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Roberta Peck

Published: February 4, 2009

The great benefit of this present financial deficit in education is that it provides us with the opportunity to diligently evaluate everything we are presently spending taxpayer money on. Little things add up. Presently, if we added up all the perfectly good fruit that our children are now throwing in the trash, I wonder just how much that would add up to, $200 a day per school.

The thinking is if food is put on the child's tray without any choice, then there is more of a likelihood that the child will eat it. Sounds good in theory but teaches our children to be wasteful.

Recently within the last few weeks there has been a cart put in our cafeteria and the kids have been told to put any unopened containers (like milk and juice) on the cart. I am a cafeteria monitor and I have noticed that unless I make a point of it, the kids are already in the habit of trashing everything and not bothering to walk to the cart. Also, it is hard to monitor if a container has been opened or not with a hundred kids to watch. I do commend whoever came up with the idea of the cost saving "cart." However, that still does not solve the situation of fresh perfectly good apples, bananas, plums and the like being trashed.

As a veteran teacher, I know that if the kids were told to put their unwanted fruit up there on the cart, there are some who would think it "fun" to spit on it, roll the fruit to smash the inside for another to complain about later, or stick hidden pieces of broken plastic fork in the fruit.

Of course we want our children to eat fresh fruit, but they should be given the option to take it, rather than having it forced on them only to have them end up trashing it. And I would like it known that many children themselves have complained about all the food that gets trashed.

Roberta Peck
Sebring

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