Ezra’s right; there’s something farcical about the knee jerk use of the word “nanny state” when you’re talking about children. The rhetorical device “nanny state” was developed to exploit a very specific set of non-subtly gendered anxieties—to make men especially picture a finger-wagging Mary Poppins that they could rebel against. “Don’t you tell ME what to do! I’m a grown man! I’ll eat all the toxic chemicals that I’m unaware are in my food that I want!”
But whining about the “nanny state” when you’re talking about the bona fide child care duties of the state—i.e. the right of the state to restrict the foods brought into the school to be sold or served the children—is puzzling. It really shows that “nanny state” is a code word that means, “In a conflict between public health and corporate profits, the latter should always prevail.” I’m guessing if it somehow started to conflict with corporate profits to teach children to read, libertarians would start howling “nanny state” about that. “How dare the nannies feed the children healthy food and teach them to read?!” It’s truly bizarre.
I do think there’s a limit on in loco parentis rights of a school, and luckily the U.S. Constitution enumerates the rights that I think should be respected on school grounds—cruel and unusual punishment, freedom of speech and religion, etc., though there’s a certain reasonable amount of age-based restriction that should loosen up as they age on some of these. There’s no real reason to stock age-inappropriate books at an elementary school, for instance. But the rights that a student doesn’t relinquish on school grounds roughly correlates to those very things where citizens have strong disagreements that would necessarily mean that any school interference would be a genuine infringement on basic rights. Religious instruction in the schools, for instance, is a clear violation of the 1st Amendment right, no matter how much wingnuts try to get around it. But healthy food and the eating of it? There’s no constitutional right to junk food, nor is there any sane disagreement in our society about the fact that it’s better to eat your broccoli than a Twinkie. And as Ezra notes, if your child absolutely must eat nasty junk food at school, no one is stopping her from bringing it with her lunch.
What’s more insidious about this whining about federal school food guidelines is how the lack of these guidelines will disproportionately affect the poor. The lack of resources, both financial and geographic, for the poor to get good, healthy food has been discussed thoroughly here. Children living in that situation could really benefit from one or two nutritious meals a day at the school. So as usual with the pro-corporate “libertarian” nonsense, it’s not just about prioritizing corporate profits over public health, it’s specifically about prioritizing corporate profits over the health of people with a lower income. In other words, outright class warfare.
But I think we can all agree this is a problem that everyone, middle class or poor, shares. Everyone wants their kids to eat better, and they’re already bombarded with advertisements for junk food everywhere. When they’re out of your sight and at school, you can’t make them eat right. The school should be able to step in on behalf of parents on this one. It’s not just for kid health and parent peace of mind, either. It’s really unfair to teachers to load kids up on a bunch of sugary stuff at lunch so that they’re beginning their sugar crash phase when they return to their desks. It’s not just a nutrition issue, in other words, it’s a discipline issue.
84 Responses to “The child right to school hour Twinkies?”
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Wow. That blog you linked to? The guy is complaining because schools will not be allowed to provide unhealthy food to children?
No wonder he has comments disabled.
Speaking of good food, I think the foodpairing site should be more widely known…
It’s not just a nutrition issue, in other words, it’s a discipline issue.
The hell, you say.
Schools are so strapped for cash they’re inviting fast food outlets into their halls. Some of my schools didn’t even soda machines; now they’re standard issue.
Kids aren’t SUPPOSED to be disciplined. That’s why they’re observed by adults.
The only lack of discipline here is that found in administrators and (most importantly) politicians who sell their kids off to marketers.
The Constitution has enumerated and unenumerated rights. The right to eat crappy food is “found” in the 9th Amendment, the same place where we get our right to birth control, nonprocreative sex, and all sorts of whatever the government doesn’t have the power to contol.
I agree that the meals the government schools provide should be healthy, since they are meals. But the snacks? As long as children can bring food to school, the only thing schools are doing by not selling junkfood is limiting their profits and creating a black market. It’s been documented that a Costco member’s child can make thirty or forty dollars a day every day of the week providing candy to fellow students. I would have a hard time justifying any disciplinary action to be taken against a candy dealer.
Also, wasn’t there a recent posting about the kinds of food the government considers healthy? I didn’t see a lot of support for the gastronomic industrial complex here.
With a vegetarian daughter, I’ve had to absolutely pack her lunch every single day. At her elementary school (in AISD, in hippie S. Austin), there was always a veggie option every day, but at the magnet middle school right in an economically disadvantaged part of E. Austin, her options for lunch are french fries or potato chips. She can’t even rely on a salad, because quite frequently they put meat all over them - low grade, gross turkey and ham lunch meat of course. It can be a challenge, especially since I figure that as long as I’m making for her, I may as well make for the boy. All I can say is, thank the gods for Morningstar Farms.
