The First Lady got a bit of a bum rap last week when some on the Right wrenched out of context her comment on the new school-lunch program. Justifying an expanded federal program to feed kids healthy breakfasts and lunches at school, Mrs. Obama said, “We can’t just leave it up to the parents.” Some radio shouters let fly at her for that.
But immediately before that statement, Mrs. Obama had said, “I meet parents who are working very hard to make sure that their kids are healthy . . . They’re trying to teach their kids the kind of healthy habits that will stay with them for a lifetime. But . . . it’s clear that we as a nation have a responsibility to meet as well. We can’t just leave it up to the parents.”
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This is not to suggest that Mrs. Obama’s initiative, which will cost an additional $4.5 billion over the $13 billion we’re already spending, is a good idea. The thrust of the new federal law is to bring the wisdom of the federal government to the task of helping kids become healthier. The terms “wisdom” and “federal government” make uncomfortable sentence-mates.
Certainly, there is a problem to be addressed. Some 31 percent of children and teens, report the Centers for Disease Control, are overweight or obese, triple the rate of 30 years ago. It isn’t even crazy to suggest, as Mrs. Obama has, that when “one in four young people are unqualified for military service because of their weight, childhood obesity isn’t just a public-health threat, it’s not just an economic threat, it’s a national-security threat as well.”
And yet, it requires a certain kind of stubborn obtuseness to ride into battle carrying the flag of subsidized school lunches when the problem was partly created by — subsidized school lunches!
Mrs. Obama is correct that school meals are loaded with saturated fat, salt, and sugar. She notes that children receive half of their daily calories from school lunches. Most kids don’t eat breakfast at school, which means that school lunches are larded up with calories.
How did this happen? Was it just that before the Obamas came to town, the feds were misguided about what was good for kids? Or was it something about the way government operates?
Is it an accident that school lunches are so heavy on cheese and meat? No. The National School Lunch program, enacted in 1946, was devised with two goals in mind. The first was to subsidize farmers by purchasing huge blocs of “excess” commodities in order to keep prices up. Only secondarily did the government intend to help feed hungry children. Subsidies are, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, the closest thing to eternal life in this world. So while America’s children were getting heavier and heavier, particularly low-income children, federal programs continued to heap pizza, French fries, and cheeseburgers onto their plates. There have been episodic and quixotic efforts to kill the subsidies. In 2007, Rep. Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.) and Ron Kind (D., Wisc.) offered an amendment to the farm bill that would have reduced subsidies for unhealthy commodities like meat and cheese, cut subsidies to millionaire farmers, and increased funding for nutritional services to poor children. But Speaker Pelosi, fearing that her farm-state members would pay a political price, urged a “no” vote.
Some 30 million American children (about 83 percent of the total) eat subsidized school lunches in America’s schools, though only 17.4 million are low income. Mrs. Obama’s reform will necessarily increase spending because healthy foods are more expensive than unhealthy ones. But $2.2 billion of the $4.5 billion cost of the new program is to be offset by reductions in food stamps. Bad idea.
The amount of all of this food that winds up uneaten in the trash can only be guessed at (though anecdotal evidence abounds). Wouldn’t it make more sense, economically, nutritionally, and (importantly) socially to eliminate school lunches altogether? Parents can pack a highly nutritious turkey, tuna, or peanut-butter sandwich with an apple or an orange. Poor parents can afford to do this with help from the food stamp program. The older kids can pack their own lunches. (A child who repeatedly showed up at school without lunch would receive attention from child protective services.) Most of the parent-supervised lunches would be superior in nutrition and taste to anything the government could serve (some kids might even find an affectionate note from mom or dad in their lunch boxes). But more importantly, the principle that parents are responsible for their children would be ratified.
One of the things we like about our school (Mountain Elementary in Los Alamos, NM) is that they don't serve lunch or breakfast in school. We feed our kids breakfast and pack their lunches, which they often eat outside (You can't do that with a cafeteria meal).
Our church offers a free, simple, and healthy lunch on Fridays for the high schoolers, who are across the street. We average over 300 kids per week for less than a dollar a meal. Private organizations can often step in when needed and act more efficiently than the government.
