School Lunches: The New Food Fight

School Lunches: The New Food Fight

Posted on March 23, 2013          



School lunches have been at the center of ridicule for decades. No child has ever raved about cafeteria food. (Except the infamous peanut butter brownie served during my elementary school years.) However, we now have kids across America rebelling against the new school lunches. This is their new food fight. The federal government, with the help of First Lady, Michelle Obama, have decided that our school lunches need revamped. Does anyone recall electing Michelle Obama to anything? I digress.                               



The Agriculture Department has proposed new nutritional rules. These rules will apply to all food sold in our schools. A few of these new guidelines will include limits on the size of drinks (I guess Mayor Bloomberg was called in for this one), controls on sugar, fats and sodium, and of course, portion sizes. The amount of calories allowed in lunches have been reduced and many children are left hungry. Student athletes, who need more calories, is just one group of students who are none to happy.



Those who know better than we do have now decided it’s important that they control our school lunches.  I suppose we are to be grateful that these new rules do not apply to after-school events, class parties, food sent from home or concession stands. (The walking taco lives on!). Don’t be so sure. I have personally experienced, first hand, the elimination of candy at school Halloween parties and vegetable trays instead of cupcakes on a child’s birthday. I kid you not. It appears that the same crowd who advocates free contraception to sexually active preteens and teens, without parental consent, feels their new mission in life is to make sure no one eats a Twizzler on school property.



The most logical way to avoid school lunches and the food fight that pursues would be to brown bag your child’s lunch. For the most part, that appears to be fairly free from scrutiny. However, there has been an incident in North Carolina where a child’s brown bag lunch was deemed nutritionally inappropriate. The turkey and cheese sandwich, chips, banana and an apple juice did not pass the test of the food Nazi’s. That child was forced to also purchase a school lunch to supplement for the obvious child abuse she receives from her brown bag lunch.



School cafeterias have become the new target for the federal government. Is there no end to their thirst for control over our lives? Kids are smuggling and trading food during school lunch periods. They have created black markets. Perhaps this is one way for the school to teach a lesson in economics. I applaud their ingenuity.



The First lady continues her crusade across the country and patting herself on the back for her success. Never mind the fact that no one is actually eating these lunches.  As vending machines of candy and soda are stripped from schools and replaced with condom machines, don’t sit idle. We should not let the food police take over. No one is for obesity. No one is against nutrition. No one wants unhealthy kids with unhealthy habits. The government has decided that the very simple task of providing school lunches for our children is better left to them.



There is a very simple solution to childhood obesity and unhealthy lifestyles. The solution is personal responsibility, parents and exercise. Let’s take the food fight to them. We do not need to spend millions of taxpayer dollars making sure chicken nuggets are coated with whole wheat bread crumbs versus white. The schools should be focusing on teaching our children to read, write and perform arithmetic. Let’s worry less about how many legumes our children ate today and more if they can count them.  The only appetite that should be checked is that of the federal governments quest for control.