Posted on 09/23/2012 7:12:18 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Children and parents across the country are fed up with the restrictive new school meal regulations implemented by the Department of Agriculture under the “Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010,” which has long been touted by first lady Michelle Obama.
The standards — which cap meal calories at 650 for students in kindergarten through fifth grade, at 700 calories for middle school students and 850 for high school students — also dictate the number of breads, proteins, vegetables and fruits children are allowed per meal.
A spokeswoman for Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King, who earlier this month introduced legislation to roll back the new standards, told The Daily Caller that King’s office has heard more complaints about the issue during the past few weeks than any other.
“This year, we’ll be hungry by 2:00,” one student, Zach Eck, told KAKETV in Kansas. “We would eat our pencils at school if they had nutritional value.”
Iowa mom Robin Wissink told TheDC that she now provides her autistic daughter Molly, a junior in high school, with a bag lunch because her school’s new menu is so unappealing. Students at St. Mark’s in Colwich, Kan. have also been “brown bagging” their meals.
And some student-athletes in Wisconsin are arguing that the calorie caps hit them especially hard, given their intense workouts and scrimmages.
“A lot of us are starting to get hungry even before the practice begins,” Mukwonago High senior Nick Blohm told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Our metabolisms are all sped up.”
The new lunch standards have led to the removal of some old food favorites, including a particularly popular item at one school in upstate New York: chicken nuggets.
“Now they’re kind of forcing all the students to get the vegetables and fruit with their lunch, and they took out chicken nuggets this year, which I’m not too happy about,” Chris Cimino, a senior at Mohonasen High School in upstate New York, told the Associated Press, which gave the rules a “mixed grade.”
Students in the Plum Borough School District in Pennsylvania are protesting the new federal restrictions on Twitter.
“everyone.. if you agree school lunches are expensive and small, RT this. we can fight the school! tweet #BrownBagginIt,” @TornadoBoyTubbs tweeted, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Administrators have scrambled to find creative ways to make the new menus appealing. A school district in Lake County, Fla., for example, is planning to conduct a survey to determine how to make vegetables more appealing to children, who often throw them out.
“[The regulations do] limit the food that you can put on the plate,” Alden Caldwell, the director of food services at a Brookline, Mass. school, told Wicked Local. “In theory, it’s a good idea, but in practice we’re finding that there are issues with it.”
Despite the outrage, some parents believe the ongoing obesity epidemic justifies the tight calorie standards.
“I think it’s smart to be pre-emptive and proactive at getting more nutrition fed into the kids,” Amos Johnson, a parent with students in the Lee Summit, Missouri school system, told the Lee’s Summit Journal. “I see that more as a multi-beneficial supporter for health and academic performance. I think that’s the thing I would look at. You should be healthier, and if you’re nourishing the brain and getting the fuel right, academic outcomes should maintain or improve.”
When the legislation was signed into law in 2010, it received bipartisan support, including a big endorsement from Michelle Obama.
“As parents, we try to prepare decent meals, limit how much junk food our kids eat, and ensure they have a reasonably balanced diet,” the first lady said in a statement at the unveiling of the new standards in January. “And when we’re putting in all that effort the last thing we want is for our hard work to be undone each day in the school cafeteria. When we send our kids to school, we expect that they won’t be eating the kind of fatty, salty, sugary foods that we try to keep them from eating at home. We want the food they get at school to be the same kind of food we would serve at our own kitchen tables.”
Obama welcomed students back to school this year with a YouTube video explaining the importance of the new meal plans.
King and Kansas Republican Rep. Tim Huelskamp introduced the “No Hungry Kids Act,” which would repeal the USDA rule that resulted in the new standards, last week.
“The goal of the school lunch program is supposed to be feeding children, not filling the trash cans with uneaten food,” Huelskamp said in a statement. “The USDA’s new school lunch guidelines are a perfect example of what is wrong with government: misguided inputs, tremendous waste, and unaccomplished goals. Thanks to the Nutrition Nannies at the USDA, America’s children are going hungry at school.”
I rode my single speed, coaster brake Sears tank-model bicycle all over the county, up hill and down dale, miles from home...and all WITHOUT A HELMET!!
Amazing that any of us lived to grow up, innit?
"Deem and pass".
What’s really sad about all of this is the nation’s children actually think Michelle gives a rat’s azz about what they think! They are pawns on her chessboard and she doesn’t give two shitza about how they feel on any thing. She is the QUEEEN. Got it?!!
119 posted on Mon Sep 24 2012 20:56:50 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) by left that other site: “I seem to remember (correct me if I am wrong) that the evil planners of Auschwitz had calculated their prisoners to 900 calories a day.”
You may well be right, and I agree that we have a major problem with federal rules for the school lunch program. I see it firsthand. In 15 minutes, a school board meeting will start in which the board will likely get another beginning-of-the-year report about how the new lunch guidelines are resulting in hungry kids and frustrated school cafeteria workers who see kids throwing food in the trash while complaining they have “nothing to eat.”
Some of that is laziness, but some of it involves legitimate complaints.
However, a few qualifications are in order.
First, the amount of food eaten at **LUNCH** is only one meal. Nobody is suggesting that kids get less than 900 calories per day. Giving a child huge amounts of calories during lunch may have the effect of damaging parental efforts to teach good eating habits at home if the child is too full to eat dinner or avoids eating breakfast because the school will give him too much food at lunch.
