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Parents protest freedom-crushing food police who search lunch bags of schoolchildren
by: Ethan A. Huff

In response to a recent incident in North Carolina where government food police confiscated a four-year-old's homemade lunch and not allowed her to eat processed chicken nuggets, a group of parents recently held a "lunch-in" at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., to take a stand for food freedom. Organized by the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), the lunch-in featured turkey and cheese sandwiches, potato chips, bananas, and apple juice boxes, which were the very same foods nabbed by the unidentified school agent.

In case you missed it, an official from West Hoke Elementary School in Raeford, N.C., recently decided that one young student's sack lunch did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) guidelines for a healthy meal. So he or she -- the school still has not disclosed the identity of the agent -- confiscated the girl's lunch, and not allowed her to purchase chicken nuggets from the school's cafeteria (http://www.dreddyclinic.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=21318).

The USDA's guidelines state that sack lunches brought from home must contain one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of either fruit or vegetables. While the young girl's lunch contained cheese, it did not contain "milk," and also only contained one serving of fruit, which is presumably why the agent felt it necessary to confiscate her lunch and force her through the cafeteria line. At the same time, the Division of Child Development reportedly stated in a later review that the girl's lunch appears to have met all the guidelines, and that the confiscation was unwarranted.

The irony, of course, is that the three processed chicken nuggets the girl ended up eating fail even worse to meet the USDA guidelines, which are questionable in the first place. Processed, homogenized milk products, for instance, which are obviously what the USDA is referring to with the "one serving of milk" category, are hardly nutritious, as a recent study out of Harvard University found that processed milk from factory farms is linked to causing cancer (http://www.dreddyclinic.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=117&t=27451).

But the government has no business regulating, let alone invasively inspecting, the home-packed lunches of schoolchildren, and forcing them to eat government-sanctioned cafeteria food, regardless of the circumstances. And part of NCPPR's demonstration was to stand in solidarity for food freedom against a government that is "waging war on lunch."

Sources for this article include:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/lunch-protests-crackdown-homemade-lunches_631809.html

http://www.dreddyclinic.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=21318

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