Hasn't cafeteria food always looked like throw-up on a tray?

If it were up to me, I'd set standards for cafeteria food, but allow people to bring whatever crap they like.

What's weird is homemade lunches, based on what I saw growing up, were almost ALWAYS healthier and fresher than school lunches, even if mom did sometimes pack a Kudos bar.

At Claremont Academy Elementary School on the South Side, officials allow packed lunches but confiscate any snacks loaded with sugar or salt. (They often are returned after school.)

Often? Often?!

The kids may have money or earn money and (buy junk food) without their parents' knowledge

And on that day, the angels will cry. I also have to ask how these kids will get all this horrible, horrible junk food without their parents' knowledge, considering this is an elementary school. Oh, wait, he just says they may get junk food. And they may...give it to your kid! Cue the theme from The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.

Can schools really do this legally? I know school districts and private schools are sovereign states unto themselves, but can they really say that kids can't pack lunches, thereby forcing them to purchase the school's food? That's why lots of parents I know pack lunches for their kids: it's cheaper and you can control what they eat to some extent. Or are all of the parents that supposedly aren't complaining just relieved that they don't have to do anything about their kids' lunch? I find that incredibly hard to believe. More likely this has been misrepresented to the parents to some degree.

Twenty bucks says there's already a ten-year-old at Claremont Academy Elementary who's started a black market for Funyuns and Reese's Pieces. I hope he makes a fortune.

This is about power and funding, not nutrition.

The more you MUST get from authority figures, the more power they have, period.

In this area, the more kids on meals programs, the more money the school gets. So they put everybody, not just "the poor", on the dole.

When actions speak louder than words, how better to show your kids that what they need comes from the government, not their family?

From inside the article, this paragraph offers at least another plausible reason:

Any school that bans homemade lunches also puts more money in the pockets of the district's food provider, Chartwells-Thompson. The federal government pays the district for each free or reduced-price lunch taken, and the caterer receives a set fee from the district per lunch.

The article later notes that it works out to $2.25/student.

Clearly the people who created this legislation have never actually been to a public school at lunch time. Ever. How in the hell can they call the schools food healthier for the kdi then what thier parent packs?! The food is vile! I don't even think the cheese on the pizza is real. If I were a parent, you'd better believe that I'd be complaining. Hard. This is just fucking absurd.

Aw, Steve said what I was going to say! I thought the tell for the whole article was in that one sentence, "Any school that bans homemade lunches also puts more money in the pockets of the district's food provider, Chartwells-Thompson."

But the best part of the whole article was the first four paragraphs concerning the rabble-rousing Fernando Dominguez, who is now my hero.

How else are they going to get anyone to allow the government to tell them what to eat? Government education exists to mold compliant citizens.

Considering this is an elementary school, what are these kids bringing for lunch more than sandwiches and lunchables? It's not like they can heat up last night's Pizza Hut for lunch.

My kids would take their lunch every day, and when it was confiscated, I'd call the police and charge the school with theft. Insane. Meanwhile, today I am making 2 cookie-cakes for the twinados to take to school tomorrow, for their b-day celebration w/ the class. Here in texas at least, that's still welcomed.

How to reverse a course on a slippery slope? I have no idea. As long as parents are not actually parenting and they allow or demand the schools still produce an adequate "product", we can expect further encroachments and nannyism.

As it currently stands, most people say that schools are at fault for their students' obesity, pregnancy, low test scores, lack of math and reading skills and every other thing. Parents apparently are not responsible for anything.

"Parent" is both a noun and a verb.

1. [n] a father or mother; one who begets or one who gives birth to a child; a relative who plays the role of guardian
2. [v] bring up; "raise a family"; "bring up children"

We need less of the former and more of the latter.

If it's so nutritious make the pricipal and teachers eat it too.

My son cannot stand the "food" served in his school cafeteria. He would not eat the food these people say is best for him, and he would be forced to starve under these regulations. I do not see how that is not child abuse.

When my son was 8, I sent him to a three day outdoor camp. The food was not to his liking. He ate two pieces of toast a day for three days. He would have starved at this school in Chicago.

I assume that my only option would have been to take him out and either home school him or put him in a private school with better food or a more liberal food policy.

When there is an affordable alternative to this crap, people will take it. First thing that needs to happen is to change the laws so that parents and children are not captives of the union controlled education system.

Meanwhile, today I am making 2 cookie-cakes for the twinados to take to school tomorrow, for their b-day celebration w/ the class. Here in texas at least, that's still welcomed.

Not here in CT, anymore, momof4. Which is quite upsetting to me and the other moms who used to be able to make cookies, brownies, cupcakes, etc. on our kids' birthdays, but because there are a few kids with allergies that can't (or wont') monitor themselves and know what they can and can't eat. One school here actually BANNED peanut butter because of ONE child who has a severe allergy.

I always made my kids' lunches, except on days when they knew the cafe would be serving something they actually liked. Which was maybe once month. But this, this is insanity! I'd much rather my kids eat something I KNOW is safe rather than risking that they won't eat at all because the food is crap.

+1 on it being about the money. It's all about getting more money.

Why stop at lunch? Forbidding kids from eating breakfast & dinner at home seems like the next logical step.

