School Shames Teenage Girl for Having ‘Too Much Food’ in Her Lunch

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Certain behaviors that are understandable with small children become pretty darn absurd when you’re dealing with teenagers. High school kids don’t normally go down for naptime, and it’s weird for a school to go through and police teenagers’ lunches at mealtime. One mother was stunned recently to discover that her daughter’s high school was going through the kids’ lunches, and especially ticked off when they told her teenage daughter off for eating “too much food.”

The girl’s mother posted to Mumsnet to see if other mothers were as stunned as she was. And the weirdest thing is that her daughter’s lunch was comparatively healthful. The girl is vegan and never buys lunch at the cafeteria, and the brown-bag lunch that apparently sparked the “too much food” announcement was “a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on wheat bread, a small banana, strawberries, some grapes, and less than a handful of dried coconut flakes and raisins.”

And for this they stopped and told her she had too much food? For starters, that does not sound like too much food, and she even brought several different kinds of fruit. The girl’s mother says that the school cafeteria serves a ton of unhealthful food like sausages, cakes, doughnuts, and custards, so it certainly sounds hypocritical to show up and tell a teenage girl that she has too much food because she’s eating a banana and grapes, especially if they’re selling pizza and cake to the other kids.

On top of all that, I would be livid if the school told my teenage daughter she was eating too much food. I remember being a teenage girl, and I would have been utterly humiliated to hear that. There is a lot of pressure for teenage girls to be as thin as possible and eat as little as possible, and hearing that sort of thing can be extremely damaging.

And it does not sound like the school has any real guidelines for food being “bad” or “good” or “too much,” because the mother said the school also reportedly told off her daughter another time “for having a few pieces of sliced up avocado because it’s ‘unhealthy.'”

Now those are fighting words. Lunch-shaming is one thing, but do not come for the avocado. Avocados are the only proof of God’s love in this world. Clearly this school has no idea what it’s talking about and they need to leave the kids’ lunches at home, especially if they want to continue selling cookies and hot dogs in the cafeteria.

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