Lunch-shaming in schools has no place in the battle against child poverty
(how many school meals would that damned MOAB have funded????)
Lunch-shaming in schools has no place in the battle against child poverty
Attacks on the poorest families in society rest on a deeply flawed narrative that we can’t afford them, yet we can still line the pockets of the rich with tax cuts
Students receive their lunch at Salusbury Primary School in northwest London
‘Many political leaders seem to think it’s OK for the poorest children to go without having the most basic of needs met, including nutrition.’ Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters
Being poor is about far more than lacking money or resources. To be poor is also to be shunned and stigmatised. “Lunch shaming”, where children in some school districts in the US who can’t afford a hot meal are publicly humiliated, in some cases by being made to clean canteen tables in front of other pupils to pay off their food debt, was thrust into the spotlight recently when the state of New Mexico passed a landmark law outlawing the practice. The law, spearheaded by local anti-poverty groups, is a welcome rebuttal to such callous practices. Other reported incidents of shaming include a child in Alabama whose arm was stamped with “I need lunch money”. Canteen workers have been instructed to throw out the meals of youngsters unable to pay.
That children from poorer backgrounds have to deal with such degrading tactics speaks volumes about wider attitudes and a toxic political climate around poverty. And there is an unsettling resemblance in the latest US episodes to the stigma experienced by poor children in the UK. After years of bashing “the poor” as lazy or feckless, many political leaders seem to think it’s OK for the poorest children to go without having the most basic of needs met, including nutrition, but to also endure a crushing shame for being in a situation that they cannot control. Attacks on the poorest in society rest on a deeply flawed narrative that we can’t afford them yet we can still line the pockets of the rich with tax cuts, as Donald Trump plans to do in what he called last week the “biggest tax cuts in history”.
It is this twisted logic that has made it possible for austerity cuts in Britain to pummel poorer families, and why 30% of children – that’s 4 million – are growing up in poverty. Prior to 2010, thanks to targeted policies, child poverty in Britain was being reduced. Anti-poverty measures have been shown to work in the US too. As a report from the Shriver Center in Illinois put it : “Poverty, like economic and social injustice more broadly, is not an inevitable or intractable force. It is something we can end through the decisions we make at the public policy level.”
This is why the latest initiative from the Living New Deal, a US non-profit project that commemorates and documents one of the most successful anti-poverty drives in history, deserves attention. This month the Living New Deal has a series of events to mark the rollout of a New York map that spotlights the thousands of public works in the city, including community parks and schools, that exemplify the legacy of Franklin D Roosevelt’s extraordinary response to the Great Depression triggered by the 1929 stock market collapse. (A San Francisco map is already complete with Washington DC and LA next in line.) For more than 10 years researchers and volunteers around the US have collaborated to make visible to as wide an audience as possible the (all too often forgotten) achievements of the New Deal. The project reminds us that as well as large-scale building of roads, bridges, schools and libraries, FDR’s New Deal ushered in an unprecedented array of social programmes. These included job creation for millions of unemployed people as well as national public health and child nutrition initiatives that transformed the lives of the poorest people.
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https://www.theguardian.com/society/commentisfree/2017/may/02/lunch-shaming-battle-against-child-poverty
= new reply since forum marked as read
By Jonathan Swift - https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/swift/jonathan/s97m/
Swift goes to great lengths to support his argument, including a list of possible preparation styles for the children, and calculations showing the financial benefits of his suggestion. He uses methods of argument throughout his essay which lampoon the then-influential William Petty and the social engineering popular among followers of Francis Bacon. These lampoons include appealing to the authority of "a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London" and "the famous Psalmanazar, a native of the island Formosa" (who had already confessed to not being from Formosa in 1706). This essay is widely held to be one of the greatest examples of sustained irony in the history of the English language. Much of its shock value derives from the fact that the first portion of the essay describes the plight of starving beggars in Ireland, so that the reader is unprepared for the surprise of Swift's solution when he states, "A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal#Details
