Parents sending their kids off to school with lunch in a brown bag are asking for whining from their embarrassed children, and a stern lecture from school administrators. Stephanie Clifford explains for The New York Times,
“Ziplocs are the biggest misstep,” said Julie Corbett, a mother in Oakland, Calif., whose two girls attend a school with an eco-friendly lunch policy. In school years past, she said, many a morning came unhinged when the girls were sent to school with disposable sandwich bags.
“That’s when the kids have meltdowns, because they don’t want to be shamed at school,” Ms. Corbett said. “It’s a big deal.”
Schools are forcing parents to buy lunch boxes, reusable aluminum water bottles, and neoprene lunch bags under the guise of saving money and the environment. Waste-free lunches require that “everything be either compostable or reusable,” writes Clifford, “in an effort to reduce garbage and the cost of hauling it away.”
Responding to the pressure from their kids and school administrators, some parents are seeing the light, and are being asked to school reluctant parents that left-over goulash can be toted to school for years in a particular piece of Tupperware.
In the past, students performed skits about recycling but the parent-to-parent evangelism seemed more effective, [principal Brain] Greene said.
“The kids are all about it,” Mr. Greene said, but with the parents, “you have to build habits.”
He added, “We don’t send notes home to parents and say, ‘Listen, this is the third time you’ve brought a Cheeto bag.’ But we help them to understand” why the school has the lunch policy.
Judith Wagner, a professor of education at Whittier College in California, wonders whether school administrators should scold the parents or lay a guilt trip on students, to rid the world of Ziplocs and brown bags. “Do you go back to the parents and say, ‘Gosh, can you rethink the plastic bags and all this food?’ Or do you talk to the children, and you make the children feel guilty because they’re throwing this all away?”
Of course schools with a green agenda don’t care much about costs, time, dishwashing detergent, and water. In some places there is a water shortage, cleaning Tupperware takes water and for those who use a dishwashing machine, electricity. And that electricity may be produced by coal-burning power plants or by a nuclear reactor.
Dishwashing detergent is made of chemicals, some (or all) of which green types don’t like. SafeMama.com says to avoid dishwashing detergents containing phosphates, chlorine and phthalates. The website provides eco-friendly alternatives, including how to make your own.
Most Tupperware products are made of low-density polyethylene (LDPE, or plastic #4) and polypropylene (PP, or plastic #5), “and as such are considered safe for repeated use storing food items and cycling through the dishwasher. Most food storage products from Glad, Hefty, Ziploc and Saran also pass The Green Guide‘s muster for health safety.” However, low-density polyethylene is made of petroleum, which must be pumped from the ground (above and below sea level) and sometimes accidents happen.
The next step for school green groups will be to require parents to abandon the division of labor altogether. Lunches must come in hand-formed pottery (made at home), cleaned only by hand in a stream or other suitable natural water source, to be dried naturally by the sun and the wind.
{ 19 comments }
If I hadn’t clicked the NYT link I’d have thought you’re pulling this from The Onion. The self-congratulatory smarminess of the administrators quoted is almost comical.
Homeschooling would save a LOT of resources–including the tax money that would no longer go to the public school.
I don’t mind looking at an educator (all of whom are beneath me in status and dignity) and telling her to buzz off, but I do worry about the tender souls of my little ones. In school after school, they seem to get targeted on my account. Not sure why.
Anyway, unless you homeschooled, it’s almost impossible to avoid this propaganda. The hope is the kids will grow up looking at these messages with the same credulity a circa 1980′s Soviet Citizen would give to a Pravda story. (“Bumper Crop in Ukraine! “Peace Mission in Afghanistan a Success!” etc.)
“I don’t mind looking at an educator (all of whom are beneath me in status and dignity) and telling her to buzz off”.
Careful. You can be tazed for that, and maybe arrested. Ya know, “Abusing an educator and resisting governmental advice.” Nuts like you are dangerous
“Do you go back to the parents and say, ‘Gosh, can you rethink the plastic bags and all this food?’ Or do you talk to the children, and you make the children feel guilty because they’re throwing this all away?”
Oooh, decisions, decisions…. Of course, those ARE the only choices, aren’t they?
“The kids are all about it,” Mr. Greene said
Beg pardon? Was that English??
