City officials are right to resist Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s new push to offer free breakfast in class; we don’t need to make our kids even fatter.
Duncan sent a letter to school officials nationwide last week, “encouraging schools, school administrators and teachers to seek out these and other innovative ways to increase participation in the school-breakfast program” to combat hunger in the schools.
The Bloomberg administration is skeptical. The mayor has said he’s happy to give principals the option of Duncan’s program if they believe it’s necessary, but he thinks the school officials need to consider other problems, too — like the fact that kids are eating too much.
Mayoral press aide Frank Barry told me that we need to “make sure those who need food get it, but without leading kids to get sick because of health complications that come with obesity. It’s a balance that you have to strike.”
With about 40 percent of city kids in grades K-8 overweight, Barry seems to have a point.
For the past decade or so, New York City has offered all of its 1.1 million public-school children free breakfast before school. But Duncan wants kids to have another bite at the apple (or the bagel): In case they missed the first breakfast, they could graze on a second one during first period.
Mind you, kids below a certain income level have access to two free school meals a day, even if school’s not in session. (The breakfast and lunch programs open even when classes don’t.)
Yes, Duncan’s letter cited a study showing that three out of five US teachers see students regularly come to school hungry. The fact that many teachers (actually, it’s surprising that it’s only 60 percent) occasionally see a kid who missed breakfast doesn’t make for mass hunger — whereas the still-rising obesity figures tell us the real problem is all in the other direction.
Yet advocates across the city still insist that “food insecurity” is a significant problem in New York.
Kate MacKenzie, the director of policy and government relations for City Harvest, says that “40 percent of kids in The Bronx live in families that worry where their next meal will come from.”
When I ask MacKenzie how she squares these statistics with the obvious obesity problem among low-income kids (the one Bloomberg regularly cites), she tells me that dividing kids between the obese and the hungry isn’t the right way to think about the question: “Obese kids or hungry kids. They’re often the same kids.”
Really?
MacKenzie and many of her colleagues in the nonprofit world make such claims by eliding the problems of access to food with access to nutritious food — and even then, they’re wrong.
The New York City Coalition Against Hunger, for instance, fights for more produce carts and community-supported agriculture groups in low-income neighborhoods. MacKenzie tells me that “in New York City, 3 million people live in food deserts where they have difficulty getting access to nutritious food.”
But food deserts are a myth. Recent studies from the RAND Corp. and the Public Policy Institute of California suggest that there is no relationship between rates of obesity and the type of food that people have access to. As Roland Sturm of RAND told The New York Times, you can get access to almost any kind of food within a couple miles of any urban neighborhood. “Maybe we should call it a food swamp, rather than a desert,” he said.
Let’s face it: The whole country is a food swamp.
Yes, hunger is still a real problem in parts of the world. (And you don’t even have to fly to Africa; just head to Mexico.) But not in the United States.
Food is more plentiful and cheaper here today than it has been at any time or place in history. That’s good news — even if Americans sometimes take too much advantage of it.
Low-income schoolchildren in New York have plenty of challenges, but a second breakfast is not going to solve them.