I find it so utterly ridiculous that schools cannot accommodate vegetarians, and further that at a lot of extracurricular events where they order pizza (like play rehearsals etc) they only get pepperoni. As if there aren’t Jewish and Muslim students? There are, and plenty of them. Schools and food quality - guaranteed to drive parents up a wall every time.
We had Pizza Hut come into out school to sell pizza and soda/snack machines in every hallway. Nothing like downing 3-4 cans of dehydrating soda before two hours of marching band practice and then going home to craaaaaash afterwards. Healthy food at school? Bwahahah!
Black market junk food? We aren’t talking about banning junk food from school; we’re talking about banning schools from selling junk food. Yes, in theory some kid might be able to make some money from dealing in Twinkies, but 30 or 40 dollars a day is a bit much to expect. In order to make that much, the young entrepeneur would need to be skipping a lot of classes or selling during class time. I doubt anyone would have much problem disciplining students for that. If they aren’t, I doubt many teachers would waste time stopping a kid from making money.
And once more, the government should not be selling this crap, especially at the expense of healthier alternatives. The schools I used to teach at, in the Chicago ghetto, had the school lunch (either bad institutional crap or some mega-caterer like Mariott selling hot dogs and pizza) and vending machines. The poorest kids on subsidized lunch got the school lunch, choosing the nutritionally worse option. Any kid with any cash bought from the vending machines.
The vending machine profits usually went to some school program, although who was managed it was often a deep mystery. Whenever parents or teachers asked that something healthy be put in the vending machines, we were informed that it would take money away from this program. So the administration was effectively putting profits over kids.
jon: But the snacks? As long as children can bring food to school, the only thing schools are doing by not selling junkfood is limiting their profits and creating a black market.
Oh my. Jon, just to let you know: schools are not meant to be profitable businesses. Their primary goal is to education children, and children are smarter when not eating junkfood. Their secondary but still important goal is taking care of children - in fact, legally, taking care of children takes priority over educating them, if the two come into conflict. Deliberately selling the kids junkfood in order to make a profit is neither educational nor caring: ergo, the school shouldn’t be doing it.
If a juvenile entrepreneur can bring candy to school and sell it to other kids out of class and without causing any trouble, there’s no reason to prevent it, nor to worry about it, providing it’s limited to the amount of candy a kid can carry. If a school has a general ban on kids selling anything to other kids, then selling candy will fall under that ban.
Ailei, you reminded me of when I was in marching band. I had discovered that soda was making me extremely ill, and had cut it out of my diet when I was 16. But after performing on the field at football games, what were our options? Clear soda or brown soda.
I went nuts since this meant I got no moisture after performing a halftime show … but it was kind of a “why should we have to accomodate this one person’s beverage issue?” sort of deal. Bleh.
As a school teacher, I can tell you how important it is for these kids to get at least some nutrition in their diet. The difference between the kids who eat the sandwiches over the trash they bring in from the street is tremendous. The kids who ate breakfast in the morning definitely have an advantage over those who forgo all of that. It’s amazing how we don’t instill nutritional values into our children. I’m not saying that we all need to go green, but something a little better than Cheese Doodles and Tropical Fantasy.
I can’t believe they missed that - obviously needs to be tacked onto the anti-flag-burning Amendnment
I’m pretty sure that’s covered by the cruel & unusual punishment bit.
I’m not saying schools should or shouldn’t sell junk. All I’m saying is that unless the schools ban all of it, they’re only losing money in the process. Maybe that’s okay with them. I won’t say it’s stupid, since it’s a principled stand that can be justified. There are often advertisements on the bus, hallways, and cafeteria. If the money is needed, there’s going to be a tradeoff. PBS children’s programs have sponsors like Frosted Flakes and yogurt. Not the end of the world, but I’m not counting the beans and making the decisions.
I still think the proposed non-sales are only a symbolic way of fighting poor health as long as children will eat unhealthy diets. The schools’ job is not to make money, but if they’re going to lose money I’d suggest it should be a part of something effective. That’s all.
Similar to the fight to preserve the right of corporations to peddle junk food to schoolkids, the rightwing blogosphere is up in arms over the possibility that the right of corporations to put a teaspoon of salt in every can of V-8 juice may be threatened by the FDA.
My grammar school had one beverage: milk. Junior high had a soda machine that dispensed seven ounce cups. High school actually had fruit vending machines, stocked with apples, pears, and oranges.
I think Amanda (and any other scolds who support this kind of thing) needs to read this instructive tale of prohibition, black markets, and the smuggler’s premium.
Just because you make something against the rules doesn’t mean it goes away. Drug War anyone?
All this will do is deprive the schools of probably much-needed revenue so certain people can strut and preen themselves for having kept the moral high ground.
But whining about the “nanny state” when you’re talking about the bona fide child care duties of the state—i.e. the right of the state to restrict the foods brought into the school to be sold or served the children—is puzzling.
Not really. It’s the old, “Who do you want raising your kids — you or THE STATE!?!?!?!” It’s trying to raise those old bugaboos of commies marching in and forcing your kids onto a collective, where they will denounce you to the authorities.
