Everything our school does undermines what we do at home

(Bob M) #1

Look at this garbage from our k-4th grade school:

Meatless Monday is a science-based public health initiative associated with Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. Its goal is to reduce chronic preventable diseases by encouraging less consumption of meat. This campaign will enable school staff and students to make even more nutritious choices, as well as help improve the health of the planet. By adopting Meatless Monday, we are helping to move towards a more sustainable food system and healthier eating habits that last a lifetime.

This is crap. Meatless anything is NOT “evidence based”. It’s religious and vegan bias. I’m so angry right now.

We tell our kids to prioritize meat/protein, avoid snacks, limit or eliminate grains and sugars, and the school does exactly the freaking opposite of this.

(Todd Allen) #2

I think vegan ideology provides the cover story but the true motivation is money. It’s not like they are replacing the meat with premium cheeses, nuts, avocados and extra virgin olive oil all of which can be as expensive as good meat. Somebody is making a killing on the cost savings of white flour and high fructose corn syrup.

(Polly) #3

It is infuriating. Try watching this YouTube presentation and then see if you can get your kids’ teachers to watch it too:

(Bob M) #4

I agree with both of you. The problem is that the people who create the meals are actually contractors unaffiliated with the schools. So, the teachers don’t really know what’s going on.

It’s just a bummer, as we try hard to have good food at home and in the lunches that they take with them, but they also want to order meals at school sometimes. And sometimes, they might need to do so, such as if they are extra hungry or don’t like what we’ve given them. My oldest daughter is taking 3 dance classes this year, and those can be intense (anyone who thinks tap is easy should try it sometimes – it looks easy because the people doing it have been doing it for years, but it’s very difficult). If we don’t pack enough for her, she’s going to be hungry. And we were letting them eat from there once per week last year.

It’s just that I ate low fat for several decades. Looking back, I was always hungry. And all they have at school is high sugar, low fat. My kids, who unfortunately inherited my genes, will eat that stuff and get hungry, as I did. They will overeat or flip on an “I want more sugar” switch.

And the whole “we’d save the Earth if we’d only eat plants” is completely unsupported by real evidence. And let’s not even get into the actual studies of diet.

(Edith) #5

The vegetarian agenda is really gaining ground. We really need some meat based messages to get out there to try and counteract the vegetarian message that seems to be getting more and more pervasive lately.

Terrible grammar but I’m not fixing it. :grimacing:

(squirrel-kissing paper tamer) #6

My son going to public school was the root of MOST of our problems growing up from new math to phasing out the use of teaching phonetics. It helped to remember that Betty in the office or the cafeteria workers, or even the principal is not to blame usually. This stuff comes from further up and I found that complaining to the actual workers added stress to their jobs and didn’t get helpful change.

The best we can do is aim at the people making executive decisions that come down to the school level and most importantly, teach what we want taught at home. I had to reteach most lessons that were taught in school at home each night because my kid was left in the dust. We packed his lunch every day because the food was so terrible. I look at K-12 as a gauntlet all kids are required to go through and our job is to support them until it’s over.

(charlie3) #7

There is the option of packing kids school lunches. Discouraging meat is not going to improve the T2D and overweight issues. The plant people ignore those.

(Jason ) #8

Making lunches at home for the boys to take is what my wife and I have done in the past, but we were beaten by pocket money/allowance. In addition to teaching our kids good eating habits, we wanted to teach them to manage their finances at an early age. We created some chores, allocated a ‘wage’ to each one, and set them up with a debit card they could access for what they wanted to spend.

One of the boys realized that they could use the debit card at the schools tuck shop (Australian cafeteria with outside choices) to buy pizza, hotdogs, cookies, chips, etc. Pretty soon all the pocket money was being used to buy crap food


I don’t begrudge the schools for putting the food on offer, as this was really a pay as you want system. What you are referring to, Bob, is a mandated menu that fits someone else’s guidelines and ideas of healthy diet. It is very frustrating when they get it wrong, as just with my work experience, the person that we would like to challenge and debate is a faceless person in a backroom that you can’t actually contact.

Grrrr


(charlie3) #9

Make a freedom of information request for copies of the agreement and accounting statements between the school and that food company. If the company pays money to the school how much is that in recent years? If the service is a money maker for the school and the food is unhealthy by any standard I would call that improper. Search online and see if similar services have been controversial in other places. When you’ve got your facts in order get some parent allies, go to a school board meeting, and read them the riot act.

(Susan) #10

I often reverted to helping my kids with homework in the way I was taught and they learned better from me. They would go to school and show the teachers -some were supportive and were fine with what I did. The ones that weren’t I told them straight up, well it is not my fault that my kid is smarter then you and if you cannot teach him/her that is not my problem. I did and they got the right answer, even if they didn’t do it your new fangled weird way
 the one teacher had to go to a teacher from a few grades up to get work for my son to do in class because he was too advanced for the class and was bored. Later she became the school librarian and I helped run her book fairs twice a year and we got along brilliantly then
 never mentioning the previous problems haha.

My grand daughter will be attending that school next fall so she will probably ask me to help again if she is still there. When my kids went to the school I helped with all the Pizza lunches, field trips, bake sales, craft sales, book fairs, etc. The school will be like “yay she’s back” if any of the old staff and teachers are still there, haha. At least I will be much slimmer then I was and in good shape for this round!

Our school didn’t have food for the kids to buy unless it was the once a month Pizza days, no cafeterias here until high school. I packed lunches for my kids from grade 1-8. When they were in high school they usually came home from lunch or sometimes packed some things themselves or would run to Mcdonald’s or one of the other fast food places in the mall beside the high school