packed lunch police

[AuntiePickleBottom]

my son lunch today, is ham salad brown bread sandwich, yogurt, an apple with a carton of orange juice..he also take a bottle of water to have in the classroom.

due to policy no sweets, choclate and crisps are allowed.

just looked on the menu for school meals and today it is Sausages with
Mashed Potato Green Beans and Gravy with the dessert of Pineapple Up-side
Down Cake with Custard

on aibu to think that ds should be allowed to have a little treat in his packed lunch seeing as the other children has cake and custard

What a contradiction!

Of course he should. I would have a word with the head...

Schools allow a bit of cake or flap jack don't they?

yes he should my daughters school do this as well, it is annoying i think they are trying to make packed lunches as difficult as possible to get you to pay for school dinners sometimes!

leo, they are not allowed them either, if you put them in there they will take them away and give it back to them at the end of lunch

Complain. It's not fair at all!

They take them away?!
Do they also stand over all the children eating hot dinners to make sure they eat every last scrap? If not, they should - that's a nutritionally balanced meal, you know.

They are trying to make packed lunches look crap (from a child's point of view) in comparison with the sugar laden school meals. This will lead to an uptake in school dinners (via pester power) and boost the profit for whatever company the council awarded the catering contract to.

Do not complain about not being allowed chocolate/crisps in packed lunches but campaign, noisily, that school dinners should only have fruit as a pudding.

Are you sure about the cake thing? Did you have that from the mouth of someone over the age of 11?

Surely the yoghurt you're giving him is "dessert", you can get ones with custard in too.

dirtydishes, think you might be right. It's a conspiracy!

Seriously though I trust my judgement as a parent to feed my child properly (most of the time). When did schools decide they had the right to dictate stuff to parents? They're not the oracle ffs.

yes it's in the school handbook

the school might be regarding the yoghurt as the desert due to the amount of sugar in them.

The state of school dinners the reason I put whatever the hell I want in my child's packed lunch. They are not allowed a packet of crisps but deep fried sausages, chips and beans and sponge and custard is ok? Give me a break!

I don't know who these people think they are

I personally am glad of the no junk rule for lunchboxes. As a child I would get picked on by all the 'white-bread-jam-sandwich' brigade for having fruit, raisins, yoghurts and always always always wholemeal bread.

The policing of lunchboxes means I can send ds a healthy lunch without him being different.

Odd about the cake and custard though

Not saying it's right, grumblinalong, but it's because some parents don't give their children a healthy lunch.

And I'm not talking a debate between a fruitshoot or freshly squeezed OJ or hummous on wholemeal vs jam on white, I'm talking parents who give their (reception in a case that springs to mind) children 2 bags of crisps and a yorkie bar for their lunch.

I agree that no common sense is exercised though, I sent my DD in with a tuna on wholemeal sandwich, small tub of home prepared fruit salad, and a small snack sized dairy milk bar from the multipacks. The dinner ladies confiscated it because packed lunches should be healthy! I queried this with the class teacher, because it was only her first term in school and DD was distraught because she thought she'd been naughty, who confirmed that DD could have a chocolate coated biscuit (e.g. penguin or kitkat) but not chocolate on it's own. Crazy!

Our school did the "healthy eating, no crap, healthy snacks" thing, and then I caught one of the dinner ladies dishing out haribo well jelly shape type sweets unwrapped, from her bare hands to the kids bare hands, in the yard. They also had several cake sale fundraisers, and a tuckshop at the Christmas discos selling sweets, chocolate and assorted other crap, so I stopped worrying about the packed lunches and await the day when they say anything to me or to one of my kids

My friends kids school has banned cake of any kind - even homemade flapjacks/fairy cakes.

They too have a tuck shop on Fridays that sells ONLY sweets and chocolate.

I've never heard anything so mad!

Does someone actually stand there and go through 2,500 lunchboxes?

How do you take a Mars Bar off a 6-footer?

I can assure you this is not the national norm. No school is going to tell me my extremely healthy-eating children can't have a bag of crisps and a kit-kat along with their ham roll, apple and banana.

I've seen threads like this before and never got to understanding them.

How does this actually work?

Are they checked at the gate? Do they "book their lunch in" at Student Services? (I'd love to see that queue at 8.15 each morning!)

Help me understand this other-worldliness, please!

itisnearlysummer I agree with you that this is a situation that ought to be handled by common sense but sadly isn't.

Fundamentally I am against any sort of packed lunch policing. However, I concede that in the extreme cases where a child brings in only crisps and chocolate then some intervention might be justified. But I don't see why such prescriptive rules are necessary. If people checking lunch boxes showed a modicum of intelligence then surely you don't need rules like chocolate only on a biscuit, no cake etc. As long as the lunch contains more actual food then confectionary then I would leave it at that.

That doesn't mean BTW that I would pack any old stuff for my DD. Whenever she took a packed lunch it was damn healthy and balanced.

Ugh, it doesn't seem right does it?
We have the same problem with DS's school. He got told off for having slices of last night's left over pizza instead of a sandwich. It was home made, so was essentially bread, loads of veg and a few slices of mozzarella... totally gobsmacked.

The main reason he has packed lunch in the first place is because the veggie option has cheese in it EVERY DAY!

I'm with you on this - the quality of our school dinners is piss poor with barely a nod in the direction of healthy eating. But stick a chocolate biscuit in an otherwise healthy packed lunch and it's like you singlehandedly risked causing early-onset diabetes in the whole school population.

I have put DD2 on packed lunches this term because she is overweight and school dinners so often seemed to be the kind of thing I wouldn't normally feed her (lots of sausage-based meals) and heavy puddings.

I hate the food police and had the same problem as you with DD1 on her first ever day at school because I put 2 digestive biscuits in her otherwise super-healthy lunchbox, to be roundly told that biscuits were NOT ALLOWED and sent home with a very ashamed DD.

I still don't understand.

Grumpy - how did anyone know your DD had biscuits? Do they check every lunchbox?

Agree with everything said. Double standards. Do they go through the lunchboxes to check? Put a timer lock on it :o

I agree it can't be all junk, that's wrong, but what is wrong with a sandwich, piece of fruit, healthy snack and some chocolate, cake or crisps etc.

What you need to do is attach a note inside your son's lunchbox reading:

^Dear Teacher

Kindly fuck off and leave my child to eat his cake

Yours
AuntiePickleBottom^