Second, with the exception of athletes and people who have after-school jobs that involve manual labor, most of our school students are essentially sedentary. The calorie requirements for a farm kid fifty or a hundred years ago who got up early before school to manually milk the cows are not those of the typical modern American child. We do have issues with parents who pressure their children to eat far too much food because it is the amount of food they (or their parents) ate growing up, and then wonder why their kids blow up like balloons.
Third, just because a child says he’s hungry doesn’t always mean the child actually needs food — I know tons of grossly obese poor people on food stamps who claim to be constantly hungry and eat food for which other people worked because their parents don’t care. After all, why should they? It’s not like mom and dad are paying for the food. The worst part is they may take a whole plateful of food and throw half of it out because they aren’t paying for it.
As much as I hate to say it, Michelle Obama is right that we have a serious and growing obesity problem in America. Most Americans eat far more food than they should be eating for their activity level. Furthermore, Michelle Obama is right that what happens in elementary, middle, and high school will establish habits that persist for the rest of many children’s lives.
The bottom line, however, is that identifying the problem is not the same as identifying the solution. This is a parent issue, not a school issue.
Even apart from the principle of parental authority, there is a practical issue that each child had different caloric needs based on activity levels and metabolism, and the government not only shouldn’t be trying to impose a one-size-fits-all rule, it isn’t **ABLE** to do do effectively.
Some problems must be handled at the national level, and providing for the common defense is one of those problems. Most problems, however, are better handled at the local level by people who know their communities. Nothing in the Constitution gives the federal government a role in this issue. Not only are some problems best handled at the local level, in this case, it isn’t a problem in which the civil government should be involved at all. This problem is up to parents, not school officials, to solve.
That sounds like a good solution. If the food remains cold, that's what counts.
135 posted on Tue Sep 25 2012 02:35:46 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) by pops88: “My daughter had a year of a school day being from 5:30 am- 4:00 pm thanks to being in a special program. I worried a bit about refrigeration as an RN, then had the revelation that a lot of what we’re told by the USDA is nanny state crap and the chance of her getting ill was extremely unlikely, especially since her meat sandwich was eaten at lunch. It wasn’t baking out in the sun and was pretty well insulated in her backpack or locker. I never packed her tuna fish salad though.”
Again, you're the mom and it's not my place to make decisions in your home — especially since you're an RN.
In my school growing up with no air conditioning and high temperatures in the locker room area where lunches were stored, my meat sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs routinely turned slimy and tasted bad, especially if mayonnaise rather than mustard was used. I have little doubt that at least some of my “tummyaches” and diarrhea and occasional vomiting were due to food poisoning. That was long ago and far away; today someone would have stopped my parents from sending unsafe lunches. There are risks to brown-bagging, but I think it's become clear that government involvement has exchanged one set of problems for a much worse set.
I too have been packing far more lunches this year. Our school lunches (Northern CA) are $3.00 and children are required to get milk or water and a vegetable before they choose their entree. My 5’1” 9 year old weighs just 55lbs and was constantly hungry during the day— and he was eating EVERYTHING they put on his plate.
“Again, you’re the mom and it’s not my place to make decisions in your home — especially since you’re an RN.
In my school growing up with no air conditioning and high temperatures in the locker room area where lunches were stored, my meat sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs routinely turned slimy and tasted bad, especially if mayonnaise rather than mustard was used.”
I was very thoughtful about it and am cognizant of food safety. Mayonnaise is preserved with vinegar. As kid, I remember when delis let it sit out on the table all day. Yes, the consistency changes, but it shouldn’t give you food poisoning. Egg products without a preservative can cause food poisoning sitting out for a relatively short time. When meat and cheese come out of a refrigerator cold for a sandwich, go into a back pack, then into a locker in a school that’s got air conditioning (we live in the desert), a sandwich isn’t going to go bad in just a few hours.
Just like the stupid, new lunch guidelines are one size fits all, so are the USDA guidelines. “Don’t eat it after x number of hours” doesn’t take into consideration temperature and conditions. I never bought fresh meat when I lived in the Philippines and in Tonga only from the German butcher with refrigeration. My husband and I had practically an hour conversation about a month ago about how long he could safely let a steak sit in a hotel fridge, or out without refrigeration and still eat it. There are so many variables- was it warm and never refrigerated? What’s the temperature of the hotel room? How many days has it been refrigerated? etc. The USDA says 3 hours, but if I leave a roast out 6 hours, take a slice and nuke it, I doubt I’ll get sick. Would I eat it cold? No. Chicken and fish are a different story. With them there is the 3 day rule, but in my house they don’t make it past day 2 1/2. From a nursing class on surviving nuclear warfare and length of meat edibility- pork roast lasts the longest, second is beef and chicken...not so much. My daughters lunches were ham sandwiches. LOL.
I wonder if the Gubmint was singling out us in the Burgh because we have that famous Pirmanti Brothers sandwich with the fries included.
What a sick toilet this nation has become. I spent many years packing three big, healthy lunches each night for my kids to take to school. How did things get to the point where a scumbag like Michelle Ubama matters at all when it comes to kids’ lunches?
Damn. The day’s gonna come when kids pine for the sort of school lunches I thought were mediocre, such as mashed potatoes with hamburger gravy.
You know, if they don’t respect our right to choose what we wish to eat they don’t respect our right to choose our leaders.
Ugh!
Unfortunately that picture is too close to reality for comfort.
Send your children to government schools, this is the type of thing you have to accept.
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