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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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Internet helps blogging 9-year-old change the lousy food at her school

By David McElroy · June 16, 2012

Nobody really noticed when a 9-year-old girl in Scotland started blogging in April about her school lunches. A couple of months later, she’s forced changes in her school’s lunch, embarrassed her local government and made the local politicians look like fools. It’s not a bad start.

Martha Payne had a simple idea. She wanted to take a picture of her school lunch each day and evaluate it, based on how she liked it and how healthy she thought it was. So NeverSeconds was born. Her mother is a physician and her father is a farmer, so it’s natural for her to think about food and health, because she’s grown up hearing about both.

As people started hearing about her blog and reading about it, school officials took notice. They even made some changes. By May 18, the school was allowing students to get unlimited salads, fruit and bread, which had always been the policy, but nobody had ever told the lunchroom workers.

So things were going well for Martha, who was posting anonymously as “Veg.” She was having a great time writing about her lunches. She was receiving pictures of other kids’ lunches from around the world. She had even started raising money to build a kitchen for a school in India. Then newspapers in Great Britain started writing about her project, pointing to the deficiencies of the food. That’s when the problems started.

Martha’s father had to meet with local officials, who wanted her to tone down her criticism of the lunches, but Dave Payne didn’t think that was fair.

“Martha writes very honestly, she takes pictures and she doesn’t lie, and I didn’t want to feel that she couldn’t tell the truth,” Payne told the Guardian.

Local politicians couldn’t deal with a 9-year-old telling the truth, so they made the big decision. They banned Martha from bringing a camera to school to take her pictures. On Thursday, Martha posted a sad entry entitled “Goodbye”:

This morning in maths I got taken out of class by my head teacher and taken to her office. I was told that I could not take any more photos of my school dinners because of a headline in a newspaper today.

I only write my blog not newspapers and I am sad I am no longer allowed to take photos. I will miss sharing and rating my school dinners and I’ll miss seeing the dinners you send me too. I don’t think I will be able to finish raising enough money for a kitchen for Mary’s Meals either.

Goodbye,
VEG

If the story had ended here, it would be just another maddening story about politicians abusing their power when they’re scared of the truth. But because Martha’s blog had attracted attention, the story about the ban went viral. People around the Internet were outraged. Here’s typical coverage, from the tech-oriented site, Wired.

Over the next day, the site’s number of hits jumped by a million. The contact information for the politicians was posted all over and outraged people started contacting them. As a result, the politicians reversed their decision on Friday. The local council leader — who had censored Martha earlier in the week — had changed his mind, apparently.

“There’s no place for censorship in Argyll and Bute council and there never has been and there never will be,” he said. “It’s a good thing to do, to change your mind, and I’ve certainly done that.”

Martha set out to raise £7,000 for the school kitchen in India. Because of the publicity, her fundraising had hit £55,000 by late Friday night. When Martha wrote her most recent blog entry on Friday — announcing that she would be back on Monday — she seemed most excited about the fact that her fundraising was going to be able to buy kitchens for multiple schools:

I think you know why I don’t have a picture today but I will have on Monday! Thanks to everyone that has helped to get my blog back on track. I would have missed writing it a lot and I’m looking forward to sharing my dinners and yours.

I worried yesterday that I would never reach enough money to buy a Mary’s Meal kitchen in Malawi (31 seconds!) but we have raised a total of £45,889.46 which is more than one kitchen! It could be many kitchens or one kitchen feeding many children for years.

A small thank you isn’t enough so here’s a big THANK YOU to you all!

See you on Monday,

VEG

It’s a great story. Martha was a mature and responsible little girl. Her parents supported her in doing the right thing. The people of the Internet helped make sure politicians did the right thing. It’s one of those rare controversial stories that ended well for everybody.

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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