Against the grain

What we're dealing with here is a school lunch made up of leftover roast beef, potatoes, carrots, oranges, and milk. It's a healthier option than most, but it was deemed “unbalanced” by a Canadian school, and so the school supplemented two siblings’ lunches with Ritz crackers to “balance” it. And it just gets better - their Lunch Nazis had the nerve to charge the parents a C$5 (NZ$5.80) fine (ticket pictured) for each lunch they “corrected.” This happened at a school in Manitoba, where the provincial government’s Early Learning and Child Care Department follows a policy that lunches must meet its Food Guide standards, and schools apparently are to correct any lunches that parents failed at sending with the proper elements, as determined by the Food Guide and the teachers inspecting the lunches, and the parents will be charged a fine for each item missing. In this instance, the parent, Kristen Bartkiw, apparently failed to include a grain in her two children’s lunches, requiring the supplementation with the Ritz crackers when a much better option would've been to make the roast beef into sandwiches (preferably on wholegrain bread). I'm sure the school meant well, but one must remember that Bartkiw sent a wonderfully wholesome lunch. The school shouldn't then add junky snack food and call it balanced. Had she sent along lunches consisting of microwave Kraft Dinner and a hot dog, a package of fruit twists, a Cheestring, and a juice box, that lunch would technically be within the guidelines. The moral of this story is that the Manitoba government should have registered dietitians on staff working on an ongoing basis with all community-based organizations that serve food, including daycares.