Turkey sandwich v. chicken nuggets

The anti-government crowd is crowing about an incident in the West Hoke Elementary School.. Apparently, the kindergarten or preschool class had the lunches they brought from home inspected and a couple girls threw away what look like healthy lunches which were replaced by the cafeteria menu that didn't look very healthy. The reports are muddled. Who did the inspecting -- a school, city, state, or federal official? What rules were the official following? Did the little girls misunderstand the directive to supplement their lunch with milk and thought their entire lunch was bad?

Even so, that prompted a commentary by Timothy Kincaid of Box Turtle Bulletin on the intrusiveness of government. He is rightfully concerned because lots of people want the gov't to be intrusive into the sex lives of gay people (yeah, the same people who don't want any other type of intrusion). Is this the same kind of issue? The debate in the comments was lively. Do kids that young understand what a healthy lunch is? Do their parents? Given the prevalence of childhood obesity, that may indeed be the case. Does a child's health trump parent supplied lunch? Is it enough to teach kids (and parents) about healthy food? Who pays for the health care of the kids with unhealthy diets? Is a lunch prepared by the school all that healthy?

This particular school lunch issue is too muddled for me to come down on one side or the other. What it has done is given me new insight into the issue of government intrusion. (1) What may be intrusion to one person may be welcome assistance to another. (2) What sounds good on paper may not be when the inspector is actually looking at someone's lunch. (3) There may be less intrusive ways to get the same result. (4) It is not fair to give a blanket pronunciation that all gov't intrusion is bad or all is good. One must look at the issue and details before deciding. Healthy debate takes a while. Alas, loud voices on both sides tend to obscure both issue and details.

But I still wouldn't want any kind of inspector in my bedroom unless they were only inspecting the electrical wiring.