Thread: This burns my bacon! More nanny state bureaucratic nonesense.

It doesn't look like the school nutritionist took the kid's packed lunch away from the kid or forbade her from eating it. She just gave the kid a school lunch as well. The kid chose to just eat three nuggets off the lunch tray and leave her packed lunch untouched. Nobody prevented her from eating her packed lunch. I presume the nutritionist decided to supplement this kid's lunch because it lacked a vegetable portion. If so, she was overzealous because the regulation in question only requires either a vegetable or a fruit portion, and the packed lunch had both a banana and apple juice, which qualify. I also feel like "supplementing" a packed lunch with the entire school lunch tray is a bit of overkill. School nutritionists should have the ability to supplement with individual portions, say a cup of green beans or corn or carrots, instead of giving them the full school lunch as well as the lunch they were packed. If a parent takes the time and effort to pack a lunch, they obviously care about what their kid's eating. If it doesn't meet USDA requirements, then supplement it, but don't offer alternatives to the portions that are packed. This kid didn't need the protein or grain from the chicken nuggets, or the dairy from the school milk, she had that with the turkey sandwich with cheese. She may have needed the corn or beans or whatever vegetable they were serving with the nuggets that day, but not according to the regulation, because she had a banana and apple juice.

So you have a school worker who went beyond the bounds of what the law requires. The law in question is not designed to, nor does it give school workers the authority to replace a packed lunch. If you pack your kids twinkies and jolt cola for lunch, the school nutritionist can't take them away or make the kid not eat and drink them. All she can do is give the kid some or all of the school lunch, and ask, but not force or require, that it be eaten first. And that's exactly what happened here. The nutritionist gave the kid a school lunch though she had her packed lunch as well, though she wasn't required or instructed to do so according the regulations, since the packed lunch met the nutritional requirements. The kid only ate 3 nuggets off the school lunch tray. She could have eaten her sandwich as well, or her banana, or drank her juice or ate her chips, or ate anything else off the lunch tray, but decided to get the lunch lady in trouble instead.

This sounds to me like a bad kid that uses food to manipulate the adults in her life. The only way the school nutritionist is gonna think to supplement a packed school lunch like that is if the kid is complaining about it, so to shut the kid up from whining about how dry the turkey sandwich is and how yucky bananas are, she gives her a school lunch. So when she gets home and her mom asks her what she ate and why she didn't eat her packed lunch, she tells her mom that the school lunch lady made her take a school lunch and she only ate three nuggets off it. Instead of getting mad at the kid for not eating her banana or the vegetables on the school lunch tray, the mom gets mad at the school lunch lady for daring to offer more food to her kid than what she packed in her lunch. Sounds like another one of those parents who's kid can do no wrong.