Posted on 09/23/2012 7:12:18 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Children and parents across the country are fed up with the restrictive new school meal regulations implemented by the Department of Agriculture under the “Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010,” which has long been touted by first lady Michelle Obama.
The standards — which cap meal calories at 650 for students in kindergarten through fifth grade, at 700 calories for middle school students and 850 for high school students — also dictate the number of breads, proteins, vegetables and fruits children are allowed per meal.
A spokeswoman for Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King, who earlier this month introduced legislation to roll back the new standards, told The Daily Caller that King’s office has heard more complaints about the issue during the past few weeks than any other.
“This year, we’ll be hungry by 2:00,” one student, Zach Eck, told KAKETV in Kansas. “We would eat our pencils at school if they had nutritional value.”
Iowa mom Robin Wissink told TheDC that she now provides her autistic daughter Molly, a junior in high school, with a bag lunch because her school’s new menu is so unappealing. Students at St. Mark’s in Colwich, Kan. have also been “brown bagging” their meals.
And some student-athletes in Wisconsin are arguing that the calorie caps hit them especially hard, given their intense workouts and scrimmages.
“A lot of us are starting to get hungry even before the practice begins,” Mukwonago High senior Nick Blohm told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Our metabolisms are all sped up.”
The new lunch standards have led to the removal of some old food favorites, including a particularly popular item at one school in upstate New York: chicken nuggets.
“Now they’re kind of forcing all the students to get the vegetables and fruit with their lunch, and they took out chicken nuggets this year, which I’m not too happy about,” Chris Cimino, a senior at Mohonasen High School in upstate New York, told the Associated Press, which gave the rules a “mixed grade.”
Students in the Plum Borough School District in Pennsylvania are protesting the new federal restrictions on Twitter.
“everyone.. if you agree school lunches are expensive and small, RT this. we can fight the school! tweet #BrownBagginIt,” @TornadoBoyTubbs tweeted, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Administrators have scrambled to find creative ways to make the new menus appealing. A school district in Lake County, Fla., for example, is planning to conduct a survey to determine how to make vegetables more appealing to children, who often throw them out.
“[The regulations do] limit the food that you can put on the plate,” Alden Caldwell, the director of food services at a Brookline, Mass. school, told Wicked Local. “In theory, it’s a good idea, but in practice we’re finding that there are issues with it.”
Despite the outrage, some parents believe the ongoing obesity epidemic justifies the tight calorie standards.
“I think it’s smart to be pre-emptive and proactive at getting more nutrition fed into the kids,” Amos Johnson, a parent with students in the Lee Summit, Missouri school system, told the Lee’s Summit Journal. “I see that more as a multi-beneficial supporter for health and academic performance. I think that’s the thing I would look at. You should be healthier, and if you’re nourishing the brain and getting the fuel right, academic outcomes should maintain or improve.”
When the legislation was signed into law in 2010, it received bipartisan support, including a big endorsement from Michelle Obama.
“As parents, we try to prepare decent meals, limit how much junk food our kids eat, and ensure they have a reasonably balanced diet,” the first lady said in a statement at the unveiling of the new standards in January. “And when we’re putting in all that effort the last thing we want is for our hard work to be undone each day in the school cafeteria. When we send our kids to school, we expect that they won’t be eating the kind of fatty, salty, sugary foods that we try to keep them from eating at home. We want the food they get at school to be the same kind of food we would serve at our own kitchen tables.”
Obama welcomed students back to school this year with a YouTube video explaining the importance of the new meal plans.
King and Kansas Republican Rep. Tim Huelskamp introduced the “No Hungry Kids Act,” which would repeal the USDA rule that resulted in the new standards, last week.
“The goal of the school lunch program is supposed to be feeding children, not filling the trash cans with uneaten food,” Huelskamp said in a statement. “The USDA’s new school lunch guidelines are a perfect example of what is wrong with government: misguided inputs, tremendous waste, and unaccomplished goals. Thanks to the Nutrition Nannies at the USDA, America’s children are going hungry at school.”
Do any of these nanny statists remember how much stuff they ate when they were teenagers?
Nanny State PING!
A local radio host volunteered at the cafeteria of his daughter’s school. Chris talked about working the salad bar. Repeatedly kids would walk up and ask for just the grated cheese.
My daughter feeds her children what they will eat. She encourages them to eat certain items but she is not a food nazi.
/johnny
Look people. The government doesn’t care if 100% of us hate it, it’ll be a “mixed grade” and nothing will happen to change it back.
Sorry, but I’ve seen the eating Moo does “on the road” WITH her kids, Goose and Gander stuff. Don’t tell US what to eat when you’re eating out all the time.
|
|
If my children were in elementary school, they would not be having their lunch bags examined, nor having their food or drink I packed tossed.
The lunches provided by schools are probably the worst nutrition-wise a child could eat. It’s all processed crap.
Having a kid that plays high school football, I know the school lunches don’t begin to cover the calories burned working out daily.
I was underweight as a child because of severe asthma.
Does this idiot Michelle realize there are other kids that may have different dietary needs?
I hypothesize that there is, in fact, a rebound effect in which children who are deprived of the food they want to eat at school and are forced to eat nothing but “healthy” food then go home and overeat to make up for the feelings of deprivation they experienced at school.
It looks like a fairly easy hypothesis to test.
That's not going to work for the 6'7" 270 lb defensive end. He will take what he needs.
My kids are among the brown-bag rebel brigade. I have been packing more lunches this year than I can ever remember.
It’s going to be a hoot to see how New Yawkers respond to Little Mikey Bloomer’s and his Big Gulp Nazis’ ban on soft drinks.
Recently we were invited to school to have lunch with our grandson. When we met up with him and ask what was for lunch, he told us all he would get was the milk because the rest of the food was “garbage”..(his words)..We decided to give the food a try....he was correct - it was garbage. We threw ours away, he drank his milk and I’m sure he is starving by the time he gets home.
This is a starvation diet..plain and simple.
They interviewed a high school athlete who purchases school lunch the other day.
His meal is capped at 850 calories, but his chemistry teacher calculated that he burns about 3000 calories in school between class, weight-lifting, and football practice ...
He states that his energy level has gone way down since these new regulations have been put in place ...
Nice goin’, Michelle ...
--food vendors are 'wasting' MILLIONS because of this dictated menu reformulationinfo provided by three districts consisting of 3 HS, 7 Middle schools, 16 elementary schools.
--students are THROWING away these new offerings
--nutrition is adversely affected
--schools ARE losing money (many self supported) as school lunches are WAY DOWN
--the purported 'free' breakfest/lunch programs are a sham as nutrition is not adequately provided
My six year old granddaughter,all 38 pounds of her,is starving when she gets home from school.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.