Just when do we stand up and say “the government has gone too far!”?
A Virginia pre-school issued the following note to parents:
“I have received word from Federal Programs Preschool pertaining to lunches from home. Parents are to be informed that students can only bring lunches from home if there is a medical condition requiring a specific diet, along with a physicians[sic] note to that regard.
“I am sorry for any inconvenience. If you have any questions concerning this matter, please contact S [redacted] the Health Coordinator for Federal Programs Preschool at [redacted].”[1]
Freedom of Choice Removed
This isn’t a case of warning about a student with severe allergy in the classroom with a request not to bring peanuts to school. This is the federal government dictating what children (little ones!) may eat. This is so incredibly wrong in so many ways, it’s hard to know where to start the discussion.
Menu of Options
Let’s completely ignore what a particular child may or may not like to eat. On a typical public school lunch menu, you can find the following:
- Monday: corn dog or chicken nuggets, Tater Tots
- Tuesday: beef tostada boat or peanut butter and jelly on white bread
- Wednesday: pepperoni pizza or fish sticks with roll
- Thursday: pretzel sticks with cheese sauce or chicken teriyaki
- Friday: cheeseburger or breaded chicken patty with seasoned fries
or, translated:
- Monday: saturated animal fat; processed meat (with nitrates, preservatives, and fillers); wheat; pesticide-laden potatoes fried in genetically-modified (GM), heavily processed oil; and huge amounts of sodium
- Tuesday: tethered cattle fed with GM grains and antibiotics; GM corn fried in GM oil; common allergen suffused with salt, sugar, and hydrogenated oil, topped with sugar; carbohydrate stripped of all nutrition with added synthetic vitamins, emulsifiers, and preservatives
- Wednesday: more processed meat; wheat; cheese from GM grain-fed and over-productive cows; farm-raised processed fish parts from animals that are fed other animal waste, antibiotics, and pesticides, kept in filthy, shore-hugging pens that allow them to ingest industrial run-off, mashed with sugar and questionable ingredients to preserve and provide texture, then fried in processed oil only to be frozen and reheated in a microwave.
- Thursday: wheat (including emulsifiers and preservatives) covered with a processed substance that can be referred to as “heart disease in a jar”; antibiotic-laden, caged animal covered in flavored salt water, GM soy, and monosodium glutamate.
- Friday: the beef we’ve covered; who knows if the cheese is really cheese–even if it is, we’ve covered the cheese on Wednesday; fish sticks but round and chicken parts inside; GM potatoes fried in processed oil. Oh, and the requisite astronomical amounts of sodium and saturated fat.
Yes, oh, yes–THAT’S what I want my child to eat. Not a vegetable, not a fruit, everything processed and fried. Perfect for that dull, sluggish, fat feeling. Ready to face an afternoon of learning.
Opting Out
Okay, so the school offers a choice: if you want to send food to school with your child, you need a physician’s note attesting to “a medical condition requiring a specific diet”. Would this type of visit be covered by your health insurance?
Probably not.
You have to take your child on a weekday to explain to a healthcare professional why you don’t want her/him to eat the junk food at school. You want your progeny to grow up healthy, happy, and free of disease–does that meet the definition of “a medical condition”?
What parents will go to the trouble and expense to do this? Not those who can’t afford either the office visit or the food for their children.
It doesn’t border on ridiculous–it’s way over on the other side.
So why does the federal government insist on this policy? The reasons are several.
Without the public school volumes, the agricultural surplus would have nowhere to go. Excess foods are sold to schools (or, in some cases, given by the U.S. government).
School management often then sends it out to processors to make fish sticks, chicken patties, and the like because they don’t have adequate cooking facilities to prepare the whole foods. It’s a multi-billion dollar market.
The result: food that is almost devoid of nutrition.[1] A direct correlation has been found between students who eat food provided by food-service management companies and lower test scores.[2]
Public schools serve over four billion meals a year.
Given that the incidence of obesity in children has more than doubled in school-age children (and quadrupled in adolescents) in the last thirty years[3] and the number of children with diagnosed diabetes has increased almost ten-fold since 2008[4], you would think the government and schools would be concerned with what these kids are eating.
Study after study after study have proven beyond any possible reasonable doubt that processed foods, refined sugars, chemical additives, GM foods, and high sodium levels are toxic to the human body. If you don’t feel like researching the studies, don’t bother–look around you; the evidence is there in almost every person you see. The result is fat, sick, medicated, under-achieving kids.
And why are there Coca-Cola, Mountain Dew, chips, and candy in schools’ vending machines?
We leave it to you to wonder why the federal government is so interested in promoting this outcome.
Meanwhile in France…
sources:
[1] https://www.theorganicprepper.ca/
[2] https://www.rwjf.org/en/research-publications/
[3] https://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/6422
[4] https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/obesity/facts.htm
[5] https://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/statistics/