Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it.
By this point, I’m sure we’ve all heard of the Swedish Lunchlady who made food that was Just Too Good and was told to tone it down. If you haven’t, well, check out the article here. If you’re not even particularly inclined to do even that, here’s the money excerpt:
Annika Eriksson, a lunch lady at school in Falun, was told that her cooking is just too good.
Pupils at the school have become accustomed to feasting on newly baked bread and an assortment of 15 vegetables at lunchtime, but now the good times are over.
The municipality has ordered Eriksson to bring it down a notch since other schools do not receive the same calibre of food – and that is “unfair”.
Now, when I read the *NEXT* line in the article, I thought that maybe there were some shenanigans being hidden by the reporter… here, check this out:
Moreover, the food on offer at the school doesn’t comply with the directives of a local healthy diet scheme which was initiated in 2011, according to the municipality.
Oh, well then. Surely she’s violating some of the diet schemes or something and people are focusing on how the food tastes good instead of how it meets nutritional requirements or something like that… right? Well, then I read *THIS* part of the article:
From now on, the school’s vegetable buffet will be halved in size and Eriksson’s handmade loafs will be replaced with store-bought bread.
I’ve never found Solomon to be a particularly interesting character in 1st Kings 3. The true mother of the living baby didn’t strike me as particularly interesting either. I’m always fascinated by the mother of the dead child, though… and how she keeps popping up when you least expect her.
Nobody expects the mother of the dead child! Her weapons are surprise, and fear.Report
One suspects that Swedes find the story as ridiculous as the rest of the world and that the situation will be reversed soon enough.
I watch Chopped! as a form of food porn. There is an episode with “lunch ladies” and they produced some amazing food under very difficult conditions. And they are able to produce a variety of substantial meals in large quantities every day. Some of them grow their own vegetables in greenhouses, others bake and slice their own bread from flour and yeast — because there is no budget to do anything else.
The food service professional at the heart of this story ought to be commended for exceptional work and held up as an example for her peers to emulate.Report
I’m sure that they do. My focus wasn’t on “Ha! Look at the Swedes!” but “Jeez Louise, there’s yet another person saying that it’s best to split the baby than someone have something good that someone else does not.”Report
“Fresh vegetables? Bread? No! You are going to make the meatballs with the lingonberry sauce because
THIS IS SWEDEN!Report
Mike, never change.Report
Except his clothes.
Mike, you can change your clothes.Report
Every half hour, underwear on the outside, right?Report
Yes, lets drag down lunch-food standards to fairly meet the standards of people with worse options instead of raising the standards for the people eating shittier meals. Makes total fucking sense; if you’re a sociopath.Report
Is this trait something that helps people get and/or keep power?
Or is it just a trait like general jerkishness that you’ll find represented anywhere and everywhere in unsurprising proportions?Report
I do think it’s indicative of a certain class of risk-avoidance thinking.
It’s the sort that I think can provide you a survival advantage in a large bureaucracy. I’m not sure it helps you get and/or keep power so much as helps you to not offend anybody until the Peter Principle puts you into a position where you actually have to make decisions, and then this happens.Report
Right, this is precisely what I was thinking. I imagine whoever made this decision didn’t think to him or herself, “These people have it better than some other people, and that’s just not right,” but instead thought, “It’s only a matter of time before a mother from another school complains, and then another, and then another, and then another. Let’s just nip it in the bud.”Report
In my experience this is how bureaucracy works. Any deviation from the standard is risky and therefore problematic.Report
First, let me say that I wholly agree with Jay’s broader point here. In a vacuum, such approaches to “fairness” are just plain silly.
But, if I may, I’m going to play a bit of the devil’s advocate on two fronts…
1.) While right now, there appears to be zero negative impact on other schools, that might not remain the case. I’ve heard of examples in the American system where School A came up with their own way to be better at X. Other schools follow suit. It eventually comes to pass that School Z (which has lower funding, fewer resources, worse teachers, and serves a needier population) would also like to improve X but lacks the ability to do so organically and independently the way that School A did. But since School A and other better-positioned schools did it on their own, suddenly School Z is being told they will get no help from above to improve X. X continues to languish at School Z. So, there is some rationale for ensuring that certain changes are done in a more universal way, with a more top-down model. It doesn’t necessarily justify how this case was handled, but it’s also not wholly crazy to say, “We know you don’t realize it, but it is possible that this can/will/is causing harm elsewhere.”
2.) A hypothetical: Suppose the school with the WonderChef was a well-funded, resource-rich school serving a privileged population. A few miles down the road is an under-funded, resource-poor school serving a needy population. The school administrators notice the work of WonderChef and the impact it is having on the students and say, “Ya know what? The poor school needs this much more than the rich one; let’s move her there and let her keep doing her thing.” WonderChef does not object. What do you think the parent response would be, particularly from the parents at WonderChef’s original school? More importantly, would this be more or less fair than their current course of action? Would it be more or less fair than just leaving her where she is and letting her do her thing? Why?Report
Harrison Bergeron loves your argument #1, but he can’t quite say why, because the loud noises in his ears make it difficult to think straight for very long.Report
Yea… externalities are just made up… right?Report
Your argument #1 is the same as the slacker who bitches about the smart kid blowing the curve.
Except that I always thought the moral of that story was that we should celebrate the smart kid and tell the slacker to hit the books.Report
To me it reads more like the ‘slacker’ complaining that no one will buy him books but they still look down on him for not having them. Or is every case of a school that ” has lower funding, fewer resources, worse teachers, and serves a needier population” down to someone being lazy?Report
That is not what my first argument is. You are wrong.
