In an incident that is outraging many persons throughout the county via governmental overreach, a government worker determined that a 4-year-old girls’ homemade lunch wasn’t healthy enough and made her replace it with a school lunch instead.
A state worker required a pre-school child to buy a lunch from the school cafeteria. Ultimately, the action resulted in the girl not consuming her turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice – and instead, she ate three chicken nuggets.
The reason the government worker decided that the girl needed to purchase a school lunch is because the worker said the home-packed lunch did not meet USDA nutritional standards.
A government employee was inspecting lunch boxes brought to school when the worker decided the girl’s lunch didn’t meet the Division of Child Development and Early Education’s Department of Health and Human Services guidelines for a healthy lunch.
The program requires that youngsters in pre-kindergarten programs, which include in-home day care centers, meet the United States Department of Agriculture guidelines. The guidelines state that every lunch have one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables – including lunches prepared at and brought from home.
Even though the girl’s lunch didn’t have milk or a second fruit-vegetable serving, it was later determined that her lunch was good enough.
When the girl’s mother got a note from her daughter’s school stating that she owed the school cafeteria $1.25 for the school lunch that replaced her daughter’s homemade lunch, she contacted her government representative. From there, the story has spread.
After the mother’s complaint, it was determined that the lunch met enough of the standards to pass as an acceptable lunch. An official from the program back-pedaled and said that the turkey and cheese sandwich is considered as grain and dairy products, and the banana is considered as a sufficient serving of a fruit or vegetable.
It has been argued that this is a case of total governmental overreach and that these recent Obama administration eating regulations are getting extremely out-of-hand for parents.
First of all, someone is actually being paid by the government to look into young children’s lunch boxes and to make these determinations. Second of all, inappropriate decisions are obviously being made regarding a homemade lunch such as this one. Next, parents say they know what their child can and will eat without the government dictating what should be in the lunch box.
The mother who anonymously complained about the incident said she doesn’t pack food items that her daughter won’t eat without being pressured by her. However, she said she makes her daughter eat all of the healthy items at dinner when they are together at the dinner table.
And finally, it is believed that the government is opening itself up to incredible lawsuits should they give a child a food item of which the child is allergic or cannot eat for some other reason – such as a bad combination with medication.
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Source: WGN
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