The Agriculture Department pays about $1 billion a year for commodities like fresh apples and sweet potatoes, chickens and turkeys. Schools get the food free; some cook it on site, but more and more pay processors to turn these healthy ingredients into fried chicken nuggets, fruit pastries, pizza and the like. Some $445 million worth of commodities are sent for processing each year, a nearly 50 percent increase since 2006.
The Agriculture Department doesn’t track spending to process the food, but school authorities do. The Michigan Department of Education, for example, gets free raw chicken worth $11.40 a case and sends it for processing into nuggets at $33.45 a case. The schools in San Bernardino, Calif., spend $14.75 to make French fries out of $5.95 worth of potatoes.
The money is ill spent. The Center for Science in the Public Interest has warned that sending food to be processed often means lower nutritional value and noted that “many schools continue to exceed the standards for fat, saturated fat and sodium.” A 2008 study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that by the time many healthier commodities reach students, “they have about the same nutritional value as junk foods.”
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Why is this allowed to happen? Part of it is that school authorities don’t want the trouble of overseeing real kitchens. Part of it is that the management companies are saving money by not having to pay skilled kitchen workers.
In addition, the management companies have a cozy relationship with food processers, which routinely pay the companies rebates (typically around 14 percent) in return for contracts. The rebates have generally been kept secret from schools, which are charged the full price.
- See more at: http://www.theorganicprepper.ca/brown-bag-ban-fed-programs-preschool-says-no-lunch-from-home-without-a-doctors-note-10222013#sthash.xxZsLgk6.dpuf
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My own feeling is that there is a little bit more to it than that. There is an impulse on the left toward forcing equality. So, if one child comes to school with a better lunch than the next child the egalitarian impulse of the leftist school administrators is offended.
I am also going to advance a theory that many will find far-fetched:
Nathan Bedford's first Maxim of American politics: all politics in America is not local but ultimately racial.
If we have whole sections in our inner cities poor and ignorant, especially of nutrition to which much of the population is no doubt indifferent, we have a real felt need to step in and do what ignorant, single mothers are unwilling or incapable of doing, that is, properly feed their own kids. So we have the move for school lunches and now for school breakfasts.
If you look at the world demographically the way the first lady looks at the world, we see this kind of thinking. In the world of the ghetto the child's parents are in fact too often irresponsible so the impulse to have the government step in to correct the situation on behalf of innocent and powerless children is irresistible to leftists. Anyone who doesn't agree is a heartless hater of children and no doubt a racist.
So we have the politics for all of America even wealthy suburban America racing to the bottom, just as our culture seems to be racing to the bottom of issues such as bastardy rates, because the government must insist that one size fits all.