Sad that it still works, but not that surprising.
And, yes, I join everyone in being deeply depressed that we’re financing our schools by selling junk food to kids Talk about short-sighted.
Oh, and a University of Minnesota study has found that, contrary to popular belief, kids will eat healthy lunches if they’re provided.
jon: . All I’m saying is that unless the schools ban all of it, they’re only losing money in the process.
Jon, ya twit, schools are not profit-making entities. Get that through your head, and stop repeating that numbskull argument!
The Cato-at-Liberty article linked in this post argues not against the fact that schools will have to conform to new nutritional standards, but rather against the idea of the new standards coming from Congress, as opposed to the states.
The article makes the point that the Constitution does not enumerate a power allowing Congress to make decisions in this area. Rather, it is up to the individual states.
Whether schools should or should not serve certain foods is another issue.
When my son was in pre-K at an urban public school (~85% low-income), you should’ve seen those kids wolf down the hot lunch. Extra helpings of gross-looking pasta. Extra helpings of faded, soggy broccoli.
At my son’s Park District day camp, last summer they cracked down on junk food. There are vending machines that sell pop, water, Gatorade, candy, chips, and cookies. All the kids were allowed to buy during camp hours were water and sports drinks. Health and fitness were part of the raison d’etre for day camp, ergo: No junk food. So much better than the year before, when kids were snarfing down Cheetos and Pepsi.
Schools aren’t for-profit entities- they’re in place to educate, to guide, and to stimulate personal growth and excitement for learning. Which they can’t do efficiently for hungry, sugar-high, headachy kids, day-in and day-out.
If schools are relying so heavily on vending machine profits (which I’d find odd, honestly, because I coordinate the vending machine revenue for my workplace, with over 5,000 students, and it’s not that much money) then they had better figure out which master they’re truly serving, and adjust according to their actual mission.
I say it’s a numbskull argument to say that schools should give up money for a program that is probably going to be as effective as the DARE and abstinence-only programs. I agree with you that schools are not intended to make profits, but if they are going to not make money where they did before, is it too much to ask that the tradeoff be something other than a symbolic gesture?
I’m not against the bans. I just question their usefulness. Makes me a twit, but oh well.
No One of Consequence:
Spoken like someone who has never had to teach. You gotta be a monumental jackass to suggest that classrooms need LESS discipline.
On a related note, does anyone else remember the part of Super Size Me, where the kids who got put on healthy foods Straightened Up and started to Fly Right?
AND ANOTHER THING: even if you want to go down the “schools are a business” road - in this metaphor, the product the business turns out is EDUCATED, DISCIPLINED, KNOWLEDGABLE graduates. Once you realize that, it becomes completely apparant that allowing junk food to permeate the Place of Business (school) has a clearly detrimental effect on the quality of your product, and therefore any competant CEO (principal) should want junk food in their school banned outright. Under the ’school-business’ metaphor, kids and parents should be grateful they’re even allowed to bring their own junk food from home.
I’m guessing if it somehow started to conflict with corporate profits to teach children to read, libertarians would start howling “nanny state” about that.
Most libertarians are typically against public schools full-stop, so quibbling over such “intrusions” as sex education, school Christmas trees, and corporate product-placement is rather beside the point.
I say it’s a numbskull argument to say that schools should give up money for a program that is probably going to be as effective as the DARE and abstinence-only programs.
Good point. Because DARE is ineffective, schools should sell marijuana, too. Then kids would have the munchies, which would increase sales of profitable junk food. Everybody wins!
Jon, the real issue you should be looking at is why schools are so strapped for cash that they feel they NEED corporate money. And the answer is small-government freaks who refuse to properly fund public education. In a sane world, schools would be financially secure enough that could easily say, “No, Frito-Lay, we don’t need your money. Get out of here.”
If companies want to sell things to kids, that’s fine, but they don’t get to do it on public lands, in public buildings, to captive audiences. Companies do not (or rather, ought not) get to use the mechanisms of government, including public education, to sell their harmful products to kids. If a company wants to advertise their corn chips during a popular kids’ show, that is fine by me. Hell, if they want to sell ad space on the back of football jerseys, I’d even be fine with that, because that’s not a primary function of school (not that you’d know it in Texas), nor is it a captive audience.
I’m not saying schools should or shouldn’t sell junk. All I’m saying is that unless the schools ban all of it, they’re only losing money in the process.
Not-making-money is not the same as losing money. I don’t see crack on the street - am I “losing money” because I go to my job instead?
If schools are relying so heavily on vending machine profits (which I’d find odd, honestly, because I coordinate the vending machine revenue for my workplace, with over 5,000 students, and it’s not that much money) then they had better figure out which master they’re truly serving, and adjust according to their actual mission.
