I get a fair amount of prop
aganda in my inbox. One recent email trumpeted Congress: Don’t Gut School Lunch Standards and Damage our Children’s Health! I learned there was a party-line vote to move forward in the House with a bill to provide more “flexibility” in applying the school lunch standards set by the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFK).
The death of a public good by a thousand, GOP-led cuts? How much more zeitgeist’y can you get? I was on it.
And then, well, I had to dig for the meat and potatoes of the situation. And those meat and potatoes illustrate remarkably well a different contribution to the zeitgeist: folks barking in caps and exclamation points to rally the hoi polloi to post a rant, click send on a petition.
So the caps-&-!! email informed me that four years into the country’s current experiment in mandating healthy school lunches, Republicans seek to let schools opt out of applying those new health standards if their budgets are suffering as a result of implementing them. The School Nutrition Association, a professional group of school nutritionists, supports the idea; however, it also happens to be funded in part by food manufacturers like Domino’s. But the National School Boards Association, a national federation of 95,000 school boards, supports it as well. Hmmm.
It turns out the opt-out folks have some good points. Two of them I found compelling:
- Starting in July, 1000% of grains offered in cafeterias will have to be wholegrain. The current requirement is 50%. Numerous school boards and principals have noted that cultural barriers are making the wholegrain requirement difficult to achieve. Kids in the Southwest, for instance, are just not into whole-wheat tortillas. I can’t imagine why not. Schools in Seattle can’t seem to make wholegrain biscuits that hold together, so the kids have started buying junk at the 7-11 instead of eating breakfasts in the cafeteria. Schools—and the right wing piggies—want the wholegrain requirement to stay at 50%
- The law currently mandates that a student receive a large serving (they specify large portions) of a fruit or vegetable when they buy lunch. For the past two years, a frustratingly but thoroughly believable number of students have simply thrown those fruits and vegetables away. A study in Public Health and Nutrition found that $3.8 million is thrown away in American elementary schools every day. How crazy is that? $648-million-a-year crazy, that’s how crazy. And all of that wasted money translates into money shortages elsewhere in the food programs. North Carolina’s school meal expenditures have increased by $17 million, three million dollars more than the increased federal funding supporting the program.
These are good arguments for allowing individual school districts the flexibility to determine the methods best suited to reaching federal student nutrition goals. They are reminders that people are individuals with personal and cultural preferences, and ignoring that fact simply alienates the very people the HHFK are trying to help. There is value in mandating goals and allowing state and municipal organizations to develop their own means of achieving those goals. Whoever decided to require every lunch tray carried by every thirteen-year-old include a fruit or vegetable seems unlikely to know very many thirteen-year-olds. Students have staged walk-outs in protest in multiple states.
I find it frustrating that the GOP—as dedicated to destroying quality public education as they are dedicated to destroying quality public everything—are able to hijack the legit concerns of dedicated student health professionals and agencies. They have, after all, successfully won federal recognition of 1/8th of a cup of tomato sauce as the equivalent of ½ of a cup of real vegetables.
But I find it even more frustrating when people largely on “my side” of the American cultural divide* create a distortion to further enrage the like-minded against that GOP. Fighting fire with fire isn’t a recipe for long-term success when the fire is the GOP’s foment of unremitting hatred.** All it does is make those concerned with the GOP’s attack on public health less distinguishable from (and equally un-trustable as) the corporate stooges themselves.
I suppose there’s an element of panic in the whole thing. I suppose it’s because everybody tuned in to the world from most any mass-market perspective feels besieged and under imminent threat. (A transmutation of the primal awareness of irreparably soiling our planetary nest? Perhaps.) But what’s the quickest way to play into your adversary’s hands? Panic.
*The side dedicated to equal accountability before the law, the protection of environmental and public health, the separation of church and state that supports inclusiveness in the culture, blah-de-blah.