In our previous town, the public school often gave our eldest a free breakfast even though we asked them not to. We believe parents should feed their kids. The school district made money on every meal they served. We switched him to a private school where he took his lunch and there was no breakfast.
RISE Academy, a very high-performing charter school in Lubbock, TX whose children are 85% poor, requires parents to sign a covenant with the school. Part of that is that parents must pack their kids a lunch every day. RISE Administrators view this as an important part of parents taking responsibility for their children. If a parent isn't willing to feed their child, then how can we expect that they will do the other things necessary for the child's growth and welfare?
Government is a huge cause of this obesity problem. We should eliminate school-provided meals altogether.
This isn't some power grab by big brother. We already provide free health care to poor people, so we might as well examine the food we give them for free.
I'd rather free lunch be comprised of water, fruits, veggies and grains. What's more, food stamps should have severe limitations on what they can be used to purchase. Don't like the choices? Then get off food stamps and free lunches. This isn't Burger King, you can't have it your way.
What's more (at least where I live) kids on free lunch are also getting breakfast at school through some welfare program, so there's no need to load em up with protein and lard.
The first result of our Federal food subsidy to poor people is that we have an obesity epidemic amongst the poor. This runs counter to all human history. For an example of what poor Americans used to look like, check out this NRO link from the feed:
The second result of this approach is the healthcare costs. Morbidly obese people consume a disproportionate amount of health care and comprise a small % of the population. See if you can find a nephrologist that takes Medicaid patients. You're looking at a millionaire. And one that doesn't have to work particularly hard- "sit here and let my nurse plug in the dialysis machine".
I think the childhood obesity problem has less to do with what kids are eating for breakfast or lunch than it does with what kids are doing - or not doing - in between meals.
The food I ate in school over forty years ago (government surplus, by the way, according to those large cans) wouldn't pass for healthy today (at least those black and white flying saucer cookies we inhaled wouldn't).
The difference was we walked to school instead of being driven everywhere by SUV. We rode bikes. We played in parks (and yes the streets). We moved instead of watching other people move on screens.
Ask any adult: weight management is difficult to control by diet alone.
With a sedentary lifestyle, you have to eat an extremely low-fat/low calorie diet to avoid gaining weight. Try telling that to a growing kid.
As for a government role, back then I recall public service TV messages for The President's Council on Physical Fitness (I even think Kennedy may have appeared briefly in one). It's hard to imagine such a thing appearing today.
I loved my hot lunches back in the 70s and 80s. They tided me over until I got home, where I could inhale marshmallows and chocolate chips. Neither I nor my classmates were notably overweight, but that may have had something to do with five-mile paper routes, daily pickup soccer games, tree-climbing, lawn-mowing and other activities. Exercise is what's missing.
There are actually a lot of public service announcements telling kids to be more active. The problem is not a lack of PSAs, but the large number of entertainment offered by TVs and computers.
The reason kids are obese is partially due to the removal of physical activity in elementary schools. When I was in elementary school the local school system was smart enough to realize that kids 1-6 grades needed someway to burn off the energy the kids had. We had a 15 minute recess in the morning and in the afternoon and even time after lunch to play outside.
There were far less cases of ADD or diagnoses of hyperactive kids. School systems then did not punish boys for being boys - having more testosterone than girls, which also makes it harder to just sit still for hours on end with no outlet for the excess of pent up energy.
Nowadays school departments are too chicken of kids getting hurt if they run around at recess or play a quick competitive game of four square. The result is kids sit around at school, then go home veg out in front of TV & or play video games - very little physical activity.
The cost to purchase healthy food vs. junk food is also contributing to obesity. Mid - Low income families who are on the go - this is probably the majority of the U.S. find it more cost effective to get junk food than healthy food. It is also quicker to get fast food than take the time for a healthy meal to be prepared.
The real reason for the balking about dumping the free meals program has NOTHING to do with the food subsidies (which many of these suggested solutions would handle).
The real problem is that the breakfast/lunch workers are putting in just enough hours to qualify for benefits. Without their work, there goes a lot of Democratic votes. And, for many, also union dues.
