A preschool girl from North Carolina was told her homemade meal consisting of turkey and cheese sandwich wasn’t healthy enough – so West Hoke Elementary School cafeteria monitor made her eat chicken nuggets instead.
The rejected meal consisted of a turkey and cheese sandwich on whole wheat bread, with a side of a banana, potato chips, and apple juice.
“What got me so mad is, number one, don’t tell my kid I’m not packing her lunch box properly,” the girl’s mother, who wished to remain anonymous, told a local newspaper.
“I pack her lunchbox according to what she eats. It always consists of a fruit. It never consists of a vegetable. She eats vegetables at home because I have to watch her because she doesn’t really care for vegetables.”
The Department of Health and Human Services requires students to eat lunches that consist of meat, milk, grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables.
It isn’t clear what the entire meal that the cafeteria at West Hoke Elementary School consisted of, but all that the picky four-year-old girl ate were the chicken nuggets.
The mother still wonders what it was exactly that disqualified her meal, and she expects that the bag of potato chips were potentially the problem.
That said, Jani Kozlowski, the spokesperson from the DHHS children’s division said that the meal sounds like it would have passed the federal guidelines test.
“With a turkey sandwich, that covers your protein, your grain, and if it had cheese on it, that’s the dairy,” Jani Kozlowski told The Carolina Journal.
“It sounds like the lunch itself would’ve met all of the standards,” she said, not having worked with the school in question herself.
On top of the wasted food that was sent home with the little girl at the end of the day was a $1.25 bill for the “healthy” school lunch.
“I don’t feel that I should pay for a cafeteria lunch when I provide lunch for her from home,” the mother wrote in a letter to her state representative.
