Should Junk Food be Banned in School? An Analysis of Pros and Cons

Banning Junk Food on School Property

I have a small article and I need two small essays on that one article in each essay APA format and two ideas from the article I need each essay must be from 250-300 words I am attaching the article and the topic of the essays are 1st essay ( junk food should ban in every school property) 2nd essay topic is (junk food should not ban in every school property).

You may have heard of Keenan Shaw, the 17-year-old student at Winston Churchill High School in Lethbridge Alta., who get suspended this week for selling contraband soda pop on school property. This freckle-faced, glinty-eyed teenpreneur stocked his locker with a case of Pepsi, a beverage banded under the Lethbridge School District’s new nutritional guidelines (only diet pop is allowed). Hawking his wares at an undisclosed markup, Shaw sold out in minutes and pocketed a tidy profit, only to pour it into more cases of pop, which he promptly sold the following day.

School administrators didn’t think his enterprising scheme was so sweet. They gave Shaw a warning, and when he refused to heel it, they suspended him. “I thought it was a joke. I didn’t know they could suspend me for selling pop,” Shaw complained to a reporter after the fact. His mother was also indignant, saying that while she understood the need for rules, suspension seemed a bit harsh. Besides, she liked the idea of her son “being an entrepreneur.”

Bracketing for a moment the fact that actively praising your child in public for selling banned substances probably isn’t the wisest parenting strategy, let’s look at what’s actually going on here. For as long as I can remember, high school cafeterias were essentially the nutritional equivalent of a red light district – scary buffets of Tater Tots, gravy fries and quivering Jello bowls, with an obligatory platter of overripe, untouched fruit at the cash register.

Things are much better now, in the post-Jamie Oliver school-lunch age. For one thing, schools these days have “nutritional guidelines,” and they actually pay attention to what kids are eating. With any luck, this means offering students food that might be good for them, or even culturally interesting, as opposed to providing them nothing but processed crap.

Look, I’m all for sustainable-fish curry and quinoa in school (what self-respecting bourgeois mother wouldn’t be?). But I do get unnerved when I hear about certain food being “banned” on school property. This is because I grew up in a house where junk food was anathema. There was a single tin of heart-shaped spelt ginger snaps my mother kept on top of the fridge and my sister and I were allowed one each after dinner, but that was basically it. Even our peanut butter was the oily health food store kind that came from a grinder.

As a result, I spent most of my late childhood obsessed with sweets. I’d comb the sofa cushions for spare change and sneak off school property at lunch hour to buy candy at the corner store. Back at school, I’d lock myself in a bathroom cubicle and feast on gummy worms and Fizz Whiz until my brain tingled with a glucose rush. My friend Amy, who had a candy dish on her coffee table (always full!) and pop in her fridge, thought my obsession was weird. “Why don’t you just come to my house after school and have a Sprite? We get it in club packs from Costco,” she’d say. And I did. But for me, that wasn’t the point. Sugar was verboten, so the pleasure was all in the sneaking.