FEDS IN THE SCHOOL CAFETERIA
The country will be debating the role of the federal government a lot for the next nine months.
I’ll be interested to hear if a politician is asked during the campaign if he/she thought that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison ever envisioned the federal government being involved in what school kids eat for lunch.
Michelle Obama and the Secretary of Agriculture announced new guidlines for school lunches today.
While they fight over the budget in Washington, maybe they can have a conversation about how many federal employees it will take to ensure that the kids at Penn Hills High School are drinking skim milk and not whole milk.
When did lunch become so tough?
When I was a kid, I took a brown bag. Inside the brown bag was a baloney or chipped ham sandwich, another sandwich bag with a few Wise potato chips and a sandwich bag with three or four of my Aunt Gertrude’s cookies.
My mother would work an apple in there once in a while and I almost always threw it away.
I seem to remember the other kids having the same kinds of things in their lunch bags.
No leafy vegetables (now required by Michelle Obama).
When I got home I was allowed to eat a few more cookies and then it was nothing until we sat down as a family to eat dinner.
I realize things have changed, but here’s something else I realize:
Kids aren’t getting fat from the food they eat at lunch.
They’re getting fat from eating too many meals away from home.
Go to any restaurant and see how busy it is between 5 and 6.
My family wasn’t rich but we weren’t poor, either. We probably ate no more than 20 meals out the entire time I was growing up.
There were no restaurants to take a family other than Eat ‘n Park (interestingly enough founded by my mother’s brother — my Unlce Larry.)
People ate at home. Mothers saw to it that we ate our leafy and un-leafy vegetables.
I don’t know what Mamie Eisenhower and Jackie Kennedy were doing back then but they weren’t worrying about what kids were eating.
It’s not just the kids who are fat. Look around. Everybody is fat.
I’m fat.
You’re probably fat.
I’m losing weight now. Charles Barkley got me with those Weightwatchers for Men ads.
I’m 15 pounds overweight because I had been eating like a pig. And I don’t go to school.
The kids are getting fat because their parents are fat and the parents are fat because they eat out too much.
So, if Michelle and Barack really want to do something for the children, they should send out the National Guard and shut down about 90% of the restaurants in America.
Let’s hire federal agents to knock on people’s doors during the dinner hour and make sure that they’re eating home cooked meals. No take out. No pizza.
The scary thing is, I think they might consider that if they thought they could get away with it.
It would make as much sense as spending billions of dollars supervising school cafeterias.
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Date: January 25, 2012
Categories: Politics