Posted on 01/10/2018 9:41:52 AM PST by Kaslin
For years after Michelle Obama’s ironically named Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, students at Penn-Trafford High School in Harrison City, Pennsylvania staged an accidental trash can rebellion. As in many districts, waste management companies were the only winners as students dumped lunch into the garbage.
For this school year, Penn-Trafford High School instead tossed Mrs. Obama’s school lunch plan and now President Trump is doing the same on a national scale.
As with any policy created by coercive utopians to control personal choices, nothing about the Obama plan made sense. Kids, parents and school districts hated it, and its restrictions harmed children it was ostensibly designed to help.
The Act’s directives called for lowering calories, portions and sodium through whole grains and non-fat milk and increasing fresh veggies and fruit — a one size fits all approach that resulted in the first decrease in the $13.6 billion National School Lunch Program participation in decades. Although the Obama administration never published the number of schools dropping the program, the media was full of such reports and social media exploded with memes, tweets and videos made by disgusted, hungry children.
It ignored schools’ regional and cultural differences. Asian students didn’t like brown rice and Hispanic children wanted normal tortillas that didn’t crack when rolled. It set the same calorie limits for an 85 pound gymnast and a 250 pound linebacker. Its sodium restrictions were too low for athletes or a child in Texas walking home in June. The student in East L.A. does not necessarily share food favorites with a kid in Manhattan or one in rural Tennessee. Cafeteria creativity and local food preferences flew out the window with its mandates.
The School Nutrition Association (SNA) representing school nutrition professionals has repeatedly expressed concern that “overly prescriptive regulations” resulted in kids throwing lunches away while districts struggled financially with increased compliance costs exceeding federal subsidies. The SNA CEO Patricia Montague recently noted, “SNA is appreciative of Secretary Perdue’s support of … flexibility to serve healthy meals.” Studies, including one by the University of Vermont in 2015, showed selection does not equal consumption as students put more fruit and vegetables on their trays, but less in their mouths.
Want school children to eat more broccoli? Give them a salt shaker and a small pat of butter. One could tell a child her plain spinach is full of pixie dust or his skinless chicken has super powers but they still won’t eat it. As Secretary Perdue has quipped, “Hungry children cannot learn and trash cans don’t need nourishment.”
Of great concern to school nutritionists are the more than 21 million children who receive free or subsided lunch each school day. For many, this meal is their main source of daily calories and nutrition. New York City admitted when it first implemented the program, its meals fell below minimum calorie guidelines and created nutritional deficits. For a child dependent on these calories, restrictions and edibility issues render the trash can a deadly enemy.
Mrs. Obama claimed these changes were designed to fight obesity, but where do most kids get their daily calories and whose fault is it if they are overweight?
Based on a simple calculation of three meals a day, children eat roughly 915 meals “at home” annually, and only 180 at school (breakfast programs and parent-packed lunches not considered.) According to the Center for Disease Control, 34 percent of children eat fast food on any given day. In 2016, consumers spent more at restaurants ($54 billion) than in grocery stores ($52 billion.) And statistically, a reduced socio-economic status is the greatest driver of childhood obesity, not school lunches.
Schools are utilizing healthy alternatives on their own and in greater numbers. Salad bars are becoming more popular and local “farm to school” programs are now operating in nearly 43,000 cafeterias. As kids clamor for real chocolate milk rather than cocoa-flavored water, some districts are throwing caution to the wind and serving one percent again instead of non-fat.
The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act was not designed by kids, nor does it make anyone hunger-free. The Trump administration under Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue has already rolled back a few of the more ridiculous restrictions and is looking to a full overhaul by the beginning of the next school year. With input from varying school districts, the SNA - and hopefully parents and children - cafeteria budgets can be made whole and children can start enjoying their lunches again.
The students at Penn Trafford were not elected, but then, neither was Michelle Obama. But President Trump was. A revised school lunch program can also serve up a lesson about how a democracy is supposed to work and whose choices really matter.
Kids need saturated fat in their diet.
So do adults.
My sis said their district signed up for the lunches and got money for doing so. When they went to unshackle, they simple could not untangle from the molasses. A school I volunteered for pressured each registering and re-registering parent to sign up for free lunches. They got money for the food and instead used it for their own pleasure.
The D of Ed is rife with corruption.
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Garlic milk though? Lol
Lots of good stuff there. But ideally, kids should get 4% whole milk un homogenized, but just shaken before apportioning.
Kid’s brains need that fat which the Creator in His wisdom put there.
I expect to find pictures of trannies here.
Oh wait.....................
How healthy is a healthy lunch that is transported straight from the serving table to the garbage can? Are the cans stronger and less prone to malnutrition?
The school districts were/are under a lot of pressure to increase the number of students receiving free/reduced-price lunches. The school I taught at awarded prizes to students who returned their free-lunch applications. I believe schools get extra funding for higher “poverty” populations—which are measured by the free-lunch count.
I expect to find clarity here. But oh wait.
I’ve got a better idea: Let parents be responsible for feeding their own children.
Don’t know if I’d like “garlick” milk myself.
That's why a lot of school districts that weren't filled with welfare recipients dumped their Federal school lunch programs entirely. If only 20% of their students were getting Federally-subsidized lunches but the other 80% had to eat the same sh!t that was being served in the school cafeteria, then they lost more money when the 80% stopped buying the school lunches than they got in Federal money anyway.
My daughter called whole milk, which we did not use, “onion milk” because of the different taste from the 2% we used at home. She got whole milk at the babysitter’s house.
I still cannot fathom why anyone paid attention to her. She wasn’t elected to a G-D thing. And if the districts were threatened with loss of funding someone should have sued the government in the most conservative leaning Federal court circuit. All that being said, those kids she and the Democrats who forced on to a starvation diet should be reminded endlessly as they reach voting age exactly who was responsible.
That headline writer deserves a $1000 bonus!
Great idea.
Why would a school district sue the government over this? School districts don't give a damn about the Federal regulations, and they don't give a damn whether the kids eat the lunches or not. They just want the money. They would have been perfectly OK if the Obama administration required them to serve dog sh!t in their school lunches.
Federal school lunch regulations have nothing to do with what is best for the kids, anyway. When you see something on a school lunch tray, you can be damn sure that an entire industry has lobbied the Federal government heavily to make sure it was required to be there.
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