America will never do the tough thing
Ihate Wednesday mornings. Wednesday is packed lunch day: the day my moral, domestic and parental deficiencies get to stare me in the face. Because it turns out the edamame beans I bought thinking they weren’t just pious but positively halo-capped are at once endangering the Brazilian Amazon, the subject of various human rights abuses and might just give my five-year-old breasts. So they’re out. Is there anything wrong with cucumber, I call out to my husband? “Cucumber is a good source of fibre,” he reads out from Google, “but wait: apparently cucumbers can contain the second highest pesticide residues in the vegetable world.”
That’s it: the girl’s getting a saturated fat sandwich on high glycemic index white bread, with a Wagon Wheel.
I’d never do this, of course. Not because of my daughter’s arteries, which would probably be fine (we all survived, didn’t we?) but because I can’t find Wagon Wheels anywhere anymore – oh, and I’m terrified of the judging that must go on inside the school gates. Well, now this has been confirmed – and it’s worse than I thought. Apparently rubber-gloved staff at Westgate Primary School in West Yorkshire are spending up to half an hour a day inspecting the children’s packed lunches after a “traffic light” triage system was implemented in which “red” foods were bagged up and handed back to parents.
Forget for a second that this sounds like something the counter-terrorism experts at Heathrow might do: as a parent, I’m so bored of being told off. We’re all too aware that we haven’t done a thing right from the moment the cord was cut (and well before, in a woman’s case), we’re usually pretty good at telling ourselves off and public shaming isn’t going to help.
Yes, we may end up packing our kids’ lunch boxes with saintly superfoods, not motivated by a fervent desire for their nutritional health, however, but by fear, status and one-upmanship.
And how healthy is that?