Here's the problem with that. I teach in a junior high school, chair a department, and I monitor the cafeteria because I work with behavior kids. What I see is this:
Our cafeteria serves the "healthy" food that was mandated under the Obamas. There are strict rules requiring students to take an entree, a vegetable, a fruit, and a milk (whole or lowfat chocolate), and forbidding sharing food, to make sure each child eats his or her mandated portion.
They don't.
They get plenty of tasty food at home, especially if their parents are "poor" and the food is free to them with no requirement to buy health food with the EBT cards. They use the money they save to eat at McDonald's and buy beer.
The mandated "healthy" school food is not even that healthy, just tasteless. Whole grain chocolate donuts, with just as much sugar, but the texture of cardboard is one of the few items that at least gets half eaten. Very little seasoning or spices. No salt or pepper available. The kids, being mainly Hispanic, used to bring Tajin to add some flavor, but it was banned.
So most of it goes into the trash. Probably could save the Arabs in Gaza from starvation with just what my district puts in the trash. Except for our high school.
At our high school, the made the decision to forego federal funds and they hired a professional restaurant manager to run it. It serves delicious flavorful food at a slighly higher cost than the pre-discarded garbage that is served in the lower grades. Free lunchers are taken care of also. It's a separate line, but the food is still better than in my Junior High thanks to the money that paying students provide.
Obesity is a serious problem, alright. But it will only be made worse if government tries to fix it.
Those are some informative points. Much appreciated. The beginning of the Obama era was kind of before I really got into politics. But my point is Michelle Obama was in the right place. She was right to urge, healthy food for children. So it’s a great idea. The only question is simply how to apply the idea. Sometimes we get it wrong, but it is ultimately the right idea for any responsible adult at least.
To your point about high school lunches. I remember back in my days of high school we had the free lunches. It was perhaps kind of an embarrassment for a youngster to hold out the free lunch card and everybody else sees that they have poor parents. And so there it is really that is the American society for you and is unfair for children but that’s life. It really is something that you have multimillionaire parents, and then you have their kids who can drive sports cars that are sometimes worth more money than what the teachers have.
I was fortunate enough to be raised in the middle-class household. Now that’s something that we don’t really have much of these days in America. Dwindling middle-class is what we have today. And I grew up in the late 90s and early 2000s when we had at least a stronger class compared to today.
And yes, as for high school lunches, the food school serve wasn’t always the best. Sometimes we did have a good salad. Often students would bring their own lunch to school.
Now you talk about your school and by the way, I appreciate your position in being A teacher and mentor to children. As we know, there are different culture’s and settings going on in high schools or middle schools all throughout the USA. There’s different types of populations. Different types of rules. Different ways to address the obesity problems and how to feed our children
I appreciate you taking the time because other people, including Republicans don’t take time on these subjects they simply provide media talking points, and it is not appropriate.
Whether it is the government or not, you pointed out as everybody knows that we have a health problem in America. It’s not just an obesity problem. It’s also a child obesity problem. We also have homeless folks who have a difficult time finding food and they are going hungry.
What we know is that the United States is the richest country in the world. We’ve given hundreds of billions of dollars to countries like Ukraine, Israel, and Egypt. …think about what all of that money or even a fraction of it could do to confront hunger issues in America among children. I recall the statistics saying it wouldn’t really cost that much money perhaps a few billion dollars to solve the homelessness crisis in America
$50 billion allocated toward addressing child obesity, and hungry students across America. For people who might say wait a minute that’s too much money. We the American taxpayers fork over much more money every year to our government. The only question is what will our taxpayers go toward and I said before I would sleep very well at night, knowing that the money went toward school programs For students to eat.
Having a successful program for students to have breakfast and lunch is a different story. And I agree with you. It’s not an easy issue to address.
By the way, it’s not just the free lunch often schools have breakfast programs for youngsters who are poor.
www.forbes.com
