Free Republic

Today’s reflection: “Obama Unleashes His Inner Geek (Again) at White House Science Fair.”"The last thing we can afford to do right now is play politics with our kids' health."The science is settled then: if you want to eat, you’ll eat what we tell you to eat. Posted from: Michelle Obama’s Mirror 

With public school students using #ThanksMichelle to tweet photos of their skimpy, stomach-turning school lunches, I decided to look at what Michelle Obama's daughters are served at Sidwell Friends school, and it turns out the girls dine on lunches from menus designed by chefs. While the Obama daughters have enjoyed dishes like chicken coconut soup, local butternut squash soup, crusted tilapia, they also get their fill of what Mrs. Obama might consider junk food. This week, for example, they'll enjoy meatball subs, BBQ wings, and ice cream, in addition to chicken curry, deviled egg salad and the intriguing "Chef's Choice."...

Michelle Obama’s new dietary restrictions is so bad that they can’t even GIVE the food away. A million kids have turned away from Obama’s school lunch and schools are feeling the huge hit. Via The Hill: More than a million kids confronted by healthier school lunches are turning up their noses, leaving the cafeteria and heading out to get a burger instead. The difficulty in getting students to eat lower-fat, lower-sodium meals is at the center of a food fight between House Republicans and first lady Michelle Obama that erupted this week.

Just a day after House Republicans introduced legislation to roll back some Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulations on school meal programs, the USDA announced some flexibility would be granted to some schools for the coming school year when implementing the new policies:

A school district in Chicago’s northwest suburbs is quitting the National School Lunch Program over new regulations championed by first lady Michelle Obama. The so-called Smart Snacks in School policy, set to take effect on July 1, is the latest attempt by our Regulator-in-Chief to dictate every aspect of Americans’ behavior. It dictates strict calorie, sodium, fat, and sugar guidelines for any food sold in schools during the day. That even includes the ubiquitous bake sales and other fundraisers. Instead of forcing the school district’s 500 low income kids and others to eat “healthier,” however, the administration is only creating...

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — Becky Domokos-Bays of Alexandria City Public Schools has served her students whole-grain pasta 20 times. Each time, she said, they rejected it. Starting next school year, pasta and other grain products in schools will have to be whole-grain rich, or more than half whole grain.

The USDA has managed to make school lunches stink even more. So why does the government continue?>School lunches still stink. But now unprecedented numbers of students are refusing to eat them.Last month I noted that a GAO report had found that last school year's disastrous rollout of the updated USDA National School Lunch Program helped drive 1.6 million paying students from the lunch rolls. The new rules led some schools to abandon the program, as I reported in 2012. What's more, the new rules, championed by First Lady Michelle Obama, have also resulted in unprecedented mountains of food waste.As I...

School leaders are getting ready for a big change in school food service. The USDA’s Smart Snacks in School rules go into effect July 1, 2014. In short, all “junk food” in vending machines, a la carte lunch, student stores and fundraisers such as bakes sales is banned July 1st. “I think that’s great!” said Betsy Hunsucker, a Brownsburg mother. “I think kids would love fruits and vegetables.” Fruits, vegetables, dairy, protein-rich foods and whole grain-rich foods are allowed. Water, milk and 100% fruit and vegetable juice is permitted. High school students can have caffeine and low-calorie carbonated drinks. There...

First, about one million public school students said “no way” to their cafeteria menus after Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign led to anger and frustration over food that apparently many American kids didn’t want to stomach. But for those without other options, all that’s left is the power of social media and cell phone cameras when they simply can’t take another bite:

Today is First World Problem (FWP) Day: In which we examine issues and problems that only occur because as a culture we have more than our fair share of everything, including time to be outraged:So here we go, in no particular order, this week’s First World Problems:1. Our culture of plenty has resulted in an epidemic of obesity.Overweight kids have forced Lady M to lower the boom on fattening school lunches, resulting in cut backs on portions and variety. This has caused some student blow-back. (caution: “colorful” language)2. Our culture of Plenty and resulting obesity epidemic has caused a preoccupation...

