There’s nothing about rutabagas in the Constitution, but that isn’t stopping the Department of Agriculture from trying to shove them down your kids’ throats. Under new school-lunch standards unveiled by First Lady Michelle Obama yesterday, public schools are now required to offer fruits and vegetables daily, along with more whole-grain foods, low-fat milk and lower sodium.
Oh yes, and there will be calorie counting, too.
“We want the food they get in school to be the same kind of food we would serve at our own kitchen tables,” said Mrs. Obama, who’s made childhood obesity one of her pet causes.
It’s a good cause. Studies — and the visual evidence all around us — consistently show that Americans are fatter than ever. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average adult is 25 pounds heavier today than in 1960. “Husky” kids are everywhere, with 10-year-olds having put on an extra 10 pounds between 1963 and 2002.
So it’s easy to understand the urgency Mrs. Obama feels. But what to make of the administration’s prescription?
“When we send our kids to school,” said the first lady, “we expect that they won’t be eating the kind of fatty, salty, sugary foods that we try to keep them from eating at home.”
But do we try? In fact, increasingly fewer American families sit down together around the dinner table, with Mom serving broccoli, a baked potato with no butter or sour cream and a small slice of steak with all the fat trimmed off.
That ideal died off with the advent of TV dinners, cheap fast food and the disappearance of the stay-at-home Mom.
The number of kids living in a two-parent family fell from 85 percent in 1970 to 70 percent by 2004, according to the Census Bureau; among blacks, it’s only 38 percent. And, as Mrs. Obama herself noted in a 2010 speech to the NAACP, black kids are “significantly more likely to be obese than are white children.”
That’s not the only societal change being ignored here. The school-lunch program was founded back in 1946 under Harry Truman — as a national-security issue at a time when malnutrition was a real problem among draftees.
But nobody starves to death in America any more, and the draft is long gone. Poor nutrition is now a choice, not a fate, and some families simply choose better. No amount of government coercion is going to change that.
Because human beings will always find a way to do what they want to do. The Los Angeles school district recently revamped its lunch program to offer such delicacies as vegetarian curries, Thai noodles and designer salads. Everybody hailed the great leap forward.
Yet the students promptly tossed the food in the trash and smuggled in junk food from home or bought more appetizing comestibles from the many black markets that have sprung up around school property. Many kids just stopped eating lunch.
Surprise: Burgers are back on the menu.
Have the feds learned from the LA experience? Well, after furious lobbying from the pizza and French-fry industries, those staples of childhood chow will stay on the menus (for now). Still, school meals are to weigh in at between 550-650 calories, or about a third of the recommended daily intake.
But a Big Mac tips the scales at 540 calories, and kids yummy those right down.
Depending on government to serve up tasty, good-for-you vittles that kids will actually eat at anything other than gunpoint is like expecting valet parking and a free car wash at your local DMV.
The proper place to learn about nutrition is in the home. Pretend however you like, neither schools nor the government can magically make up the difference if parents fail to do their job.