OPINION:
The Senate did the right thing this month when it voted to discard the Obama administration rules that would have increased federal standards for the training of teachers in elementary and secondary schools.
Six Democrats, in a rare demonstration of bipartisanship, voted with the Republican majority, rightly arguing that the federals want to infringe state and local education prerogatives that are rightly none of the feds’ business. Several of the Democrats must run for re-election in red states next year.
The next day the Senate voted to roll back Obama-era regulations stipulating how states must carry out the 2015 federal education law that supplanted the No Child Left Behind Act. Another good day’s work.
Now the Senate, and the House, should target Michelle Obama’s costly, burdensome and wasteful “healthy food” mandates for school lunches.
“This is about giving our kids the healthy future they deserve,” Barack Obama proclaimed when the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act was enacted by a Democratic Congress in 2010. (Is there a grinch anywhere who favors hungry, unhealthy kids?)
Somebody had to step in to tell the feds that school menus should be drawn up by local schools, and since the politicians wouldn’t do it, the kids themselves are doing it. They’re making it clear they don’t like what the federal government is putting on their plates, so into the garbage can it goes. Wasting food does nobody good, but just as you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink, so, too, you can lead a kid to spinach but you can’t make him eat it. (Ask any mom.)
A parody music video, “We Are Hungry,” posted on YouTube in those days of recent yore, ridiculed Mrs. Obama’s misbegotten menus, with kids depicted as collapsing on the playground after school, pitiful victims of reduced portions of unappetizing eats, and having to be carried home.
The former first lady’s goal of reducing childhood obesity is a worthy one, but school-cafeteria menus in Albany and Albuquerque and points between should not be micromanaged from Washington. It’s one thing for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to encourage schools to offer more fruit and vegetables, as well as more whole-grain foods. It’s quite another to stipulate strict limits on the size of portions, on saturated fats and trans fats, or that only skim and 1 percent fat milk be served. Healthful whole or even 2 percent and chocolate milk are thought to be as wicked as a bottle of beer. Nor should salt be withheld as to make grub so tasteless that kids go “yuk.”
The school-lunch ladies shouldn’t be dragooned into becoming enforcers of the nanny state. They don’t want that role imposed upon them. When the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act was up for reauthorization in 2015, the School Nutrition Association urged that the strict sodium and whole-grain mandates be relaxed.
The association, representing 57,000 school nutrition workers, urged the nannies to relent on requiring kids to take either a fruit or vegetable with their lunch, whether they want one or not.
A small-scale Harvard School of Public Health study in March 2014 found that while fruit and vegetable consumption at school had increased, between 60 percent and 75 percent of vegetables and about 40 percent of fresh fruit were thrown away, leaving only the garbage can to get its minimum daily adult requirement of fruit and veggies.
The School Nutrition Association urged in 2017 that the feds give schools more flexibility. “Overly prescriptive regulations have resulted in unintended consequences, including reduced student lunch participation, higher costs and food waste,” the association said. “Federal nutrition standards should be modified to help school menu planners manage these challenges and prepare nutritious meals that appeal to diverse student tastes.” Cut out the nanny and reduce indigestion, too.
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