It happened again. Last month, on Veterans’ Day, as many as forty high school students in Richfield, Minnesota were served a hot lunch, then had it taken away and thrown out. Their crime: incurring $15 or more in unpaid school-lunch debt.

While Richfield School District eventually apologized, it did so for the wrong reason. As district officials told the local news, the proper procedure was to prevent those children from entering the lunch line in the first place. Apparently, denying food to schoolchildren wasn’t something for which they needed to express contrition.

To be fair, the embarrassed students weren’t denied all sustenance — they got a cold lunch instead. But it was yet another instance of “lunch shaming,” a grotesque American phenomenon where kids unable to pay for their lunch are in some way branded or marked as debtors. In the last few years, we’ve seen lunch shaming all across the country: in Alabama, where students had “I need lunch money” stamped on their arms; in Rhode Island, where a school district hired a debt-collection agency to pursue students who hadn’t paid for lunch, and in Utah, where, as in Minnesota, students were served a lunch and then had it seized from them and thrown out, uneaten.