Unfortunately, that “adjustment” means that they’ll have to cut most or all extracurricular programs (including sports), plus any lingering art or music courses they still have. Not to mention the little extras like enough schoolbooks for all of the kids, fixing broken desks, etc.
That’s the sad part here: because school funding has been cut to the bone, the schools are dependent on this junk food money just to keep going.
Oh, and to clarify: the schools are not making money from what the kids put into the vending machines. They’re making money from the exclusive contracts with the various soda and concessions companies to allow those companies to put the machines into the schools. Pepsi and Coca-Cola pay big bucks to schools if the schools allow them to install a soda and/or snack machine with their products in it. That’s the revenue stream, not the quarters the kids are putting in.
Jon: I say it’s a numbskull argument to say that schools should give up money for a program
Jon, are you genuinely incapable of comprehending that schools exist to educate children, not to make money? What do you think schools are?
Makes me a twit
Yes. You are a twit, because you think schools are supposed to make money! Schools are supposed to be provided with money by the government (or parents, if private: or church, if religious) to provide an essential service to the nation: educating children.
(Private or religious schools may have other goals besides educating children, but that’s a separate issue: if they have ceased to provide any kind of education and are merely about making a profit, they have real problems and should not be referred to as “schools”.)
Er, MH, I think No One of Consequence was saying ‘disciplined’ in the self control sense, as in children have no self control, hence need to be observed by adults.
I could be wrong, but that was the context I took from that comment.
Part of the problem is that schools don’t let kids eat often enough. The time between the start of school and lunch is too long - with my metabolism not being able to eat between 8 am and noon was pure torture. And I ate breakfast every day. My dad always packed my lunch, so I got things that were pretty healthy. But then there was another three hours until I could eat again. When I came home from school I would eat a can of soup and two bowls of cereal and after that my supper because I wasn’t getting enough to eat during the day. It’s ridiculous that schools starve children and then expect them to make sane choices when they are allowed to eat.
It takes money to run a school, and there isn’t enough for everything. Yes, I think it’s sad that corporations can pretty much have their way with cash-strapped school districts. Yes, I think junk food isn’t a good thing. And yes, I agree that schools don’t exist to make money.
I really hate these idiotic contracts with approved vendors and all the rest of the garbage that ensures corporate interests prevail over student choices and even fiscal responsibility. The schools could very easily run their own stores to sell junk food, fruit, soda, juices, and the rest, make their own profits, and probably make much more than they are making with these vending machines. I hate that bands (just as an example) sell chocolate from companies that only exist in the world of scholastic welfare. I don’t want some off-brand chocolate at a pretty-high price even if it’s for a good cause.
Maybe the problem is that schools haven’t examined their options. Making a profit isn’t a bad thing, even if it isn’t their raison d’etre.
You know, I think jon’s right, except that he has the good and the bad exactly backwards.
If our young entrepreneurs want to take a case of Twinkies to school and sell them to the kids with too much pocket change, who is the school to compete with that kid and deny them a valuable lesson about capitalism and entrepreneurship? In the context of a school, the school is The State; therefore, *every* good libertarian should be in favor of the school *not* selling junk food (because that would be State-Sponsored Business, or Socialism), in favor of letting the little darlings conduct their own sales at lunchtime. How are they going to learn about the free market if they have to compete with the State’s enormous (in comparison to a ten-year-old’s) economic power?
No, I’m sorry, I can’t keep that up. This is an utterly ludicrous controversy. The argument that the school shouldn’t bother not to sell junk food because the students can just bring their own overlooks that the final arbiter of whether a kid eats junk or not should be THE PARENTS. And by selling junk food there at the school, the school is ensuring that the parent cannot control whether a child has junk food or not except by sending them to school with a lunch and not giving them money. For kids on free or reduced lunch programs, parents are forced to choose between a state benefit or healthy food for their kids.
Any parent who is okay with their kid eating junk food, or wants them to eat junk food, can send them to school with some. My son is 46 lbs at 11 years old; if any parent in the world would actively want her kid to eat junk food at lunchtime, it would be me, and I have no problem with demanding healthy food be served at school. (Hell, part of the problem with my son’s severe underweight issue is that he doesn’t like processed food, so if they served him fresh fruit and uncooked vegetables and other healthy food at lunch, he might even *eat* it.)
So the argument that preventing the school from selling the junk food will not prevent the kids from eating junk food, and therefore it not a worthwhile endeavor, is a straw man. The problem is not that kids eat junk, the problem is that it is too easy for kids to eat junk. A little bit of junk food never hurt a kid, but a steady diet of the crap is horrible. Tone it down so the only junk food you can get at school are at the monthly bake sales and your classmate’s birthday cupcakes, and occasionally your friend who brought in a Twinkie and will sell it to you for a quarter, and aside from that you’d have to bring it yourself so your parents will know and control your level of junk food consumption, and you will have much healthier kids than the ones who are free to buy soda and Hershey bars EVERY SINGLE DAY.
