Moral Hypothetical — Is It Better to Trash School Lunches — or Continue to Give them to Poor School Kids — Whose Families Are behind in Paying?

© 2014 Peter Free

 

03 February 2014

 

 

Moral hypotheticals are sometimes illuminating — here is one that involves poor school kids falling mercy to an apparently “conservative” ethical orientation

 

From Lisa Schencker at the Salt Lake Tribune:

 

 

Jason Olsen, a Salt Lake City District spokesman, said the district’s child-nutrition department became aware that Uintah had a large number of students who owed money for lunches.

 

As a result, the child-nutrition manager visited the school and decided to withhold lunches to deal with the issue, he said.

 

But cafeteria workers weren’t able to see which children owed money until they had already received lunches, Olsen explained.

 

The workers then took those lunches from the students and threw them away, he said, because once food is served to one student it can’t be served to another.

 

Children whose lunches were taken were given milk and fruit instead.

 

Olsen said school officials told the district that their staffers typically tell students about any balances as they go through the lunch line and send home notifications to parents each week.

 

The district attempted to contact parents with balances via phone Monday and Tuesday, Olsen said, but weren’t able to reach them all before the child-nutrition manager decided to take away the students’ lunches.

 

© 2014 Lisa Schencker, Lunches seized from kids in debt at Salt Lake City elementary, Salt Lake Tribune (29 January 2014)

 

 

Boston versus Utah-Texas

 

Annie-Rose Strasser at ThinkProgress dug up this ethical contrast:

 

 

In November, a Texas middle school student’s lunch was thrown away because he was 30 cents short on payment.

 

 

But depriving children of food — and embarrassing them in front of their peers — isn’t the only option. In Boston, for example, public schools provide all students with cost-free breakfast and lunch no matter their financial situation.

 

 

© 2014 Annie-Rose Strasser, Utah School Threw Out Students’ Lunches Because They Were In Debt, ThinkProgress (30 January 2014)

 

 

 

Consider the following vignette

 

 

Visualize this school cafeteria scene:

 

 

 

“Hey Duane, we see yer family ain’t paid for yer grits, so I’m gonna trash what’cher eatin’.”

 

 

“Huh?”

 

 

Merinda Moliner grabs Duane’s tray and sweeps his lunch off its separate plates into the garbage.  Duane’s classmates look on with interest.  Obviously Duane was a bad person and should be punished.

 

 

“But I’m hungry,” he protests, not recognizing his apparently destined place in the pecking order of plutocrat-to-serf hierarchy of worthiness.

 

 

“Well, ya kin’have a banana and a glass’a milk.”

 

 

Merinda plops both in front of the unhappy kid.

 

 

Apparently she and her supervisor have not recognized that:

 

not only has she trashed an already school-bought meal,

 

but

 

now she’s added a banana and milk that could have been saved for the following day.

 

 

Value plus value, trashed.  And a still hungry kid.

 

 

 

Who is being punished in this scenario?

 

 

Waste gets us all.

 

 

Guess who subsidizes these school lunches?  Taxpayers.  The program is a federal one.

 

 

 

The moral? — Boston’s cost-free approach makes more economic and humanitarian sense (given what the school lunch program was designed to do)

 

 

But I suppose that allegedly “liberal” ethical leaning would cheat the self-righteously intolerant among us from the pleasure of starving and humiliating our inferiors — by the sheer cleverness of throwing away food that taxpayers have already paid for.