No meal for you! (Slap!)

You may remember the 'Seinfeld' episode about the "Soup Nazi." He was a character who ran a soup stand and bellowed, "No soup for you!" if customers didn't maintain a rigid protocol when ordering soup.

Now America's schools are telling poor children, "No meal for you!"

Several large school districts have launched an effort to stigmatize low-income kids by depriving them of full meals at lunch. They'll serve them a cold cheese sandwich, a microscopic slice of fruit, and an 8-ounce skim milk. But - at least for growing children - that does not constitute a whole lunch.

The schools' excuse is that their parents haven't paid what they owe for lunches. Well, that's because they can't, because they are too poor. (The schools probably force them to waste money buying uniforms instead.)

Schools aren't shy about making an issue of feeding poor kids substandard meals. On countless occasions, school officials have made a production out of pulling poor children from the lunch line to be served separately, to the jeers of classmates.

Obviously it's not about saving money. It's about meanness. Schools single out poor and working-class pupils for mistreatment because they can. I wasn't rich, and the schools tried to humiliate me too. It's happened to many folks.

The so-called meals fed to poor students aren't just too small. They're also of poor quality, and the food may in fact be spoiled. One child said, "Every time I eat it, it makes me feel like I want to throw up."

If these lunches are considered adequate for low-income kids, why aren't they good enough for everyone else? If the schools are so interested in saving money, why don't they just serve these meals to everybody? The government had billions of dollars to give to Halliburton and Custer Battles, and it's worried about spending too much on school lunches?

Nah. It's meanness.

(Source: http://content.usatoday.net/dist/custom/gci/InsidePage.aspx?cId=cincinnati&sParam=30237411.story)