Comment by drewrv
4 years ago
Imagine you have a school age child. If there were a 100% chance that they would be served arsenic at school you would probably keep them home. If there were a 0% chance, you would send them to school.
What "%" risk that your child would be poisoned do you find acceptable?
In this analogy though, is 99% of the population able to eat and digest arsenic without a problem?
If so, I think the reality that needs to be dealt with is that there are going to be a lot of situations throughout their life where people are going to be serving arsenic. It sucks to be in that situation, but it's something that child will need to be taught to take into account (even if accommodations can kick that can down the road for now.)
If arsenic is poisonous for everyone in this analogy, then I have a lot bigger problems with this school than the lunch menu.
My point is that there is a scale and if you think about it not as a binary, but as a gradient, you might be more understanding of school administrators who are trying to create a safe learning environment for hundreds of kids.
Yes, if there is a substance that's poison for one kid, they'll need to learn to take precautions. And if there's a substance that's poison for all, it should be banned from school meals. What if it's 10% of kids? 5%?
Food allergies are common these days.
Arsenic is an essential micronutrient with a toxicity profile similar to selenium (another essential micronutrient). Arsenic is sufficiently available in diets around the world that deficiency isn’t going to be a thing unless you go out of your way to aggressively remove it from the water supply.
Your attempt at an analogy was clumsy and nonsensical regardless. They aren’t serving poison at schools. Sugar would have been a better example.
My point is to think about risk as a scale. There's no need to be pedantic about the analogy.
Would you send your child to school if there was a 1% chance that they would be served something that would put them in the ER? .5% chance?
If you were a school administrator, would you serve food that could put 3% of the student body in the ER? 6%?