More than one million U.S. schoolchildren stopped buying school lunches during the 2012-2013 academic year, after new nutrition standards championed by first lady Michelle Obama took effect. The Government Accountability Office, a watchdog agency inside the federal government, told members of Congress in a little-noticed January 28 report that participation in the school lunch program declined by 1,086,000 in that one year, the biggest drop on record. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 directed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to revise its school lunch standards to bring them in line with a new set of nutrition requirements. The first...

Despite an increase in the number of students who receive free meals as a part of Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, 1.6 million students have dropped out of the school lunch program, according to a Government Accountability Office Report (GAO), which noted that part of the decline was due to the palatability of the lunch offerings, and “plate waste”—students throwing away some of the food. […] “Further, some SFAs we visited noted that negative student reactions to lunches that complied with the new meat and grain portion size limits directly affected program participation in their districts,” said the GAO. The...

One Illinois Republican lawmaker has asked the White House and the Obama’s to stop being “hypocrites” and practice what they preach about nutrition. Tuesday night’s glutton-fest of a White House state dinner for French President François Hollande was the perfect example of why U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis has introduced legislation that would require official White House meals to follow the same USDA mandated guidelines for school lunch and breakfast programs.

Parents upset after school takes lunches from students with account deficits SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – Dozens of students at a Salt Lake City elementary school were served lunch Tuesday, only to have the food taken from them and thrown away in an incident parents said was uncalled for and humiliating for the children. The incident took place at Uintah Elementary School when students were told there was no money in their school lunch accounts. The students’ lunches were taken and thrown away, and the students were provided with fruit and milk. Officials said it’s school policy for food in...

Thursday's edition of the Federal Register contains 185 new agency submissions, including an update to the cost of the National School Lunch Program. Nutrition: The price tag on Michelle Obama's National School Lunch Program was inaccurately reported in the Federal Register earlier this month, so the Food and Nutrition Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture is correcting the cost. The National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program, which provides free and low-cost healthy meals to more than 31 million students, are now projected to cost taxpayers $16.4 billion for 7.8 billion million students in 2014. The costs will...

After the federal government’s school-lunch standards were overhauled in 2012 in what I’m sure was a very well-intentioned effort to institute healthier habits in America’s children and help stave off of the country’s growing childhood obesity problem, it didn’t take long for the calorie-intake and portion restrictions in the new code to crash and burn spectacularly. Healthy eating habits being the highly individualized needs and preferences that they are, kids and parents quickly began complaining that students were not able to get enough to eat at lunchtime, and in some districts, school-lunch participation began to drop as more and more...

It looks like the days of trading half of your peanut butter and jelly sandwich for half of your best friendÂ’s ham sandwich may soon be over if the federal government has anything to do with it. A Richmond, Virginia mother received the following note, telling her not to pack a lunch for her pre-school age child. (source: Momdot.com) Dear Parents, I have received word from Federal Programs Preschool pertaining to lunches from home. Parents are to be informed that students can only bring lunches from home if there is a medical condition requiring a specific diet, along with...

SNA Urges Congress to End Shutdown to Protect School Meals NATIONAL HARBOR, MD (October 11, 2013) – The School Nutrition Association (SNA), a national non-profit representing 55,000 school nutrition professionals nationwide, sent a letter to congressional leaders today urging them to end the Federal Government shutdown to ensure the availability of school meals for America’s students. Starting on November 1, school meal programs will request federal reimbursements for meals served during October, but the US Department of Agriculture has not guaranteed the availability of sufficient funds to reimburse states for all meals served in October. In fact, one state agency...

The Agriculture Department says 524 schools—out of about 100,000—have dropped out of the federally subsidized national school lunch program since the government introduced new standards for healthier foods last year. The new standards have been met with grumbling from school nutrition officials who say they are difficult and expensive to follow, conservatives who say the government shouldn’t be dictating what kids eat and—unsurprisingly—from some children who say the less-greasy food doesn’t taste as good. But USDA says the vast majority of schools are serving healthier food, with some success. Data the department is planning to release Monday shows that 80...

WILLINGBORO — It seems ripped from the pages of Dickens: A hungry child approaches the school cafeteria worker, meal in hand. The worker promptly throws the meal in the trash and sends the child away unfed. Why? The child's parents have let the lunch account run dry.