Thank You But No Thank You!

Does This Look Healthy To You?

A Principal at a school in Chicago has banned all lunches brought from home because she decided that too many of them were unhealthy.  She saw colas and chips being brought and decided that the school lunch would be healthier.  Healthier perhaps but probably horrible tasting and very salty or at least that has been my experience  with school lunches both as a student and as a teacher.
When I was a student I brought a lunch from home until my Mother went to work and then I was given money to buy my lunch.  Well that didn't last long, the lunches were horrible, heavy on starches and overcooked veggies, frequently there was creamed tuna, macaroni and cheese (something I still won't eat), soggy chicken, and cooked to death meatloaf.  Now I'll grant you I was a picky eater but what kid isn't . I started going home at lunch time and making my own lunch there.  Then I discovered that one of my friends wanted very badly to eat the school lunch but her Portuguese Grandmother made her a sack lunch, in my opinion a wonderful sack lunch.  So I would give her my lunch money and she'd eat the school lunch and I would eat her very tasty homemade lunch.
Flash forward a number of years and I was a teacher and I could buy a school lunch or bring one from home, there really wasn't time to go out to lunch (40 minutes) and after sampling the school lunch, again, heavy on the starches and overcooked veggies, corn dogs, absolutely disgusting pizza, or greasy nachos covered in a faux cheese sauce, so  I began packing my own lunch, usually a salad.
The kids at the school in Chicago are very unhappy,  many boycotting the school lunch or buying it and throwing most of it in the trash.  The healthiest lunch in the world won't do you much good in the trash can.
What a child eats for lunch, or any meal for that matter, should be a parent's decision, I absolutely hate it when officials of any type make decisions that aren't theirs to make!