Even Communists didn't do this. My mom, like every other mom behind the Iron Curtain, always packed my lunch when I was in elementary school. Otherwise, the authorities would have investigated to find out why she wasn't feeding her own kids. What would they have made of parents like Miguel Medina, who told the Chicago Tribune that he thinks this no-home-lunch policy is a great idea because "when they bring the food from home, there is no control over the food"?

"Why stop at lunch? Forbidding kids from eating breakfast & dinner at home seems like the next logical step."

A lot of "poor" kids are already getting their breakfasts at school (poor is in quotes because I don't know what the standards for getting to be part of the breakfast program are). Yes, it is federally subsidized. And they are talking about a federally subsidized after-school dinner program too. I guess for the same kids who are already eating breakfast and lunch there.....

My mom packed me a lunch for school everyday all the way through high school. On the rare occasion she didn't and I'd need to buy a lunch at school I'd opt to go hungry because I'd get sick from the cafeteria food. It contained so many soy and non-food ingredients I was allergic to that I'd become lethargic, vomit, and get hives. I'd have been quite starved if I had to forego a homemade lunch everyday.

It's absolutely absurd to me that parents that are actually involved and trying to raise their children properly are being prevented from it!

> One school here actually BANNED peanut butter
> because of ONE child who has a severe allergy.

Doesn't seem surprising. Where I live every school, daycare, etc. bans all nuts and seeds.

Growing up as a strict vegetarian, I always managed to monitor my own eating. Now granted, I wouldn't DIE if I touched something that someone who ate one of the foods on the "do not eat" list touched, but frankly, neither would most allergic people.

We solved the birthday cupcake issue thus: At the beginning of the school year my mom baked a batch of eggless, lardless cupcakes and froze them. We had a list of birthdays. Whenever someone had a birthday, I took a cupcake to school which was thawed by the time I got there. I ate my cupcake, the kids ate theirs.

Is there a reason the gluten/wheat/dairy/nuts/ allergic, or the kosher/halal/vegans can't do this, too?

I'm shocked! A monopoly trying to gain more power over their captive customers and get more money for themselves and their co-conspirators. Shocking!

The pretentiousness in Godwin's (ironic surname) words just drips off the monitor. You hoi-polloi parents are far, far too stupid to know what's healthy for your children. However did the human race ever survive without lunchroom monitors to tell us what to eat? Elle, the school dinner program is already up and running -- it's been a pet project of Michelle Obama's.

It seems we're not that far away from the day when babies will be taken from their mothers at birth and raised in government creches. Every time I read something like this, I get a mental image of the Union birth labs from C. J. Cherryh's Downbelow Station.

This is making the rounds on Facebook too. I agree it's mainly about putting dollars in the food supplier's pockets - and I for one would scream blue murder if my hypothetical child was denied the lunch I packed.

Okay. I can kind of see this making sense in a low-income district where the parents consistently aren't parenting, ie sending their kid to school with a Mountain Dew, skittles, and bag of Doritos for lunch. Pretty much any kind of meal is going to be an improvement on that, and do you really want to teach a classroom full of kids who have just ingested 70+ grams of sugar?

But applying this to a middle-class suburb where the moms are packing lunches with turkey sandwiches, apples, and homemade cookies-no, just no. Even if you duplicated the exact same meal, the school lunch is going to be inferior because they typically use low-quality, non-fresh, mass-produced, preservative-filled ingredients. School lunches should be the last resort to make sure kids aren't starving--not the default. This is seriously messed-up.

...only reduced-fat salad dressings and mayonnaise are offered as condiments....

Kinda makes you long for the days when ketchup was a vegetable.

Wait, how is mayonnaise a healthier condiment than mustard and/or ketchup?

I ate cafeteria food on the first day of Kindergarten and not again until middle school. The food was nasty and not very healthy. How nutritious could brown sludge and fake meat be?

My kids are still too little for school, but they are already picky and won't eat unfamiliar food to save their lives. (We're working on it.) I would imagine that anything I put in a lunch box would be better then having them pass out in P.E. from starvation. I seriously doubt that very many parents are sending meals of potato chips and soft drinks for their children's lunches anyway, so why punish everyone?

The nanny state's desire for power is getting more disgusting by the day. Doubleplusungood.

lunchables

The horror. Lunchables are truly ghastly. Taste terrible, no nutrition, lots of plastic waste. Something that I'd prefer to see its producer remove from our markets. However, if that is what you wish to feed your child it's not my business.

Out of the lunch bags and into the streets!

As long as tossable plastic supermarket bags aren't available for bringing your lunch in, I fail to see the problem.

My sister is hypoglcemic, for those of you unfamilliar with it is the opposite of diabetes.

Rather than a craped out pancreas producing no insulin the pancreas produces insulin non stop in a steady constant stream.

Most peoples pancreas only produces insulin when we eat something.

Anyway as a result of her condition she had to eat 8 times a day, a constant intake of food to balance the constant stream of insulin. So in addition to a small lunch she also had to take five or six snacks to eat durring the day.

Funny thing was she was hasselled far more by the teachers and administrators who were supposed to know of her condition then the students who only heard about it thru rumors and the gossip lines.

20 bucks says this policy quietly dissapears with out informing people they no longer have to follow it the fisrt time a parent with a diebetic or hypoglycemic kid threatens to sue