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Opening Arguments

Trash cams

The food nannies kick it up a notch:

TAVARES, Fla. - Lake County School Board officials are considering attaching cameras to school cafeteria trash cans to study what students are tossing after officials found that most of the vegetables on the school menu end up in the trash can.

New federal laws require students to take a healthy produce at lunchtime, but last year in Lake County, students tossed $75,000 worth of produce in the garbage.

 [. . .]

No decisions have been made on the cameras, but school leaders say they wouldn't capture students faces, just what they're throwing away.

Won't show students' faces? Then what's the point of the cameras, since school officials already know what is being tossed?

Posted in: Food and Drink

Comments

Harl Delos
Thu, 10/04/2012 - 6:21pm

When my son was 8 months old, he wolfed down the beets his mother offered him. "Honey, I think our son has brain damage!" I suggested.  There were no beets on my plate.  My wife asked me if I'd ever had beets other than canned Harvard beets.  No, I said. That's what the school cafeteris served.  These beets were grown in our own Florida Avenue backyard, pulled at golf-ball size so they were tender, steamed, and buttered.  I reluctantly sampledthem and found them delicious.

The schools want to take vegetables off the menu.  What they need to do isto offer vegetables worth eating. Go to any restaurant that has a good salad bar, and you'll find kids of all ages scarfing down veggies.  Aren't those the same age kids that attend school?

Tomatoes are about the only vegetable that is edible when canned - and when I was in school, when they served stewed tomatoes, they added so much sugar that it tasted like pancake syrup.  Frozen veggies can be adequate if prepared with care, but if you drmp them into a pot of water and boil them to death, they might as well be canned vegetables..

Euell Gibbons (of "stalking the wild asparagus" and Grape Nuts TV ads fame) said that he'd rather scrounge for food in Indiana than on some tropical isle where there are breadfruit everywhere you look.  If "buy fresh, buy local" makes sense anywhere, it surely makes sense in Indiana.

Yes, it will cost more.  It's like oats.  You pay more for good clean oats than oats that have been processed by a horse.  We teach nutrition in health classes, and when the school cafeteria serves crap, it's just another sign of the disrespect schools have for students. Why do schools conplain that students show little respect for teachers and administrators, when they are treated like inmates in some prison?

 

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