[school lunches] let them eat crisps

Bloggers are often accused of being derivative and the peerless Oliver Kamm is the High Priest of the Anti-Blogger League but Liz appears to have also raised the question.

I'm very proud to claim that I hardly ever use the MSM - I try not to feed off it like a leech and pass off comment as my own writing. Instead, I feed off other bloggers as a leech, tap into their accumulated wisdom and pass it off as my own writing.

Thus it is here with the School Lunches Issue. The Fake Consultant [why fake?] draws attention to the Calloway County School District, Kentucky, which has seen fit to punish recalcitrant parents who don't pay for their children's school lunches by giving their children sandwiches instead of the full lunch.

To a point I'm appalled - punishing the child, publicly in fact, for something the parent did. Sins of the father visited on ... etc. Equally appalling, surely, is that a system is in operation where school lunches are paid separately to the other fees [tuition, uniform etc.]. Surely there's a once a term payment in advance which covers these things.

Then we come to the issue of school lunches themselves and as a former head, I feel strongly about this. It's a long tradition in Britain to provide the kids with a sit-down hot meal a day. Basically the child gets a main course, a dessert [such as roly-poly], tea and bread and a piece of fruit as a minimum.

The fact that that hot meal is usually the lowest common denominator, using sub-standard cuts, swimming in fat and penny-pinching here, there and everywhere is another issue again.

Supplementary snacks are another matter. If a school bans supplements, then we get the "passed-through-the-barbed-wire-from outside" situation. If we allow them, then they're usually garbage food - crisps, sweets and sugar water and is it the school's business to interfere in this or not?

Compare this to the Thai situation in the images in this post. Click on the link and read about their situation over there. And another thing - I really like the way the children give thanks before it. The process of being thankful, rather than arguing over whom to be thankful to, is surely the issue here.

Pink Floyd sang "The Wall" but I wonder - if there were no lunches at all, no aggro, no "if you don't eat yer meat, how can yer have any pudding?", nothing provided for the kids whatsoever - would that be better?