After Congress comes back from its Hot Spring Break or whatever, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 [PDF!] is out of committee and awaiting arguing and posturing and maybe voting. It'll expand food programs for low-income children pretty radically, from what we can tell. Which is great! On the other hand, some kids have too much food, or something, and they are storing it in their bodies, so the bill will, in its Food Death Panels section, take food away from them in the form of giving them food that is barely food. Also the bill would cause schools to maybe stop feeding children millions of pounds in recalled meats, but whatever. Also! It will make sure that all children only drink skim milk, according to the Times: "For example, milk is the biggest single source of saturated fat on the lunch line. The bill would allow only skim milk to be offered, banning whole and 2 percent milk." While this is not actually stated anywhere in the bill, at all, that is possibly true! Because what we know now is that milk is what makes children obese.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
31
I can't wait for Red State America to start force-feeding their children bacon cheesecake and Crisco straight from the can just to spite this librul health agenda.
So, I mean business as usual, really.
Maybe we can fortify the milk with high fructose corn syrup so that can become as obese as lab rats.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100322121115.htm
the question is, will it be chocolate-flavored skim milk?
What they feed the kids in schools is NASTY. It is like really processed yellow cheese product melted over really processed diseased meat product all within a HFCS no-fiber bun. My teacher friend forgot her lunch one day and ended up puking.
My parents and I cannot eat fast food without getting sick, as none of us have eaten it with any regularity well on seven plus years (I'll admit to McDonald's fries when I'm drunk).
My mother literally becomes ill when she eats it, my dad gets sore joints and muscles has to 'run it out,' and I just feel gross and eat salad for two days to push it out.
If your body is not conditioned to process this junk, you realize how terrible it is for you and how much it fucks your shit up.
My husband's coworker went to emergency for severe abdominal pain. The docs asked if he had eaten the angus burger from McDonalds; he had. They told him that a lot of people end up in the emergency room after eating those things. This story was told because another one of his coworkers was having really bad stomach cramps after eating there.
Did they tell him why it was causing the pain?
I'm a good liberal, but these new things WILL NOT WORK. Kids will continue to get fat, and we'll have all these programs sucking money out, not working. Not saying it's not a good start/good idea, whatever, but, in this way, I can see where republicans get hot at the thought of these kinds of programs. They don't work. Whatever we do, kids will continue to get fatter. We need to change our whole culture to enact the kind of change we envision. Can we do that with a bill? Change our whole culture? Maybe, but it will take something way bigger than this.
I think the main point is to get food into the kids, but maybe now they are starting to care about what kind of food they are feeding them?
True. "At least $40 million would be spent on farm-to-school programs and school gardens. Another $10 million would go toward adding organic food."
$50 million? Are you shitting me with that? As is noted in that piece, if schools have no money to pay for these healthy programs, what good are they? Schools are going "out of business" right now b/c of underfunding. They are going to 4-day school weeks in many places. Busing has been terminated because schools CANNOT AFFORD GAS.
So, yeah, organic lunches. Those kids who aren't at school will certainly benefit from them.
Two schools 30 miles from here are going to cut staff. American kids are testing at an all time low, but at least they working on that evil 2% milk!
There are about 55 million students in pre-12 public schools. So that works out to about $0.90 per student! I'm sold...
I don't know much about this at all, and this comment is altogether reductive, but if the distributors (my schools always had big Sysco trucks etc.) and schools just changed the weekly orders to look more like the Ikea food court and less like the frozen pizza section, couldn't you still have a similarly balanced supply/demand relationship? I am sure that there can be moderate changes that make a major caloric difference over five [or four? :(] days that don't involve 50 million dollars worth of organic arugula.
I wonder if there's been any talk of subsidizing PE class. Or recess. I am mostly serious about this.
Also, from my tutoring days, I've seen the shit they try and pass off as food in the subsidized lunch programs. It's insulting, and is the only food some of the kids I worked with got during the week. I completely agree with the need for cultural change, but that's going to take a hell of a lot of work, and involve a complete revisioning of schooling - which is not going to be popular.
Cherri- you're right about it being a hell of a lot of work and not being popular, I think. It'd be like Health Care reform all over again. I really am beginning to believe that we may have the ability to pass one major sweeping change in our culture per decade. So we got ours now... guess we can do climate in 2020 and education, say, 2030?
@doubled277: Keep in mind that's $0.90 per kid PER YEAR.
@doubled277: but if we ignore climate change now, the rest of our problems will go away (read: be wiped off the face of the Earth)!
@abe, so, whole foods will be doing the catering, is what you're saying?
@goons, this would certainly save us money!
Abe - I can't tell if you think this is a lot or a little.
legs - pretty sure it's little
@Legs: It would be just about the right amount PER DISTRICT.
You can take my car, my dishwasher, my air conditioner, but you CANNOT take my 2% milk. Skim milk is an abomination.
It's super shitty in tea.
I'd rather drink soy or rice or almond milk.
Ruins coffee, though not bad with Bosco.
I don't know we're even having this conversation because whether it's whole or skim, OMG MILK IS BAD AND WILL KILL YOU!!!
Cf: http://www.notmilk.com/ et al.
Are these govmunt bureaucrats not aware that there is such a thing as 1 percent milk? Half the fat and probably a good 80 percent of the taste of 2 percent!
Anybody who's spent five minutes in a school cafeteria can tell you with great certainty that there is NO FUCKING WAY anyone is going to eat enough of that crap to get fat.
Let me show you some of my DC tutorin kids. If your only options are crap or nothing, believe me, you eat all the crap you can.
.....And then you don't have gym class, recess, afterschool sports, or neighborhoods safe enough to play outside or bike in.
Skim milk? Like kids are really gonna drink that.
Why not just serve them breadsticks too while they're at it?