OPINION:
Hardly anyone has a fond memory of the school cafeteria. The gray meat, if meat is what it was, and peas, Jell-O and oily pizza are best forgotten. Many have tried to improve school lunches but sometimes a tater tot is best left a tater tot. Enter Michelle Obama, the first lady of the steam table. Her good intentions have only done for the school lunch what Obamacare has done for health care, with loud fanfare, more government guidelines and greater costs. With government “help,” the lunchroom offers only more kale.
That may soon change. Rep. Kristi Noem, South Dakota Republican, has introduced legislation to ease dietary guidelines for school lunches. “The administration is saying ’One size fits all,’” observes Mrs. Noem. “’They’re all the same. Feed them all the same. None of them are different.’ Anybody who has worked with kids — I have, I’m a mom. I’ve worked with kids my entire life, in 4H and church and youth and summer camp, and I know that all kids aren’t the same. They’re different sizes. They have different energy levels. They have different needs, based on different activity.”
Mrs. Noem observes that some children need more calories than they get in school lunches. Hardly a revolutionary idea, but it strays from the received wisdom and rankles the arbiters of what children should eat. The Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, a reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act enacted by Congress in 2010 with new provisions to raise government subsidized lunches to higher nutrition standards, was backed by Mrs. Obama. School districts with little money to spare and a surplus of unhappy children have struggled to comply.
The School Nutrition Association, which represents school cafeteria workers and companies that supply food and equipment to districts, have lobbied Congress for more money and more flexibility to feed the kids. Despite the motives — everybody means well — of those who push nutrition, a lot of food ends up in the garbage can. The association says it isn’t fighting against good nutrition, just for a more realistic understanding of what kids will eat. You can lead an 8-year-old to green beans but you can’t make him eat them.
Kids who buy a lunch at school select a fruit or vegetable only about half the time, researchers at the Johns Hopkins-Bloomberg School of Public Health have found. “The Hopkins study observed 274 6- to 8-year-olds in New York City public schools as they selected what to eat in the lunchroom. Only 58 percent chose a fruit and 59 percent selected a vegetable, and just 24 percent of those who took a vegetable didn’t eat a single bite.”
Kids who take lunch from home — sandwiches lovingly cut and made with a kiss from mom — fare no better. “Those brown bags are packed with significantly fewer fruits and vegetables, plus more salt and sugar, than school-provided lunches,” a team from Baylor University College of Medicine finds.
Mrs. Noem is clearly on to something. Her initiative coincides with the government’s failure to manipulate appetites. Noble intentions led to a law that restricts the opening of new standalone fast-food restaurants in one of the poorest sections of Los Angeles. The goal was to curb obesity and improve diets, but the scheme didn’t work. The Rand Corp. found that obesity rates in South Los Angeles continued to rise. “It had no meaningful effect,” Roland Sturm, a senior Rand economist, says. “There’s no evidence that diets have improved more in South Los Angeles. Obesity and overweight rates have not fallen.”
Lines in the lunchroom are long enough. The government has no place in them.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.