As parents we tend to get very touchy about the subject of how our children are disciplined, fed, taught or treated. To keep it simple you might just say that most parents are touchy about their children in general. So when it came to light recently that a school replaced a child’s home-packed lunch with chicken nuggets it should come as no surprise that the wagons were circled (don’t worry, our in-home tutors or online tutors would never do such a thing!)

Earlier this year a preschool student in North Carolina brought from home a lunch consisting of a turkey sandwich, a banana, chips and apple juice. A state inspector determined that her lunch did not meet nutritional guidelines and replaced it- with chicken nuggets.

In my opinion there are a number of factors awry here. First of all, the concept of declaring a turkey sandwich, banana, chips and juice to be less nutritious than what were surely fried chicken nuggets is beyond my cognitive grasp. Perhaps the least nutritious part of the original lunch were the chips, so if that is what flagged the inspector then why not simply remove the chips from the lunchbox and send the child on their way with the remainder? I could understand if their lunchbox contained nothing but M&M’s, chocolate milk and Cheetos, at that point it could be argued that chicken nuggets carry more nutritious value.

Then we must weigh the question of whether or not schools or the government should be dictating what we feed our children. Isn’t that perhaps getting just a little too intrusive into the parenting choices of Americans? My original inclination before hearing a story such as this one would be sure they should begin inspecting lunches; I would imagine that there are plenty of kids that go to school with ridiculously unhealthy lunches not unlike the horror that I described above. But then I hear something like this scenario and I’m reminded of how our government, however well-meaning they may be, has a tendency to take things too far. If I’d sent my child to school with the lunch in question and found out that they were instead fed chicken nuggets I would be furious for obvious reasons. For one thing I can only assume that they threw away the contents of the original lunch, a complete and ridiculous waste of money that I worked hard to pay for, not to mention woke up early, put together with a preschooler getting ready (any mother with a young child knows the terrors of the morning routine), and got them to agree to eat. Secondly I return to my earlier point that I have a hard time grasping how chicken nuggets are more nutritious than a turkey sandwich, banana and juice. Then I take into consideration the recent news about the “pink slime” beef being considered for school lunches and I find myself completely turned off as a mother from allowing my children to consume school-provided lunch.

If it could be trusted that situations such as this one, which is completely ridiculous in my opinion, would not happen and that our government would never feed our children the pink slime we’ve seen in the news, I would be all for the inspection and replacement method in school lunches. Until that day comes, however, I pity the fool who takes my kid’s sandwich.