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Lunch Ladies to Serve Dinner??? Where Does this End?

By: reddog53 (Diary)  |  December 4th, 2010 at 11:40 AM  | 

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Congress seems to have a lot on their plate — literally.  The House recently passed a bill that EXPANDS the school lunch program to one that serves dinner, available in all 50 States.

The Bill is a result of the Ms. Obama’s efforts to end childhood obesity. Like all things with good intentions, this bill goes off the rails pretty quickly. One of the main targets of the Bill is to regulate school bake sales — apparently the occasional brownie or slice of pizza is now viewed with the same critical, nanny-state view as transfats and high fructose corn syrup.

Public health groups pushed for the language on fundraisers, which encourages the secretary of Agriculture to allow them only if they are infrequent. The language is broad enough that a president’s administration could even ban bake sales, but Secretary Tom Vilsack signaled in a letter to House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., this week that he does not intend to do that. The USDA has a year to write rules that decide how frequent is infrequent.

Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest says the bill is aimed at curbing daily or weekly bake sales or pizza fundraisers that become a regular part of kids’ lunchtime routines. She says selling junk food can easily be substituted with nonfood fundraisers.

“These fundraisers are happening all the time,” Wootan said. “It’s a pizza sale one day, doughnuts the next… It’s endless. This is really about supporting parental choice. Most parents don’t want their kids to use their lunch money to buy junk food. They expect they’ll use their lunch money to buy a balanced school meal.”

The bill spends $4.5Billion to ensure that kids are eating a healthy diet.  The program is run by the Department of Agriculture, not the Department of Education– no chance of bureaucratic turf wars or bungling incompetence here, right?

So now we have disadvantaged children eating school breakfast, lunch and dinner, with the resulting length of time spent at school getting even longer….meaning more ‘late buses’ and other school costs.  Who will be the cafeteria monitors after the teacher’s union mandated ‘end of school hours’ release of teachers at 4PM?

But most serious of all, if the kids are eating dinner at school, that completely isolates them from the family dinner table. Aren’t we supposed to be encouraging parents to take an active role in their children’s lives and talk to them about sex, drugs, rock and roll, bullying and life?  And when will this happen if little Johnny and Suzy don’t get back from school until 5:30 or 6:00 PM, already fed?

This is a clear over-reach by the federal government, trying to leap frog right into our kitchens and dining rooms, ‘for the children…’  It won’t take long for the program to grow and grow to a point where it absorbs all students, so that scheduling can be simplified for the poor school administrators.

This is a classic example of out of control government, founded on ‘good intentions.’

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  • http://www.gmsplace.com/ civil_truth

    …to take children from their parents and raise them under the State, in order to fashion the New Man and bring in the socialist utopia.

    You’re absolutely right, once the school capture children all day and feed them their meals, the family is being eclipsed. Not to mention this further reinforces as culture of dependency – no helping to shop and prepare food – just something that is presented to you on a tray – prepared by politically connected companies.

    The justification is that children misuse their lunch money – how about finding ways to assist in letting the parent take charge of seeing the THEIR money is spent for the purposes allocated. But that would strengthen families.

    So instead, they take more responsibility away from parents – and time. We’re already approaching the point where children will be taken if parents don’t conform to governmental-approved values and philosophies.

    Before long, parents will simply become breeders for the State family. Shades of the The Giver.

    And if technology gets to Brave New World levels, we won’t even need sex and pregnancy to produce babies.

  • belcatar

    I read a book called “Eat, Drink and Be Healthy” By Dr. Walter C. Willett of Harvard Medical Center, and he talked about how wrong the USDA was about nutrition.
    The USDA food pyramid is one of the things that has contributed to the obesity problem. Here’s how it works. The U.S. Department of Agriculture tells people to mostly eat the stuff that our farmers produce the most of, which is corn and wheat. Processed corn and wheat products contain a high glycemic load, which, when coupled with lack of exercise, creates fat. It also requires more insulin to push the glucose out of the bloodstream, which triggers the hunger mechanism. That’s why you feel hungry again an hour or two after you eat a bunch of white rice.

    Another aspect of the obesity problem is sugar subsidies. Since the government manipulates the prices of U.S. sugar, it’s twice as costly here than anywhere else. This gave rise to the corn syrup industry, now known as Evil Big Corn.

    So the same people who gave us a food pyramid that helps make people fat, and the high fructose corn syrup industry that helps make people fat, now want to tell me the kids can’t have a bake sale, because it makes people fat.

    Thanks, Government! Another heavy-handed solution for a problem YOU helped create. I’m still waiting for a problem that the government can actually solve, instead of exacerbate.

    For more info on Dr. Willett’s book:
    http://www.health.harvard.edu/books/Eat_Drink_and_Be_Healthy