The superintendent of an American school district has apologised to parents for the heinous crime of serving kangaroo meat to their kids during lunch, issuing a notice saying officials “will make sure that something like this never occurs again.”
The notice comes after students at a high school in Potter, Western Nebraska were served beef chilli supplemented with kangaroo, which appears to have caused some serious concern in a region not exactly known for chowing down on Australian marsupials.
In a statement released Wednesday, Potter-Dix Public Schools superintendent Mike Williams said the school’s head chef supplemented the meal with kangaroo meat because of its nutritional value.
Williams advised parents he had no reason to believe the kangaroo meat was unsafe, and that it would have adhered to United States Department of Agriculture standards, but said the meat will no longer form a part of traditional school lunches.
“If a family wants to eat exotic foods, they can do so on their own time – not at school,” Williams said.
“We will no way be serving food of this nature again. Period,” he added.
Williams said kids should be notified of what they are being served – which is fair, really – but maintained the addition may not have been to everyone’s taste.
“On behalf of Potter-Dix Public Schools, I apologize for the anxiety and any harm that this has caused individual students and/or families,” Williams said.
Of course, the protein-rich meat has been a key component of Indigenous Australian diets for millennia, and has been widely adopted by the broader culinary world.
Apparently that world doesn’t quite extend to high schools in Potter – which is curiously located some 30km west of the city of Sidney.
