Minnesota mom Alicia Liebel Berg recently went viral for posting a note she received in her preschooler’s lunchbox. Turns out, her school is following some pretty specific guidelines for the contents of preschooler lunches. The operative word here is preschooler.
On January 11, she shared on Twitter that her son's school requires lunches to follow guidelines provided by the US Department of Agriculture, which means they must include milk, a protein, a fruit, a grain or bread, and two servings of veggies -- which can either be a quarter of a cup of veggies per serving or a quarter of a cup of a fruit and vegetable.
I have a few questions.
Has the US Department of Agriculture actually tried to feed a preschooler, let alone depended on a third party to make sure said preschooler eats the lunch that you’ve sent with him or her? Every parent knows that unless the lunch contents contains the words “nugget,” “...and cheese,” “flavored” or “fun pack,” it’s unlikely to get past the preschooler’s a) tightly sealed and/or b) gaping wide and screaming mouth and tiny fists of fury.
Also, has the US Department of Agriculture ever, after a temporary wave of parental guilt, filled their preschooler’s lunchbox with organic healthy fruits and vegetables that they overpaid for at the grocery store, only to pull out their kid’s lunchbox from their backpack at the end of day, all soggy and sticky and swampy from the browned organic apples and water logged organic carrots that the preschooler didn’t eat?
Finally, has the US Department of Agriculture ever felt the hot rage of a preschooler whose blood sugar is dangerously low because he or she refuses to eat the perfectly good lunch that has been kindly placed in front of them...even though they specifically asked, no DEMANDED, that you purchase those food items as they shrieked and attempted to dive head first into the snack aisle while the Target shopping car was in motion? Well...has it?!
Unsurprisingly, The US Department of Agriculture has no answers...except for one. And it’s an answer to a question that literally no one was asking: Do pickles count?
But god bless this MN mom. Instead of getting mad (as some of us might do and by “some of us” I mean me) got funny.
So the next time you try to pass off a vegetable as a vegetable in your kid’s lunchbox, you might want to think twice. Better yet, ask yourself, What would the US Department of Agriculture do? And then say, Fuck it and toss in those Veggie Straws instead. You know your preschooler is gonna eat that shit.
Read the full story, as captured by CafeMom, here. 🥒
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