Three years ago, the federal government passed a law establishing new, very strict nutritional guidelines for school lunches. For about a decade, nutrition activists like the table-overturning nag MeMe Roth have demanded that the carrot-juice, Prohibitionist approach to feeding schoolchildren apply to all food, even the sacrosanct birthday cupcake.
Combine the two and you have a debate now playing out in the nation’s capital, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture considers what foods to ban from snack lines and bake sales. The Washington Post reports:
Across the country, school lunch directors, nutritionists and parents like Devitt are asking the same question as the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) crafts new federal nutrition standards limiting sugar, fat and sodium for school snacks and drinks. The rules would be the first update to school snack guidelines in more than 30 years and would come as first lady Michelle Obama continues to take aim at childhood obesity.
Our Senior Research Analyst also weighed in, noting that hungry school-kids are quite resourceful when it comes to skirting whatever bans schools impose. Texas kids’ surreptitious peddling of chocolates created an atmosphere that a reporter characterized as “Willy-Wonka-meets-Casablanca.”
As radical nutrition activists work ever harder to demonize food that isn’t un-seasoned, butter-free cauliflower, pay very close attention to school lunch debates. RAND Corporation researchers openly wrote that any foods banned from school lunches might be banned from sale to youths generally.
It’s a short march from there to the portion-size prohibitions recently invalidated in New York City, if not to food item prohibitions recently proposed in California. (No, seriously.) Today it might be cupcake cops and tomorrow gummy-bear G-Men. But with each passing day, it becomes clearer that if the anti-food movement and animal liberationist hangers-on get their way, next week might bring cheeseburger Prohibition.