Mr. Greene is apparently quite hip.
The state indoctrinators seem blissfully unaware that using children to discipline the parents is a marker of profound significance. And it is not a marker of anything good.
Don’t use government schools, they’re bad for your children’s environment.
On the topic of environmentalism, this lecture by George Reisman changes everything: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtyN8VNjWqM .
Have the kiddies bring home the trash in their lunch boxes under the guise of “we are going to wash out and reuse the zip locks”.
My mother and aunt actually do! Whatever…
This is exactly what I was thinking – bring the trash back home. I think it is a legitimate argument that the school might want to save on waste removal costs (although this is clearly not their central motivation for the policy). Parents can tell their kids to put their trash back in the bag, and pack it home in their backpack. Mom and Dad can choose to pay for their own private waste removal – problem solved for both parties. But I’m not thinking like a public school administrator, I guess.
There are many ways to do school lunch. Consider the Japanese way.
All the food for all the students in a city is prepared at a central location. It is carefully portioned out, based on attendance reports, into hundreds of large, insulated aluminum containers which are delivered by truck to each school. Inside the school, students from each homeroom pick up their designated containers, deliver them to their homeroom, and serve the food to their classmates. All containers, trays, bowls, and sporks are returned to the central location every day for cleaning.
Pretty green, I guess, except for driving tons of rice and stuff all over town. Bonus: the children learn how to cooperate, share, and handle food properly. And they eat together every day at their own desks with their homeroom teacher.
“WE don’t NEED no EDuCAtion….
…..”
If you need anymore reason to pull your kiddos out of the government schools this is a huge one, instead of learning about history, math they are fed this sort of green propaganda. The sad thing is those kids are too young to even realize they are under the influence of these skillful propagandists.
From what I can tell, most private schools hammer this stuff just as hard. I find myself de-programming the little ones almost daily. If the wifey would let me, I would hire a private tutor and be done with it.
Stephanie Clifford is a grade-A, museum-quality example of what the Complete Guide to Everything podcast calls … “A$$holes we never heard of until we read about them in the New York Times”.
Funny, I remember not all that long ago the push for using brown bags in the stores and for lunches as being the great environmental salvation as it uses a renewable resource rather than ‘evil’ plastic bags. Green is the new red, environmentalism no more than the new collectivism and for all the same old wrong reasons, why do we keep repeating all the errors of history? I literally cannot comprehend the moronic mindset required to buy into this idiocy, how people cannot think past the first step and not see the blazingly obvious contradictions and errors in all the feel good do nothing enviro garbage. Replace perfectly good, inexpensive incandescent lights with expensive CFLs that generate a sickly light and are a toxic hazard if broken, use soft force to push people into the idiotic reusable tote bags rather than quite nice and fine plastic in the stores (how can one not see that the reusable totes are a breeding ground for all manner of nasty bacteria and if you wash them you are using the equivalent resources of hundreds of plastic bags, I’ll leave aside most are made in China which has no regard whatsoever for the environment and must be shipped here which requires far more energy and resources than simple plastic bags), enforce a guilt trip on people who ‘waste’ energy, and so on.
None of it makes sense until one understands the reality that the core of the environmental movement is their insistence on viewing humans as just another animal. While that we may be, we differ from any other animal in that we survive and thrive solely by use of tools and modifying our environment to suit us, we have no adaptation to our surroundings so we adapt our surroundings. The logical conclusion and admitted goal of their leadership (the idiotic propagandists in the schools and tools such as Greenpeace, Sierra Club, etc. are naught but useful idiots) is to retrograde mankind to the Stone Age.
Do not allow your children to be devolved into collectivist lemmings! Leon Trotsky would be oh so proud of the “progress” that the government/union system is making towards reducing our children into the lowest of social “common denominators” through publik ejukashun. If you think that home schooling is expensive in time and resources, or that tuition is too much to pay in addition to the school taxes mulcted from you, consider what the end result is for your own progeny. The state considers your children (note the possesive) to be an asset. They wish to have compliant serfs to work in the state manor. Deny them this.
Practical economics will encourage all to make appropriate decisions in the affairs of life, without the need of a nanny state to render judgment on everything one does. Which master will your children truly respect – the state, or parents?
just brown? are there no other colors than brown?
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