There was an article in the September 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine called “Fifty Years of Blaming America’s Educational System For Our Stupidity”, wherein the author basically describes how as a society have come to expect schools to somehow solve things like child health and nutrition and child abuse, which they are not equipped to do.
I bring this up, because of this last comment from jon–”Maybe the problem is that schools haven’t examined their options. Making a profit isn’t a bad thing, even if it isn’t their raison d’etre.”
I think the problem isn’t that schools could find a way to make a profit and aren’t doing it, or even that schools could, if they just tried hard enough, provide proper nutrition for the kids that don’t get it. I think the problem is that we expect schools to do this, without providing them with the funding, the staffing, the resources, and the true support that would allow them to do either of those things. Any school that does manage to develop adequate programs should be applauded, because I feel like it takes heroics to even do that.
jon: It takes money to run a school
Yes, it does, jon, but the school isn’t supposed to make the money by using the children. The children are there to be educated, not to provide a profitable resource.
and there isn’t enough for everything.
ooh, the old excuse: the US is just a poverty-stricken Third World country and it can’t afford to fund its own schools! Come off it, Jon. That’s almost as numbskullish as the argument that schools are there to make money and they shouldn’t give up sources of profit!
Maybe the problem is that schools haven’t examined their options.
No, Jon. I’d say the problem is way too many people like you who think the US is a Third World country and that schools are there to make a profit out the children sent to them.
(Apologies if this appears twice… there really needs to be a way to tell the difference between “the spambot ate my post” and “it’s in moderation”…)
You know, I think jon’s right, except that he has the good and the bad exactly backwards.
If our young entrepreneurs want to take a case of Twinkies to school and sell them to the kids with too much pocket change, who is the school to compete with that kid and deny them a valuable lesson about capitalism and entrepreneurship? In the context of a school, the school is The State; therefore, *every* good libertarian should be in favor of the school *not* selling junk food (because that would be State-Sponsored Business, or Socialism), in favor of letting the little darlings conduct their own sales at lunchtime. How are they going to learn about the free market if they have to compete with the State’s enormous (in comparison to a ten-year-old’s) economic power?
No, I’m sorry, I can’t keep that up. This is an utterly ludicrous controversy. The argument that the school shouldn’t bother not to sell junk food because the students can just bring their own overlooks that the final arbiter of whether a kid eats junk or not should be THE PARENTS. And by selling junk food there at the school, the school is ensuring that the parent cannot control whether a child has junk food or not except by sending them to school with a lunch and not giving them money. For kids on free or reduced lunch programs, parents are forced to choose between a state benefit or healthy food for their kids.
Any parent who is okay with their kid eating junk food, or wants them to eat junk food, can send them to school with some. My son is 46 lbs at 11 years old; if any parent in the world would actively want her kid to eat junk food at lunchtime, it would be me, and I have no problem with demanding healthy food be served at school. (Hell, part of the problem with my son’s severe underweight issue is that he doesn’t like processed food, so if they served him fresh fruit and uncooked vegetables and other healthy food at lunch, he might even *eat* it.)
So the argument that preventing the school from selling the junk food will not prevent the kids from eating junk food, and therefore it not a worthwhile endeavor, is a straw man. The problem is not that kids eat junk, the problem is that it is too easy for kids to eat junk. A little bit of junk food never hurt a kid, but a steady diet of the crap is horrible. Tone it down so the only junk food you can get at school are at the monthly bake sales and your classmate’s birthday cupcakes, and occasionally your friend who brought in a Twinkie and will sell it to you for a quarter, and aside from that you’d have to bring it yourself so your parents will know and control your level of junk food consumption, and you will have much healthier kids than the ones who are free to buy soda and Hershey bars EVERY SINGLE DAY.
@jon
What makes you think that the schools haven’t looked at their options? It would not be easy to run a store in a school. First, there’s the investment question, if there’s precious little money lying around, where does the case come from for inventory? Second, you have to pay some one to run the thing, even if you could get a little student help in handling the actual sales. I don’t get the sense that there’s cash lying around for that either.
Look, schools used to be much better funded, That meant they could have their own cafeterias, run music and art programs, offer all sorts of learning experiences to students that are just impossible now.
When schools are reduced to having to shill to large junk-food corps to make ends meet, they’re not going to have the cash to open little snack shops.
So it’s nice I didn’t suggest it. You’d have to be a dumbass to misread my post.
And how the hell would you know that I haven’t taught?
And back to the first part: what dumbass would imply that children enter school with discipline? That must be taught. You can’t expect a ten-year-old with $2 burning a hole in his pocket (which is more than I was allowed to carry around at that age without specific instructions, but that’s a different story) to not by sugar. Sugar is chemically addictive. Most adults can’t kick it.
Expecting teachers to be academics and babysitters and sociologists and — on top of everything else — nutritionists is simply insane. You simply can’t ethically justify junk foods in the school from any source.
