cornelluniversitylibrary's Flickr photostream/Creative Commons

We take school lunch very seriously here at TakePart, particularly efforts to increase access to healthy, local ingredients, but a Chicago middle-school may have gone a little overboard when they had 25 students arrested for a cafeteria food fight.  I’m in favor of school safety, but did they really need to bring in police officers to round up, arrest, jail and charge these kids with reckless conduct, a misdemeanor?

Maybe the students were fed-up with being fed bland food that lacked nutritional value and decided to stage a revolt and literally throw the junk food out of the cafeteria.  Something tells me that’s not the case, but regardless of what prompted the tossing of edible projectiles, I have to think there are more appropriate ways of handling disciplinary action.  Wouldn’t you agree?  I can recall a few food fights in my day, and I’m thankful no one threw me in the slammer for flipping mashed potatoes from a fork.

Not surprisingly, parents of the students are outraged at what the New York Times rightly describes as “the criminalization of age-old adolescent pranks”, and many are worried about the lasting legal and psychological effects of the arrests.

For a more thoughtful lunch room encounter, watch this amazing video from One Tray, the national campaign to improve child nutrition by connecting local farms to the federal school lunch program.

Lunch Encounters of the Third Kind from Parent Earth on Vimeo.