SIGN UP - IT'S FREE!

National Debt Clock


A million seconds pass in 12 days.
A billion seconds pass in 31 years.
A trillion seconds pass in 31,688 years!

Eurabia Watch


Family Security Matters has started a new feature, called Eurabia Watch, which will warn Americans that what happens in Europe with political correctness and Islamism will soon be on its way to America. What do you think?







View results


Sign Up for FSM Updates!

HOME > PUBLICATIONS > Michelle Obama's Unsavory School Lunch Flop

December 21, 2011

Michelle Obama's Unsavory School Lunch Flop

Michelle Malkin

Print This
  Comments (17)

 
The road to gastric hell is paved with first lady Michelle Obama's Nanny State intentions. Don't take my word for it. School kids in Los Angeles have blown the whistle on the east wing chef-in-chief's healthy lunch diktats. Get your Pepto Bismol ready. The taste of government waste is indigestion-inducing.
 
According to a weekend report by the Los Angeles Times, the city's "trailblazing introduction of healthful school lunches has been a flop." In response to the public hectoring and financial inducement of Mrs. Obama's federally subsidized anti-obesity campaign, the district dropped chicken nuggets, corn dogs and flavored milk from the menu for "beef jambalaya, vegetable curry, pad Thai, lentil and brown rice cutlets, and quinoa and black-eyed pea salads."
 
Sounds delectable in theory. But in practice, the initiative has been what L.A. Unified's food services director Dennis Barrett plainly concludes is a "disaster." While the Obama administration has showered the nation's second-largest school district with nutrition awards, thousands of students voted with their upset tummies and abandoned the program. A forbidden-food black market -- stoked not just by students, but also by teachers -- is now thriving. Moreover, "(p)rincipals report massive waste, with unopened milk cartons and uneaten entrees being thrown away."
 
This despite a massive increase in spending on nutritional improvements -- from $2 million to $20 million alone in the last five years on fresh produce.
 
This despite a nearly half-billion-dollar budget shortfall and 3,000 layoffs earlier this year.
 
Earlier this spring, L.A. school officials acknowledged that the sprawling district is left with a whopping 21,000 uneaten meals a day, in part because the federal school lunch program "sometimes requires more food to be served than a child wants to eat." The leftovers will now be donated to nonprofit agencies. But after the recipients hear about students' reports of moldy noodles, undercooked meat and hard rice, one wonders how much of the "free" food will go down the hatch -- or down the drain. Ahhh, savor the flavor of one-size-fits-all mandates.
 
There's nothing wrong with encouraging our children to eat healthier, of course. There's nothing wrong with well-run, locally based and parent-driven efforts. But as I've noted before, the federal foodie cops care much less about students' waistlines than they do about boosting government and public union payrolls.
 
In a little-noticed announcement several months ago, Obama health officials declared their intention to use school lunch applications to boost government health care rolls. Never mind the privacy concerns of parents.
 
Big Government programs "for the children" are never about the children. If they were, you wouldn't see Chicago public school officials banning students from bringing home-packed meals made by their own parents. In April, The Chicago Tribune reported that "unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria." The bottom line? Banning homemade lunches means a fatter payday for the school and its food provider.
 
Remember: The unwritten mantra driving Mrs. Obama's federal school lunch meddling and expansion is: "Cede the children, feed the state." And the biggest beneficiaries of her efforts over the past three years have been her husband's deep-pocketed pals at the Service Employees International Union. There are 400,000 workers who prepare and serve lunch to American schoolchildren. SEIU represents tens of thousands of those workers and is trying to unionize many more at all costs.
 
In L.A., the district's cafeteria fund is $20 million in the hole thanks to political finagling by SEIU Local 99. The union's left-wing allies on the school board and in the mayor's office pressured the district to adopt reckless fiscal policies awarding gold-plated health benefits to part-time cafeteria workers in the name of "social justice." As one school board member who opposed the budget-busting entitlements said: "Everyone in this country deserves health benefits. But it was a very expensive proposal. And it wasn't done at the bargaining table, which is where health benefits are usually negotiated. And no one had any idea where the money was going to come from."
 