And arguing that some kid will sell junk food is simply a non-sequitur, especially if the practice is against school rules (which it probably will be). By that specious logic, cocaine should be allowed at high school because if you make it illegal, some students will sell cocaine anyway (and do — QED!).
The point of schools is to help children. Junk food hurts children. So, naturally, someone suggests we sell kids junk food? Jesus, what’s next? An anti-prostitution taskforce that pimps out its clients?
And I’d argue that differences in free lunch quality violates Equal Protection, but the courts already killed that argument. You want to shift all the money from poor neighborhoods to rich schools because you’re on record that you hate the brown people in the former? Legal under our federal Constitution says Scalia. (Illegal under the NY Constitution, but wtf can you do to enforce the judgement?)
And as Ezra notes, if your child absolutely must eat nasty junk food at school, no one is stopping her from bringing it with her lunch.
Says he. Maybe in his school district that’s true, but in other districts schools are confiscating things like maple syrup that kids bring to school to eat with their French Toast Stix, because goddess forbid children should be allowed to consume ZOMGCALORIES. School lunches ARE being examined and “offending” items confiscated, all having to do with the overriding obsession in getting and keeping the children slim, which is now more important than anything on earth. Maybe it’s not happening absolutely everywhere, but don’t be too sure it won’t happen to your kids, and soon.
Look, kids want “junk” food for two reasons. One is that, as Entomologista says, five hours between a bowl of cereal and lunch means hours of not being able to concentrate. No snack foods were ever available when I was going to school, and I about passed out from hypoglycemia on multiple occasions due to not being able to eat very much when I woke up. Thus, the meager “diet lunch” (gotta get slim!) I wolfed down in five seconds because I was so damn hungry was all the food I got. Two is that in most places, school lunchroom food tastes like ASS, and fast food at least has a certain reliable consistency.
I should have said, “Bagged lunches brought to school are being examined and offending items confiscated.” Sorry if that was unclear.
Hector B.: You had a vending machine that sold fruit? I am so jealous.
“Pepsi and Coca-Cola pay big bucks to schools if the schools allow them to install a soda and/or snack machine with their products in it. That’s the revenue stream, not the quarters the kids are putting in.”
Guaranteed future customers, whether or not the machines pay for themselves. I bet the tobacco companies are jealous…
oh for fuck’s sake, confiscation of maple syrup in one school in one school district does not mean the Apocalypse is upon us. It’s just as fallacious to argue from that one case as you complained Ezra was doing nort a paragraph before
Maybe if our schools focused on, oh, actually educating our kids, rather than pumping school tax money into sports programs, they wouldn’t need to sell out to fast food and vending corps.
Wait, I’m talking about MY school district, where they don’t have enough classrooms (they have two dozen of those nifty trailer things), but the football jockoffs damn sure have ASTRO-FUCKING-TURF in their “seats 5,000, with night-lights” stadium.
“That’s the sad part here: because school funding has been cut to the bone, the schools are dependent on this junk food money just to keep going.”
I wonder what would happen if the schools got more money? Ahhh, but that’s just crazy talk!
Everybody knows “You can’t fix problems by throwing money at them!”
(Note: this phrase not legally binding on certain government-provided functions, department, or agencies - such as Dept. of Defense, Agriculture Dept., Dept. of Homeland Security, DEA, etc. Also cannot be applied to bridges built in Alaska, dams and water projects, and anything Rudy Giuliani needs for logistical support during an ongoing affair….)
Good grief. I don’t so much disagree with this post, but it just makes me nostaglic for my childhood when my grandma could pack a Twinkie for me at lunch and nobody was ready to call social services for child abuse!
Also, when I was a kid, running around outside wasn’t called “fitness” it was called “playing.”
I’m in the position of defending the status quo at the same time I want to kill it. Schools are selling out the interests of our children, and that’s bad enough. What’s worse (my opinion) is that they are doing so in a way that isn’t as profitable as it could be if they did it on their own. Some say they shouldn’t do that, and I can’t strongly disagree. I am not sure I agree, but that’s not the issue. But I do suggest that with the money woes of schools, losing a funding source (even a small one) should be worth something. And whether this is or isn’t worth it isn’t something that would fit on a financial ledger.
that doesn’t mean it wasn’t fitness.
jon: Schools are selling out the interests of our children, and that’s bad enough. What’s worse (my opinion) is that they are doing so in a way that isn’t as profitable as it could be if they did it on their own.
Oh, for crying out loud, Jon - how many times do you have to be told before you get it through your numb skull: it is not a school’s business to regard the children they are supposed to teach as a source of profit. Not, not, not. It is not acceptable, it is not right, and it is not on. It doesn’t matter which way a school could make more money out of “their children”: they shouldn’t be doing it in the first place!
Hmmm…my middle school sold school supplies in the front office and they had these really awesome scented pencils. I don’t know how they did it, but they smelled like specific candy (like if you bought a Reese’s pencil it would smell like a Reese’s Cup, etc…).
