Monday, April 19, 2010

Is this food worth fighting over?

 Some students in New Jersey used their cell-phones to co-ordinate a food fight in the cafeteria at Atlantic City High School.

The school's response:  Only the minimum required meals were provided for the next two days.  Cold cheese sandwiches.  The principal says this has been effective in the past.

One irate parent's response:  "Cheese sandwiches?  That's prison food!"

My response:  If that is the kind of parent you are going to be, your kids should get used to it.  Prison food that is.

6 comments:

  1. I agree with you. We've been dealing in Philly lately with flash mobs of youngsters who gather together and wreck havoc on the streets and in stores. Some people say they just need to be listened to - well, I don't like what I'm hearing!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yikes! With people starving across the world, these kids should get NO lunch just for throwing food around and wasting it. Little beasts.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Do you mind if I ask what's the usual menu. Fresh and local or processed with sulphur sugar and salt or phosphate. I suspect the latter, and it's a blessed wonder with all that crap floating about in them that they are not actually rioting for real.
    For my money what they were throwing at each other ceased to be food about four steps back along the chain from the kids and about two from the farmer.
    For heavens sake in Huntington, West Virginia, they are putting sugar in school milk. WTF is up with that ?.

    ReplyDelete
  4. what is with all this gentle new parenting? i seriously don't get it. we were all raised with rules and had to pay the consequences of our actions and we all turned out fine! do you know i'm not even allowed to tell my kindergarten kids to "line up"? i have to say things like "make a choo choo train" because telling them to "line up" is too "authoritative". it's nuts!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Kate Hanley: Well put.

    Rebecca S: Yes the behavior is beastly. But I can imagine a scenario where even a good kid got caught up in a food fight at school. What I find truly beastly is the parental response the tries to protect the child from the consequences of their actions.

    Vince: Some schools are trying really hard to provide good food, but I don't know that this is one of them. It probably was all carp (that troublesome fish) If their fight were some form of protest, they probably still would have gotten cheese sandwiches, but would have had the opportunity to tell their tale to the media. That does not seem to be the case.

    Dickinsons: Um, are teachers not meant to be a source of authority? I was ill equipped to be a parent when I first had kids. I was surprised at how much WORK it is to train your children. And, yes, they must be trained. They are more work than puppies, and more important. But if the work is not done, constantly, consistently, you will find that they are out of control by the time they are five or six. I think many parents are like I was and then they just muddle through, dropping their kids at day care and then school and hoping they will get better. And, then when they feel guilty for this, they get mad at the school for not doing a better job than they could. But, my oldest is only 5 so I could be completely wrong.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Ha! Ha! That made me laugh. Prison food! When my kids don't like the lunch at school, they'll ask for a cheese sandwich and melt it in the microwave! :)

    ReplyDelete