Early next year, Mrs. Obama will use the "success" of her child nutrition campaign to hawk a new tome and lobby for more money and power in concert with her husband's re-election campaign. It's a recipe for more half-baked progressivism served with a side order of bitter arugula.
 
 
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies" (Regnery 2010). She is also the author of "Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild. Her e-mail address is malkinblog@gmail.com.
 

Reader Comments: Submit Your Comment (17) | Sign Up for FSM Updates!

Print This
  Comments (17)

Amazing that the crazy libs in California didn't go for this "progressive" nanny state program. What it does show is that if left alone, free markets will play out. This was NOT what the majority of the students and families wanted, even thought it was FORCED on them by the government. Kudos to California ...and I don't say that often.

posted by: Betty
Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 05:12 AM

This is so very sad that this program didn't work as it should be mandated in every school district across the country. Parents don't know how to properly feed their children so knowing the school can get one good meal into kids each day was a hope many of us had dreamed of for our country. Hopefully this was a fluke and other school districts will supply the healthier meals, along with banning the horrible things like cakes and candies for different in school parties. None of this does any good for our children.

posted by: Mary
Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 07:57 AM

More criticism of a good thing from a narrow minded conservative view. There is no new Conservative ethos because the Conservative views are destructive and critical(not in a good way) by nature, and might I add, not for any constructive purposes.

posted by: mario
Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 08:40 AM

One meal a day isn't going to work - there are weekends, holiday breaks and school vactions when it would all come undone. Parents need to be educated but sometimes they just don't care enough - which is really pitiable.

posted by: June
Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 09:09 AM

I raised 4 healthy children and never once did I need to have government tell me what they should eat.
Common sense is what the WH is lacking. Before all these regulations are put into force they should have some insight as to the outcome.
We are living in America, the home of the free.

posted by: Jo B
Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 09:16 AM

Thank you, Ms. Malkin, for an educational insight into the results of government meddling. Wasted tax-payer money and corrupt politicians and unions rewarded. The children are short-changed.

posted by: Daniel Pierce
Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 09:24 AM

I'm with Jo B!!! I too raised 3 children and all were happy and not obese. Michelle O takes after her husband, a great deal of talk and no go!! Everything she or her husband has tried has come up a Total Failure!!

posted by: Dave
Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 10:01 AM

Killing Us Sweetly: Conservatives Role in American Obesity
Read the Article at In These Times

DECEMBER 8, 2011
Killing Us Sweetly
Conservatives’ role in the growing burden of American obesity.
BY THEO ANDERSON
The obesity problem is a profound challenge to the fundamental tenet of American conservatism.

Conservatives interested in defining and defending American exceptionalism should really love our waistlines. The United States may not lead the world in much anymore, but its citizens are easily among the fattest in the industrialized world. And there is no end in sight to our growing size. Our political system, paralyzed by a lethal combination of conservative dogma and corporate interests, is completely unprepared to face the realities underlying America’s obesity epidemic.

One-third of the country’s adults were classified as obese in 2010. That’s double the adult obesity rate in 1980. The state with the highest overall obesity rate in 1995 was Mississippi. Its rate at the time–19 percent–would now be the lowest in the nation. Mississippi’s obesity rate remains America’s highest, at more than 34 percent, while Colorado has the lowest rate, at 20 percent.

Those numbers will almost certainly continue to rise, and it’s plausible that half of America’s adult population will be obese within the next two to three decades.

The medical costs related to obesity are enormous, because it’s closely linked with diabetes–a chronic disease requiring costly, long-term treatment. In 1995, only four states had a diabetes rate above 6 percent. But as rates of obesity have soared, so has the incidence of diabetes. All but eight states now have a diabetes rate above 7 percent.

The spiraling rates of obesity and diabetes pose a dire challenge to America’s healthcare system. In a study released in 2009, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimated that direct and indirect medical costs related to obesity run to $147 billion every year. In a press release that accompanied the report, the director of the CDC said that “it is critical that we take effective steps to contain and reduce the enormous burden of obesity on our nation.”

Well, good luck with that.

What is even more remarkable than the rising rates of obesity over the past few decades is the total lack of political will in the United States to address the problem–though we find huge sums of time, money, energy and manpower to wage a failed “war on drugs,” the singular achievement of which has been to give us the highest incarceration rate in the world.

