Posted on 10/12/2014 12:29:12 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
For many young professionals far from their schools days and a ways away from having children of their own, the battle over healthier school lunches seems of little relevance. But in Washington, D.C., the policy debate has become an all encompassing issue highlighting the intricate network of lobbyists, corporations and associations all with a financial stake in a policy that was otherwise born of good intentions.
The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act was passed in 2010, offering $4.5 billion in new funding over 10 years. However, the details of the new program have yet to be implemented due to a growing chorus of criticism from stakeholders in various industries, combined with the fear that a new Republican Senate could gut the program all together.
No one is doubting that healthy school lunches are a critical part of building a healthy society. The federal government first began subsidizing school lunches in 1945 as a national security effort after receiving testimony that many potential army recruits were being turned away due to poor nutrition. In 2009, the Department of Defense announced that obesity was the number one medical reason for turning away potential soldiers.
However, the financial stakes involved are hard to ignore. In the 2009-10 school year, $20 billion was spent on food and operating costs in America's school cafeterias. Much of this profit is going to the large food companies that supply these schools with cheap meals in bulk, whereas schools themselves are hoping to turn a profit on sales from snacks and vending machines.
As the debate wages on, schools are arguing that nutrition requirements are preventing them from making money off of unhealthy snacks. They are also struggling to break even with less students choosing to buy the newer, healthier lunches....
(Excerpt) Read more at inthecapital.streetwise.co ...
We have got a better chance of seeing God. The republicrats will never shut down the hog trough.
“No one is doubting that healthy school lunches are a critical part of building a healthy society.”
A red herring if ever there was one.
A definition of “healthy” should be available.
Lunches are not the real problem.
Parents are the critical component of building a healthy society.
I’m a statistics-freak.
So, you start with this false analogy....a school lunch building a healthy society. A kid eats 1095 times a year (breakfast, lunch and dinner). I won’t even count the 365 snack sessions (1.5 per day). You can figure the kid attends forty-four weeks of school a year (toss out summer and spring break, and the Xmas-two-week period). At best, the kid is getting 220 of these questionable nutritional meals per day. At best, the kid gets this fake but nutritional meal twenty-percent of the year.
Then you consider from the 220 meals....he only likes what is on the plate for roughly 140 meals. The rest? He eats the apple and tosses the rest of the plate into the garbage. Then he opens up his stash bag (mom prepared it for this event), with 1,000 calories of junk food to get him by for the remainder of the day.
For some idiot to sit in DC and fantasize about how they will remake the school lunch program, when it only affects twenty-percent of the total meals that the kid consumes....is outrageous. The kid could consume eight strips of bacon and three biscuits loaded with jelly for breakfast. And his dinner might be a 900 calorie frozen pizza. I won’t even guess his weekend count.
It’s all bogus. People are faked out....they don’t get the big picture. No one looks at the real numbers. No one stands there at the clean-up point of the school cafeteria and looks at the amount of garbage leftover from the nutritional lunch program deal.
What this leads onto? We will eventually get to some mythical point where they say....”oh, we can’t get the kids to eat a $1.50 nutritional lunch because of the limited cost factor...so we want the nation to federally subsidize the lunch program to $4.95 per kid.”
That’s the whole gimmick and direction. Personally, I’d rather take $1.50 and just buy the kid a frozen Salisbury steak dinner and give them an apple. But I guess I’m a bad nutritional expert.
Statistics do get to the heart of an issue, but for every statistic or fact there is unfortunately someone’s bleeding heart to sustain the movement for government control.
Very few have the vision of what government control can lead too.
...and thanks for the stats.
Funneling tax dollars to campaign donors is why government for sale does.
“No one is doubting that healthy school lunches are a critical part of building a healthy society. The federal government first began subsidizing school lunches in 1945 as a national security effort after receiving testimony that many potential army recruits were being turned away due to poor nutrition. In 2009, the Department of Defense announced that obesity was the number one medical reason for turning away potential soldiers.”
Incredible paragraph. The first sentence uses the term “school lunches”, rather than just “lunches” or “meals”. The second sentence shows just how corrupt our Congress was, even in 1945. They had no Constitutional jurisdiction and they knew it, but FDR had packed the courts by then, so tough. And the last sentence implies that the QUICKEST WAY to end childhood obesity is to simply end the program, as people are taking too much of the freebies, and that always happens with freebies.
“No one is doubting that healthy school lunches are a critical part of building a healthy society. The federal government first began subsidizing school lunches in 1945 as a national security effort after receiving testimony that many potential army recruits were being turned away due to poor nutrition. In 2009, the Department of Defense announced that obesity was the number one medical reason for turning away potential soldiers.”
Incredible paragraph. The first sentence uses the term “school lunches”, rather than just “lunches” or “meals”. The second sentence shows just how corrupt our Congress was, even in 1945. They had no Constitutional jurisdiction and they knew it, but FDR had packed the courts by then, so tough. And the last sentence implies that the QUICKEST WAY to end childhood obesity is to simply end the program, as people are taking too much of the freebies, and that always happens with freebies.
My grand son eats breakfast at home, then at 10:30 AM they are feeding him Mooch’s lunch, which he puts in the trash can, except the drink. He is not hungry just 3 hrs after a cooked breakfast. Yes, his mom cooks him breakfast of 2 eggs, toast and a meat.
I’ve raised 3 boys, they will NOT eat what they do not LIKE. Ditto goes for girls.
The stupid food plate system is wrong. Protein, fruits, veggies then last and least grains. Curb the sugar and grains. They are weight producers deluxe.
Woe is the kid who is Allergic to that crap you call food that Mooch says they must eat.
The old food can be made healthier and the kids will eat it and not know the difference. And can even contain a low sugar desert.
Is Michelle forcing her menu on prison inmates? That could be a true test of her nutrition project.
When I grew up in 1960s Pennsylvania, the school didn’t even have a cafeteria. We had to bring lunch from home, was not optional. Just saying that there was a time when they didn’t feed kids anything at school.
I assume the school had a budget and went from there. All that went to Fed. control and lunches went to hell.
vaudine
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