A Canadian daycare's decision to fine a parent over the new national lunch policy has caught the attention of the media and Weighty Matters blog writer Yoni Freedhoff, an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa and founder of Ottawa's Bariatric Medical Institute.
Blog reader Kristen Bartkiw sent in a copy of the $10 fine she received last December from her children's daycare for allegedly not providing a well-balanced lunch up to snuff with the Manitoba government's controversial new Early Learning and Child Care lunch regulations. Her vice? Not including the "one grain" that the center said they were required to financially substitute themselves.
"They have certain legislation that they have in place where you have to follow these food groups, but it doesn't matter how processed the foods are or if they're junk food... so Ritz crackers count as a grain," the 33-year-old mother told Canada's Metro News. "I phoned the daycare worker and said 'you know, potatoes, surely I can get away with this,' and they didn't actually end up charging me the $10."
Bartkiw added that the daycare's claims that the lunch she'd packed for her five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter, which consisted of "homemade roast beef, potatoes, carrots, an orange and milk" was unhealthy and unbalanced, was "ridiculous."
She wrote to Freedhoff's blog that if she had sent her kids to daycare with a "microwave Kraft Dinner and a hot dog, a package of fruit twists, a Cheestring, and a juice box," she would ironically have made the health mark.
"I would encourage parents to not just blindly follow the Canada Food Guide, but really think about eating more real food and not packaged food," Bartkiw told Metro News.
"Kristen also updated me that consequent to parents failing to pack 'balanced' lunches they've moved to a hot lunch program that she describes as great. So perhaps some good came out of Manitoba's idiocy after all," Freedhoff wrote in Weighty Matters.
Click here to see the $10 fine that mother Kristen Bartkiw was given over her allegedly "unbalanced" lunch for her children.
