OPINION:
President Donald Trump’s administration is at long last setting their sights on the lunchroom standards former first lady Michelle Obama imposed on students across the nation, and come next year, schools across the nation will be able to opt-out of a couple of the regulations.
About time. Rolling back these nanny regulations has been too long in coming. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue this week announced school cafeteria fare would no longer have to meet two dietary standards affixed by Mrs. Obama — the one guiding sodium levels and the one mandating whole grain substitutions.
Call it a back-pat for freedom.
Parents can once again parent. Children can once again eat. Life is moving back into the balance zone.
The first lady never should have been involved in school lunch menus in the first place First off, she was never a duly elected representative — voters never had a chance to weigh in and yay or nay her “Let’s Move” campaign that brought about the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010. This measure was simply a congressional nod to her legislative intrusions; it was not a ground-up bit of a bill that came from constituent request or demand.
It came about because of Mrs. Obama’s marriage ties.
Second off — and even if the regulation had been constituent-driven — Congress has no business in the lunch bags of school children. That’s parental domain.
Get out of my kid’s lunchbox would’ve made a great T-shirt for the year 2010, when Mrs. Obama’s “Healthy Kids” bill became law. The accompanying image?
A picture of a too-thin kid tossing his food-filled lunch tray in the trash.
The Obama-fueled rule resulted in huge cost hikes for already-ailing and cash-strapped school districts. On top of that, stories flew fast and furious in the after-days of the program showing how kids hated the fare, refused to eat, and food waste was commonplace. Student-athletes were particularly aggrieved by the standards, saying they left lunch hungry and didn’t have the energy they needed for their after-school sports. And of particular horror? Stories about teachers snatching lunch bags from children’s hands and, upon inspection, sending notes home to parents to advise them of the standards and suggest a switch-out of, say, cookies for carrots.
Can you say America, land of the free?
Perdue said the costs of the program had been projected at $3.2 billion over five years. But schools spent $1.22 billion in fiscal 2015 alone — and much of that was wasted.
“If kids aren’t eating the food, and it’s ending up in the trash, they aren’t getting any nutrition,” he said, The New York Times reported. “[And that’s] undermining the intent of the program.”
That’s only partially right. True, the program led to wasted food and wasted money. But the intent of the program — the real intent of the program — was not so much nutrition, but control. Mrs. Obama and her supporters just thought they knew better than parents and caretakers how to parent and caretake the children of America.
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