Those were totally cool. Must go to Ebay and look for them…
Rachel, you’re right, I was engaging in fitness when I used to play outside as a child. But this isn’t a matter of linguistics.
It’s being turned into a means to and end. A chore if you will. “You must go outside and exercise so you won’t get the dreaded obesity sickness. You must be FIT not FAT!” So I can imagine it doesn’t have the sheer joy of just going outside, running around, and having a great time. Kids want to start dieting at 6 years old now! I didn’t know what that MEANT at 6 years old.
I think I was pretty lucky. I wish children were given the chance to just be children and have fun again.
Jesurgislac,
If it’s not the schools’ job to sell things, then ban the sale of things by schools. That’s as simple as your assertion that I don’t understand your point. But here in the real world, the schools get needed money by selling things. Banning the sale of junk food might inspire more healthy eating, but only if the schools offer healthy alternatives. I have little confidence they would. Juice is pretty damn high in calories, fruits have lots of sugar, and vegetables spoil easily (and we all know school food is always of the highest quality.) And most of those granola bars are held together with corn syrup. I’m not saying “Avoid the produce!” so much as “Is this really the solution, or is this just a feel-good measure?” Just because something is a good idea doesn’t mean it won’t create additional problems with its implementation. And if you take that to mean I support junk food sales in school, I clearly can’t dissuade you from that.
Oh, and also, those lovely pictures of fruits and veggies that accompany this story? It would be nice if most kids in school were ever served produce that actually looked like that. Unfortunately, what most kids are actually “treated” to is overripe or underripe fruit, and vegetables (usually canned or frozen) that have been cooked to death. Way to turn kids off to anything that grows in the ground (and hasn’t been boiled in oil) for life.
“I wish children were given the chance to just be children and have fun again.”
Fun? FUN?!? Don’t you realize that EVERYTHING CHANGED after 9/11?
We need generations of fit young warriors! Fun does not not figure in that deadly calculus…
(BTW, snark aside, I know exactly what you mean. Being a child was never a bowl of cherries, but we do seem to have successfully extracted any remaining pleasure and handed the dessicated corpse back to our sadly deprived kids…)
NOOC,
I can relate. Most elementary school classmates and I were rarely, if ever given any cash to carry around not only to guard against us buying sweets, but also to prevent us from becoming potential mugging targets in our then urban working-class neighborhood.
In fact, I didn’t start to carry cash regularly until I was in junior high and high school and that was because I started working a part-time cashier’s job at a stationary store for school supplies and spending money.
The selling of junk food is a travesty and underscores the deleterious effects on our public schools, especially those in urban areas from decades of neglect from all levels of government.
children are still children, but conditions around childhood have changed.
I guess I’m just aggravated (and haven’t eaten lunch yet) at the “good old days” rhetoric around childhood.
Yes, some of us got to run around a lot when we were kids.
Yes, some parents don’t let their kids do it anymore because they’re unduly worried or live in dangerous neighborhoods.
Yes, there are more obese children than there were, but there are also more obese adults (who were once the running around, careless children). Is the difference something about childhood is is it something about our society? It’s clearly the latter.
I live in a neighborhood where some of the kids play football in the street and I see others shuttled off to different practices (soccer, I’m guessing from the gear). Both groups look pretty happy at play.
I doubt that children now are much more unhappy than they were 50 years ago. I bet they’re a lot happier than they would have been 100 years ago, when many of them would have been working.
There’s something about nostalgia that just annoys the living piss out of me.
jon: But here in the real world, the schools get needed money by selling things.
You mean, in the undeveloped Third World country you live in, which is too poverty-stricken to be able to fund education?
And if you take that to mean I support junk food sales in school, I clearly can’t dissuade you from that.
Oh, goal-post shifting! What you’ve been arguing for is that schools are profit-making entities, that use children as a resource to make money. Repeatedly. Get it into your thick head that schools are not there to profit out of the children they educate, and you can then join in the discussion about junk food.
I’m too lazy to go back and see who mentioned the maple syrup being confiscated, but it isn’t just “one school district” imposing the school nutrition rules on food brought from home. In Pennsylvania (and I HAVE to believe we’re not the only state doing this) any school that participates in the subsidized lunch program has to enforce their “healthy snack” policy on every student, regardless of whether they are buying school food and bringing their own. We received a VERY restrictive list at the beginning of the year that the kids are allowed to pack for their snacks and lunch, and were also informed that children can no longer bring in a special snack for their birthday if it violates the policy. Now I don’t know about you, but I think saying that once or twice a month 1st graders can’t have a freakin’ cupcake to celebrate a child’s birthday is a LITTLE ridiculous.
Hence, the blog: http://veganlunchbox.blogspot.com/ where a vegan mom shows what she packed for her child over the course of a year.