My first argument is that some schools are better positioned to make improvements independently than others. If those schools less well positioned are expected to meet the same standards as those better positioned ones because, hey, the better positioned ones are doing it all on their own, you leave the less well positioned schools in a lurch.Report
Oh, so it’s not “blowing the curve”, instead it’s you following a slippery slope? Congratulations, you’ve gone to an even worse argument.Report
That’s not an externality.Report
Sure it is. A cost (the raising of expectations which cannot be met and the consequences therein) is potentially being borne by a party not involved in the initial transactions (other schools). Superchef does not bear the brunt of this and, thus, does not consider it when evaluating her transaction. I’m not saying that is absolutely happening, but am offering it as a possibility.Report
“Superchef does not bear the brunt of this and, thus, does not consider it when evaluating her transaction.”
So we should not strive to succeed or to better our situation because an idiot in the government might decide that, therefore, people who aren’t us don’t need help.
When someone successful through indi–oh wait, that’s right, You Didn’t Build That. Any success is just the result of standing on someone else’s back.Report
Harrison Bergeron is also a complete work of fiction. It has never happened and will never happen.
I don’t understand why these stories become useful rhetorical devices or sincere gospel to people. They are extreme.Report
Jonathan Swift was an idiot. Nobody would ever seriously consider eating children. I can’t believe that people bother talking about that idiot who suggested people would eat children.Report
Has there been any additional follow up with this story?
I have to confess, this seems like one of those stories that’s too crazy to believe because it didn’t actually happen – like the guy that was reading pornography to his class or the guy that wasn’t hired by the DMV because we was declared “too competent.”Report
The original story was dated the 6th (two days ago). The website (thelocal.se) *SEEMS* like a fairly seriousish (i.e. it has reporters and stuff) website but there is a vague tabloidy feel to it… then again, tabloidy is how Europe does its papers.Report
I don’t think you need to be a tabloid to erroneously report such a story. It might well tun out to be that the school district did indeed say the food is too good, it needs to be of poorer quality.
But I will not be surprised if it turns out that the issue was budgetary, or complaints about ignoring dietary restrictions, or not having 15 different options done by lunch time, or some other more logistical reason.Report
The story does make it seem like the Crappy Awful Default Meal isn’t necessarily all that bad. I mean, they say that the “vegetable buffet” was “halved”. Not removed entirely, or replaced by vitamin-supplement chicken nuggets, or something.
I also wonder whether school funding was being used for this enhanced menu, which would leave us with the criticism of “you’re spending money we gave you to buy books to make perfectly good lunch menus fancier just to satisfy your foodie whims”.Report
Yea, the only report that the funding didn’t change seemed to come from the lunch lady herself. Which might be the case. Really, of all the reporting I’ve seen, none of it seems to include statements from the school.Report
This is usually indicative of a problem in the U.S. If there’s no bland denial from school officials, there’s usually no real story.Report
the guy that wasn’t hired by the DMV because we was declared “too competent.”
Well, there was the police force in Connecticut that didn’t hire a guy because they thought he was too smart
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/01/too-smart-to-be-a-good-cop/Report
It makes me think of this.Report
What is interesting about this article is that it shows the differences between how engineer/science types might view a situation and how lawyers might view a situation.
So some observations based on law and my old employment discrimination class:
1. Intelligence is not a protected class according to section of the Civil Rights Act that covers employment.
2. In American law, things or people that are not protected with heightened scrutiny receive what is called rational basis review. That means that the government just needs to come up with a rational basis for the practice. My constitutional law professor called this the “say anything that makes sense and with a straight face” test. It is a very low bar.
3. Employment attrition passes the rational basis test. It does cost a lot of money to train police officers and the government does have a valid interest in receiving a good return on investment and not having too much turnover. IIRC police officers often have a high-turn over rate. If the government feels like he will be bored by his job (and a lot of police work seems rather repetitive) than it made a case on attrition.
Now it strikes me that a lot of engineer types generally find legal logic and arguments to be super-frustrating because it seems to go against everything they learned as engineers. However, I like the gray of law. Law is more philosophy than science. It is not black and white and most cases are complicated with both sides being partially in the right and partially in the wrong to varying degrees.
Though this seems like when private companies don’t hire people because they are “over-qualified”. This could be completely inaccurate but companies seem to like high attrition rates and don’t want to spend a lot of money on someone who will jump ship once a better opportunity comes along.Report
Regarding the Connecticut case, I think there may be another reason that they did what they did: disparate impact.
If you cut off the people who scored lowly on the IQ test, that’s going to disproportionately impact minorities and leave you open to some pretty bad things.
However, if you define an IQ testing range that discriminates to some degree against high scorers and low scorers, you can still weed out the low scorers without upsetting the racial balance of applications too much.Report
The municipality has published a short notice on their homepage, claiming that this is just a misunderstanding. That what they wanted to communicate is that the schools should think about the environment when they choose what vegetables to serve, to pick vegetables that match the seasons. They also say that they have no problems with bread baking, a statement that seems to be supported by the fact that there are plans to train the local lunch personal in how to bake bread, and that they want to support the kind of enthusiasm that Annika Eriksson, the lunch lady in question, shows.
I have also read the two articles that the Local base their article on. Many of the claims in the Local article seem to be made up, for example that the stated reason for the cutbacks was that the food was too good and that this was unfair for students at other schools. The original articles do briefly mention that the quality had to be cut back because it was too good but they do not explain how they reach this conclusion.Report
With just a little bit of slant in the opposite direction, this becomes “we know that you rich people don’t like the thought of eating icky Poor People Food but that’s just too darn bad, you have to have the same lunch everyone else does, because there’s no right to be pointlessly unique just to show us all how rich you are”.Report
Man, that’s just sad. God forbid we raise standards. No, gotta conform to the lowest common denomator. The bureaucracy insists.Report