Sam and I are wondering why Michelle Obama has to pick on school lunches. I like her and I think she’s doing a pretty good job as our president’s other half, but can’t she find another First Lady Cause?
Mrs. Obama and her fellow supporters of healthy life styles want school kids to eat what’s supposed to be good for them. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has ordered schools to double their daily offerings of fruit and vegetables, increase offerings of whole grain-rich foods, reduce the amount of saturated fat, trans fats and sodium in cafeteria food, limit calories based on the age of children to ensure they receive proper portions of food, and allow them to have only no-fat or low-fat dairy products.
According to a January 25 story by Karen Dillon appearing in the Kansas City Star, Mary Wolank, a school dietitian said, “The new rules are absolutely vital and absolutely reasonable. If you offer the kids choices and as long as every choice is healthy, they will make a healthy choice.”
Oh boiled Brussels sprouts Wolank! What fairy tale land did you come from? The problem with insisting that kids eat healthy at school is that is they probably don’t eat healthy at home. If their moms and/or dads have jobs, and the kids have after-school sports practices or music lessons (whatever) and their families are running around like cockroaches attacking an open bag of fruit loops, they probably eat a lot of mac and cheese and pizza and hot dogs or hamburgers and French fries. Are you going to post cops near the lunch counter then send the cops home with the kids with orders to rap parents’ knuckles with rulers when they don’t serve up wholesome food at home?
A television newscast reporting on the new health putsch for school kids showed a lunch tray with a bunch of celery on it. Celery! Seriously? What kid in his or her right mind is going to eat celery for lunch? Not even with peanut butter or processed cheese. Ain’t gonna’ happen.
And the newscast mentioned that milk served with the lunch should not contain more than one percent of fat. One percent! Bleah! The only thing worse would be nonfat milk which tastes faintly reminiscent of powdered milk. Ever drink powdered milk? Bleah! Not even the great taste of chocolate rice puffs or oatmeal smothered in brown sugar and maple syrup can compensate for the bad taste of powdered milk - just keep shipping that stuff to poor starving Third World kids. Bleah!
Sam and I don’t understand why kids’ families should pay for meal tickets if their kids don’t get to eat what they want. I guess those mythical people who make $250,000 a year (that the President keeps talking about) can afford to be health nuts and put fresh-squeezed seaweed juice on the table every morning. But regular people like Kathleen I, who haven’t earned $250K in any of our 20 years of marriage, can’t afford to be so picky.
We Americans THINK we deserve to eat so-called “healthy” foods so we will live forever. We run around looking for gluten-free products, almond milk, chai tea and all manner of weird things to put into our stomachs when plain old pizza, hamburgers and French fries would suffice. Here’s news for all you health nuts: you probably won’t live any longer than the rest of us. Remember Euell Gibbons? He died at 64.
Sam and I say two bags of poop on healthy school lunches. Give us hot dogs or give us death.
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