain nutritional balance to avoid nasty headaches.
To my way of thinking. Yes, we need to feed habitually hungry kids. The parents need to be held responsible or face some kind of consequence. Funding a Union does not seem to be covering the basic need.
3 comments:
Anybody that supports school lunch programs needs to sit and observe the cafeteria. More than half the food is thrown away; mostly the fresh fruit and vegetables. The desserts, processed chips, and bleached white bread sandwiches might get eaten----in that order. Many of these kids have ipods and cell phones, but still get the free lunch.
I'm OK with the school funding brown paper bags to send home so the parents can put food into them. (We used to have contests to see who could make their brown paper bag last the longest)
Our lunch? Bologna on roman meal bread, one slice of lettuce. Fruit, sliced vegetables. Sometimes a cookie. Fridays during lent it was tuna; Mom made a single can of tuna stretch between all 5 kids AND my Dad
Wow, that must have been a thin sandwich! I am in agreement. Carl's mom made his lunch every day as did my mom until we were old enough to make our own...(uh, not so with Carl, his mom made his into college). My kids at 11 and 9 are making their own lunches. They do not care much for sandwiches so an example of Kaleigh's lunch is some salad, a yogurt squeezer from Trader Joe's, a tangerine, some edemame beans, maybe a hawaiian roll and maybe a small dessert. Cole's is usually some string cheese, some tortilla chips some baby carrots and a small dessert. We never got dessert and later gorged on sweets so my kids get a little now and then. So they have a good lunch that they make themselves. They do have a hot lunch program (private school) where about 3 times a month the kids get to pick out of pizza, baked potato bar, KFC, or a teriaki chicken bowl.
Isn't kid-made lunch the reason peanut butter was invented?
My lunch was a PB & something (banana, honey, jam) on wheat bread, a fruit, & a granola bar. In fact, said cereal bar is the reason Carolyn refuses to eat oatmeal to this day - Nature Valley is to blame. Usually we drank water, but sometime we could bring a Thermos with milk. I may have bought milk sometimes too. It was a dime.
I did trade my granola bar for a cupcake when I could :)
Having vegetarian kids will keep you from most school lunch. You really can't substitute cheese for meat all the time. Doy.
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