The drug war shows, if nothing else, that we are capable of taking some health issues seriously. Yet we’re unwilling to engage the obesity problem in any serious way. America is poised, in fact, to become truly exceptional: the first empire in human history to eat itself into oblivion.

A super-sized world tries to downsize

The United States is just the most extreme case of a growing worldwide problem. Obesity has risen to epidemic proportions in much of the developed world, as America’s nutritional model–food that’s cheap, tasty and loaded with fat, salt and sugar–has spread.

There are no simple solutions, and no one has yet found good answers, because the problem is complex and has roots branching in several directions. Heredity plays a role in obesity, as do socio-economic and cultural factors, the influence of marketing and media, and so on. There’s no solving it by getting at the root of the problem.

But some countries have at least begun experimenting with solutions.

Though France’s obesity rate is less than half that of America’s (15 percent), several years ago the French government began taking aggressive action. France began requiring junk-food advertisers to put public-service messages in their ads, emphasizing the importance of eating fruits and vegetables and exercising regularly. Now it’s phasing in an anti-obesity campaign with the backing of French president Nicolas Sarkozy. The campaign has three components: medical care, research and prevention. France’s Ministry of Higher Education and Research has already committed nearly $200 million to obesity-related research. Preventative measures have also been implemented, including a two-cent tax on cans of soda. Half the revenue will be used to combat obesity.

In 2006, England began progressively implementing a ban on ads featuring foods high in fat, sugar and salt that are aimed at children under 16. In October, England’s prime minister, David Cameron, floated the idea of imposing a “fat tax” to help fight the nation’s obesity problem, pointing to “how bad things have got in America” as a cautionary tale.

Notably, both Cameron and Sarkozy lead the conservative parties in their countries.

America’s anti-obesity plan: Just say no

Meanwhile, in the United States, obesity has become like global warming: Actual evidence has little relevance in political debates, because what’s at stake is ideology. The anti-tax and anti-regulation fervor of America’s conservative movement makes taxing and regulating unhealthy food all but impossible here. But the issue goes deeper than that.

It turns out that the obesity problem is a profound challenge to the fundamental tenet of American conservatism. If progressivism’s most basic belief is that we are in this together–that our fates are interconnected–conservatism cherishes “rugged individualism” above all else. This is why evangelical Christianity and political conservatism are so compatible: Both focus on individual human will.

But none of the evidence regarding America’s obesity problem confirms or conforms to the bedrock faith of American conservatism. The only solution it offers is that people should eat less and exercise more. That’s good advice, as far as it goes, but conservatism has little to say about the systemic factors behind the problem–about the agricultural subsidies that make unhealthy foods fantastically cheap to produce; about the externalized medical costs associated with those foods; about the role of poverty, culture or heredity in the rising obesity statistics; about the power of marketing to shape consumer preferences; about the fact that the nation’s most conservative region, the South, is also the fattest.

It’s clear that there’s a lot more behind obesity than just a failure of willpower. It’s equally clear that the American political system is inept at addressing the problem, because doing so would demand the ability to deal with complexity in a mature way. It would demand, too, a conservatism that is more interested in advancing Americans’ well-being than in defending its own ideology.

That brand of conservatism is moribund in modern America. And it has become startlingly clear over the past several months how aggressively conservatives are willing to oppose anti-obesity initiatives.

In April, the Interagency Working Group–a collaboration of four federal agencies, including the CDC and the U.S. Department of Agriculture–released the results of a study that had been commissioned by Congress in 2009. In the report, the IWG proposed a set of guidelines for the food and broadcasting industries to follow in marketing food to children. Though the proposed guidelines were voluntary–the agencies involved in the IWG have no authority to create relevant regulations–the blowback was fierce. Corporations opposed the guidelines, naturally, but conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation did the really heavy lifting in opposing them.

In a blog post and e-mail with the headline “Food Regulators Out of Control,” Heritage claimed that the government was “starting to infringe on the free speech rights of advertisers.” The IWG, it said, had “delivered a plan to drastically censor food advertisers … simply because the ‘nanny state’ is uncomfortable with what they are selling.” In response to such criticism, the IWG agreed in October to weaken its already toothless guidelines.

Obesity epidemic 1, Truth 0.