Am I the only one who thinks that eliminating school lunches is a terrible idea? What about economies of scale? Isn’t it much more efficient to have a handful of centralized workers providing food for all the kids than each family preparing one or more lunches individually? And what about the added burden on parents? Do you really want to add preparing little Johnny’s lunch to your nightly to-do list? I know I don’t.
I like Lawdawg’s and David Carr’s comments, and (in my opinion) therein lies a more practical solution than flat out elimination: if parents want to make their kids lunches, great; and for the rest of us, just make them as healthy as possible. Then send them all out to the playground to run off those calories! And if it turns out that the majority of parents choose to make their kid’s lunches, then sure, let’s eliminate the school lunch program altogether.
I’m a little puzzled by all the bad press the First Lady is getting on this topic. Every President’s wife takes up a cause. For Nancy Reagan it was illicit drugs, for Laura Bush it was illiteracy. Contrary to what Ms. Palin and others would have you believe, Michelle Obama has never (to my knowledge) proposed, suggested, or even hinted that the government should dictate what you and I feed our kids. It’s just her “cause,” and so far all I have seen is a sincere commitment to addressing the problem of childhood obesity.
As you have likely already concluded, I am about as blue as they come. But before you attack me, let me also say that I was born in this country, to parents who were born in this country, and so on for at least three generations before that. I love this place and want the best for it just as much as you do (not to disparage our more recent arrivals). As a nation, I fear we are letting our ideological slants get in the way of common sense and decency, and I say that to the reds, the blues, and the purples.
All American, I guess my question to you is, if you had children, shouldn't you also have to take care of those children, even if it means (gasp) fixing their meals?
If you have a nightly "to-do" list, what the heck is on it that would trump fixing a child's lunch? My kids are grown, but sometimes they bought lunch and sometimes they took lunch. Either way, it was MY responsibility to see they were fed.
You make it sound like such a burden to actually do the work to feed your child. Stunning.
School lunch programs may be a good idea for many reasons, but not as a measure to address the obesity epidemic. There is hardly agreement as to a healthy diet to avoid or reduce levels of stored fat in the body. For example, saturated fat has been shown to have been demonized without scientific evidence, yet the columnist here regurgitates the bromides of discredited nutritional advice. Has the government got any nutritional advice right in the past 50 years? I would eat hardly anything on the state menu, thanks.
Public schools should get out of the food service business. But, they are not because the unions want it, the lazy parents want it and the school boards want to vote for what the unions and the parents want. School food service is here to stay and it will expand at greater cost. No matter, they are forcing the rest of us to pay for retaining their union members and to pay to feed their kids Unhappy Meals.
What magical food stamp program are you referring to, that would allow a poor family of four to pack lunches of "tuna, turkey and peanut butter?" Just curious.
Everything I've read about human behavior with regards to food tells me that the 'cause' of our obesity is the overabundance and wide variety of tasty (salty, fatty etc.) food. No civilization in history (and many regions of the world today) has had that much easy access to the variety and amount of food available in the western world. That problem, in addition to the reduced amount of physical activity in our culture, means our children are going to continue to be overweight.
There is nothing our government, short of artificially limiting food supply, can do about it. And for the govt to suppose they can is folly. Research shows that eliminating sugary drinks in school would have less than a 1 pound per year impact on children's weight. There is no replacement for the accountability of parents and the children themselves in this area.
This is a cultural problem that can't be financed or legislated away. People eat too much unhealthy food and they don't exercise. Ergo, obesity. It doesn't matter what we feed kids at school if they eat Doritos and play xBox for the rest of the day.
Our kids are fat because WE are fat. Sweet/fatty processed foods taste good and are easily accessible. If you leave a kid alone in the kitchen, that's what he's going to eat.
The only way to combat the problem is to make better choices in our own lives and pass those choices on to our children. We, as a society, do not value health and wellness sufficently. In the long run it's going to cost us all hundreds of billions in medical costs, if not more.
I graduated from high school in 1956. All through my school years, politicians whined about "our children's weight problem". They even instituted mandatory exercise programs to help burn that fat off. (This was California.) JPK is right, this is a solution (government control) driven problem. I also take exception to the position that meat, cheese and bread aren't nutritious. They are among the most nutritious foods available. The desire for slim children is reflective of the liberal's desire for standardized human beings.
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