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My daughter feels deprived because I have made her pack her lunch all school year long. She asks me constantly if she can buy lunch and of course my answer is not just a NO, but an ABSOLUTELY NOT!
I think I was one of the few Jamie Oliver fans and I have been so “bummed” ever since it got cancelled. I loved that show. It was a nice slap in the faced to our governments school lunch choices. I am sorry that it took someone from out of our country to have the b@!ls to say something.
We as Americans keep complaining about obesity, but we don’t question our schools choice for lunches…really?
So my daughter packs a lunch. She gets a rather healthy lunch every day and I do give her some treats in it occasionally. I don’t do it every day but a treat, actually treated like, a treat, and not every day, is fine.
So the last full week of school starts today. She has been begging me to buy so I am giving in to one week, the last week. I figure I can meet her half way. The other weeks of school she has packed, so what is one week right?
To be truthful I am a bit worried she will like it, however, she is used to eating healthy so on the other hand she may not like it all week. Who knows. Anyway, now onto what inspired this post today…
My husband was the one that had to go into the office to pay for her week of lunches, since he drops her off. Apparently the school does allow you to say yes or no to snacks. When he asked “what are the snacks?” The office replied, FIRST…”they are all government approved.” He said, “OK, but what are they?” They said, “ice cream and Doritos,” and they listed some other sugary and preservative snacks that he could not remember word-for-word. He said he just kind of looked at them and said, “well for one week I guess I can say yes.” He then bought her 5-days of lunches and left.
So here is my thing…we pay X amount for our kids lunch and they have a snack option. First of all, we are fighting deep fried and breaded foods, and french fries that are also government approved vegetables. Then they offer ice cream and chips as snacks. At what point is ANY school aged kid going to say NO to deep fried, sugary, preservative filled food? And we wonder why our kids are fat? Seriously? Not just fat but Type 2 diabetic at ages under 5? They even had to change the diabetes name from Adult Onset to just Type 2 because of so many obese kids?
Well, one for sure is that my kids are packing lunch. I will give in to the last week of buying, but that is it!
Now I taught High School for 5-years and I saw perfectly good lunches get thrown in the trash and fries being bought (2 orders at a time) to make a whole lunch. So I am even considering, in the future, not allowing money to be taken to school either. There is no guarantee that a packed lunch will even be eaten during the day if the kids has the cash to buy something bad for them.
This may sound mean and over protective, but there is a reason my kids have lots of energy and are ideal weight and healthy looking. It’s because I don’t give into the feeding them a bunch of crap because society says it’s OK.
The worst thing we can do with food is let the government give us our nutritional value. They are apparently too interested in making some money selling the cheap filler crap and so many people are not strong enough, or have enough energy to fight it. So my fight is to make it virtually impossible for my kids to get their hands on. That is the most important thing to me…healthy kids.
Happy eating!