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Uncommon children's snacks being banned by schools

June 11, 2015

 

It’s enough to curdle your clotted cream!

The Scotch egg – that slightly snooty stand-by of semi-sophisticated snacking in the U.K. – has been banned from a school in Colchester, England, branded as common junk food.

The Telegraph newspaper reported Tuesday that Cherry Tree Primary School has declared the eggs – hard-boiled, and blanketed in sausage meat and breadcrumbs – “too unhealthy to be part of a balanced diet,” and is confiscating them from students’ lunchboxes.

Scotch egg enthusiasts may feel slighted – and they are far from alone.

The dividing line between acceptable and unacceptable school food is vague and nebulous. It varies greatly from place to place – and from time to time.

In Norwich, England, a controversy recently erupted after a headmistress, who insists her students eat fruit or vegetables as an 11 AM snack, confiscated a six-year-old boy’s biscuits.

“My son had been taking Rich Tea biscuits into school since last September, which was agreed by his class teacher, until last week when he took in six small butter cookies with sugar on them, the size of a 10 pence piece,” the boy’s mother told The Daily Mail. “They were confiscated by the teacher. He was made to watch the rest of the class eat their fruit and vegetables while he went hungry.”

These bans can seem trivial, but the stakes can be high. Early last year, a mother in Hamilton, Ontario, filed a human rights complaint against her daughter’s school, claiming it failed to make proper allowances for her potentially fatal allergies to milk and cheese.

Recent research at Cornell University offered some intriguing insights into the after-effects of these bans, when 11 elementary schools in Oregon did away with chocolate milk in their cafeterias. Researchers found that, as a direct result, students took 10% less milk, and wasted 29% more. Seven per cent of the schools’ students stopped eating school lunches entirely.

And sometimes, things become ludicrous.

Last October, The Mirror in England reported a young girl with food allergies was banished from her London school’s dining hall because she brought her own lunch. The school considered this “anti-social.” The girl was ordered to eat in a different room, accompanied by a supervising school nurse, and one single classmate for company.

The great grand-daddy of all school food regulations was handed down by U.S. president Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. Faced with a lack of funding for school lunches and rising criticism over low vegetable content and poor nutrition, Reagan famously declared ketchup and relish to be vegetables.

Things have changed dramatically since then. Last summer, the U.S. Department of Agriculture enacted sweeping regulations to ban many forms of junk food – particularly soda pop – from being sold in vending machines in American schools.

Another nice capper came in 2011, when France banned ketchup in all its schools.

Now, wouldn’t it be amusing if at least one child in Colchester went out for Hallowe’en this fall dressed as a Scotch egg?