First Lady Michelle Obama deliver remarks before President Barack Obama signs the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.
School kids celebrated in lunchrooms across America, chanting “we want fish sticks” and “where’s the beef?” and heartily cheered a man that most had never heard of, or cared to know — Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue. Perdue recently commenced the rollback of another fatally-flawed Obama-era program of secular oppression, The Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act of 2010 and Mrs. Obama’s pet public relations project, was summarily sliced, diced, and spiced on the order of President Trump, whose goal was to “make school lunches great again’.
Mrs. Obama was right in one aspect; Americans are addicted to their fast food, preservative laden microwave cuisine, and soda pop, and, bless her heart, she wished for a healthier lifestyle for the next generation. Good intentions aside, her force food program failed miserably, and the tyrannized adolescents, armed with unmatched expertise in social media, fought back with a vengeance in a revolution known as Cafeteria Wars. A peek inside their training camps can be witnessed in this amusing video.
The program was severely restrictive; no salt shakers, only non-fat flavored milk (yuck), and calorie counts based on the age of the child, and no choice. (Would you like a veggies burger or a veggie burger?) For instance, if you were limited to 750 calories for lunch, the hair-netted lunch lady may plop down an apple, a slice of cheese and a whole-wheat flour tortilla. What are you supposed to do with that? The nutritional rubric did not consider, or heed the student athlete’s dietetic needs, such as increased carbohydrates and protein for prolonged, daily exertion. Can’t imagine why all these kids are falling asleep in class?
School administrators and educators pleaded for more oversight by individual districts and less stringent purchasing guidelines. But Mrs. Obama ‘just said no’ from her perch at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Children were going without sustenance during their entire school day, energies and grades suffered, and parents worriedly complained–and yet no one listened. Can you imagine the Obama’s not listening to Americans?
Their concerns roiled into an uncontrollable boil, and a study conducted by Public Health Reports fueled their arguments:
Because they were forced to do it, children took fruits and vegetables — 29 percent more in fact. But their consumption of fruits and vegetables went down 13 percent after the mandate took effect and, worse, they were throwing away a distressing 56 percent more than before.
The waste each child (or tray) was producing went from a quarter of a cup to more than a 39 percent of a cup each meal. In many cases, the researchers wrote, “children did not even taste the [fruits and vegetables] they chose at lunch.”
So, now we are demonstrating to our youngsters that wasting food, whether tasteless or not, is okay just to prove a point. Oh, and how about the picky eater, Michelle, did you think of that? That was a hypothetical question:
Some school officials had warned that picky eaters would just throw the additional food away, but proponents said they should give kids more credit and that they would make the right choice with some nudging.
“The basic question we wanted to explore was: does requiring a child to select a fruit or vegetable actually correspond with consumption. The answer was clearly no,” Amin, the lead author of the study, said in a statement.
We, the people, know that there is an epidemic of poor choices and resulting ill health from coast to coast. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report over one-third of our adult population is obese, and 12.7 million school-aged children are following their parent’s lazy attitudes toward food. Whether, or not, you swing through the local burger chain, where an ambitious Millennial asks what dipping sauce you need, or steam up a head of broccoli and wonder why George Junior was so hostile against the green goodness, that’s on you. The government repeatedly fails at regulating our personal choices and our morality. At some point, Americans need to take responsibility for their poor choices (like we did November 2016) and lead by example, not by mandate.