The only brake on advertising unhealthy food to children remains industry self-regulation. How’s that working out? A recent report by Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity found that soda ads aimed at children had doubled between 2008 and 2010–this despite industry pledges to reduce them.

And so it goes in the land of the free and the home of the brave: Nothing will slow our march toward total obesity. Insane self-subversion? American exceptionalism in all its splendor? Whatever you call it, one thing is certain: Yes, we would like fries with that.

ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Theo Anderson, a former In These Times editorial intern, has a Ph.D. in American history from Yale University and teaches seminars at Chicago's Newberry Library.

posted by: roland james
Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 10:03 AM

Michelle Obama: a woman who never saw a fried chicken or shrimp dinner, she didn't like..I wouldn't mind so much but she's such a hypocrite..and I find her offensive in the extreme; who she thinks she is...there is evidence to prove she should mind her own business...at least if she practiced what she preached or at least demonstrated to all outward appearance, she was at least marginally following her own advice to the public, there would be little reason to complain...but she makes it obvious to all concerned, she has no interest in tamping down her own wants and desires or need for any food while the rest of the country is experiencing a financial meltdown...does she care that the average person cannot afford the food she thinks all of us should eat? I would say no, she doesn't even appear aware the country is struggling...k

posted by: Kristen McFarland
Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 11:25 AM

Also interesting to note how many of the above comments use anecdotal evidence to support the article. Again, it feels good to lend your support to people who have similar views. My criticism (purposeful) is that these articles only prove persuasive to people who already agree with them. It's like an ignorant form of group think unified by the false notion that less government is better(this based on illogical fears). Most of the band wagon jumpers have never actually considered why a program like this one might be useful. That's my challenge to you. Use your own mind. Be kind. Consider the perspective of others.

posted by: mario
Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 11:52 AM

Big surprise. yet another socialist program fails miserably. When will america realize their biggest threat is living in their White house.

posted by: paul duncan
Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 11:53 AM

The only way go get nutritious foods down our kids at school is to disguise it! One way would be to cook down kale and fresh onions in tomato sauce, and use this sauce in as many dishes as possible: spaghetti, lasagna, pizza etc. Kale, if cooked well enough, is practically undetectable, and adds a delicious flavor to the sauce. If kids will eat stew or vegetable soup, it could also be added to that. My kids liked carrot and celery sticks, but don't know about today's kids...

posted by: Evie Wilson
Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 01:38 PM

This is what is called Dictatorship wake up Americans! call it for what it really is Dictatorship!

posted by: Ardith
Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 02:04 PM

Why doesn't the Govt. mind their own biz. When they FINALLY figure out how to do the jobs they were hired for ,then let them them take a stab at this, but I say it's none of their business whatsoever

posted by: mark
Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 06:07 PM

Mary, you must be all of 20-yrs. old and receiver of State and Federal Handouts and Free-Bees. People have lived for almost 6,000 yrs. with Mothers who would get their lazy rears out of bed and fix their kids Breakfast, pack their Lunches, and fix them supper of an evening. Today it is "let others carry my Load. I'm spending my money on Toys, cell phones, computers, Pay-TV, etc. I am not going to go to bed early and get-up early with my kids, nor am I going to stop getting my hair and nails fixed. As long as Tax Payers will keep being stuck with the Bills, I'll keep letting them so me and mine can eat a Big-Mac, etc, someone else has to put out the labor to fix. Grow-up girl, Life is Reality, not Free-Bees and Handouts at other Working People's expense. God Bless, Jimmie

posted by: Jimmie
Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 03:37 PM

Jimmie - you make some good points about the nature of people not wanting to take care of their responsibilities, etc. This surely is one part of a complicated equation. But your logic is faulty that because of people's faults or because they have been doing something for 6000 years that means that a government program is not necessary. It seams that you are only considering your beliefs, and and not reality. I would recommend that you consider the beliefs of other people in a respectful manor. Here is an article that I would recommend: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/laissez-faire-capitalism_b_152900.html

posted by: mario
Monday, December 26, 2011 at 12:57 AM

I was amused when I read one part of the story that said in Chicago schools, students were banned from bringing lunches from home!? I think Michele Obama should get out of our faces and mind her own business! It's none of her business what our kids eat!

posted by: Karla Baker
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 08:22 PM