I grew up vegetarian and there were NO options for me from the school cafeteria until I reached high school, and then the option was that I was allowed off campus at lunchtime to get my own lunch where ever I wanted. In elementary school I had NO options whatsever, nothing, nada, zip. In junior high school my options were limited to french fries and the occasional fruit.
We need to get those soda machine and fast food out of the cafeterias, but we also need to get more fresh fruit and veggies in. Our schools are filled with meat and dairy, surplus that the government buys cheap, but that trains children to eat high fat, high cholesterol, high bacteria-laden and hormone-induced foods. “Milk does a body good” is a big, fat lie. It’s propaganda and it doesn’t belong in our schools. The majority of humans are lactose intolerant! More: http://www.milksucks.com/
From the Office,
Though you have a point, many nostalgic people are going by their own personal experiences which may be happier than those of their children.
My mother remembered her high school as a far more carefree and happy one compared to what she observed in her children or her younger nieces and nephews who were concerned about issues such as teen pregnancy, street violence, public school funding issues, planning for college and career, and whether Social Security would exist for when we get old among other things. These were issues she never thought to be concerned about at our age (13-18).
On the other hand, my father has little nostalgia for the past as he had to fend for himself since he was 12 due to early parental deaths and the chaos arising from the Chinese Civil War. From his vantage point, he often feels most American children and adolescents had it far easier than he did at their age.
I think my comment got caught by the spam trapper.
Here’s some anti-nostalgia to complement all the nostalgia in this thread: At least at the HS where I work, the cafeteria lunches are fucking banquets compared to the swill I had to choke down when I was in high school, but I still see plenty of kids toting fast food bags back to class after lunchtime.
I’m loathe to call someone a liar, but the entire state of Pennsylvania doesn’t seem to be snatching cupcakes out of kids’ hands. In fact, they ask parents to bring enough for the whole class (see page 34)
Here’s the actual policy.
OK, I think that things are being conflated with the whole cupcake/maple syrup (and other things) ban. The issue of the post is whether or not schools should be in the business of selling junk food.
As a general rule I would say that if parents are fine with sending junk food to their schools, then they should be able to. However, I don’t think that selling crap is appropriate for a school to do, at least on a regular basis.
The earlier discussion of smuggler’s premium is just so much crap. Governments and companies routinely “cheat” themselves out of revenue streams for ethical or social reasons. If getting maximum revenue for the school is the goal, then why not just set up peeping cameras in the locker rooms and lavatories? I’ll bet they could make a mint.
Final note, even if schools are selling some junk food, shouldn’t healthy food be at least some part of the option. Most of the schools I taught at only had crap or else a very limited supply of juice and water along with the sodas (not coincendentally the healthy options were more expensive). Not to mention, the money was clearly lining someone’s pockets.
I’m hardly THAT nostalgic for my 1970s childhood! I just think all the focus on weight, fitness, and yes, even nutritian for young children leaves them more likely to develop eating disorders very early on.
Fitness is being sold these days as something you need to force children to do so that they won’t get fat. When it was just considered outdoor playing you didn’t need to make kids to do it for their health. The hard work would have come in trying to STOP them from going out to play!
As for whether or not they’re confiscating junk foods on kids at school, I have no idea, I don’t have kids. And I agree wholeheartedly that the schools don’t need to be in the business of providing sweet treats for kids. However, I think that in the current climate, putting a Twinkie in your child’s lunch box is being related to as giving them a loaded gun or crack or something like that! Sometimes a Twinkie is just a Twinkie. I ate one with my lunch every day as a kid, and here I am, 37 years old and alive to tell you about it!
I think my longer post is caught in the moderation queue.
short version - there is no record of Pennsylvanian schools being forced to snatch sweets out of kids’ hands. In fact, one link I provided asked parents to bring enough treats for everyone if they’re bringing in anything for their child’s birthday celebration. The state program is pretty clear and not draconian, but you’ll have to wait for the links to show up.
If you think that kids don’t play outside because someone calls it fitness, I don’t know what to say. There are a number of reasons why kids don’t play outside as much as they did twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years ago. None of them have anything to do with the name of the activity.
Eating disorders? If you’re talking about anorexia, knowledge about food isn’t going to make that happen , as I’m sure you must know.
YES YES YES YES YES!!!!!! I TOTALLY AGREE!
Fitness is being sold these days as something you need to force children to do so that they won’t get fat. When it was just considered outdoor playing you didn’t need to make kids to do it for their health. The hard work would have come in trying to STOP them from going out to play!
Uh, kids haven’t stopped going outside to play because they were told it was “fitness” and not “play.” Kids stopped going outside because media-fueled hysteria told parents that if their child ever — even once — set foot outside unescorted by a parent, the child would be immediately swooped up by roving bands of pedophiles, never to be seen again.
This has come up before. Compared to kids today, I’m astounded at how much freedom I was allowed to have just riding my bike around the neighborhood or walking to and from school or my friends’ houses. And I had very strict, paranoid parents at the time (wanted to be called when I arrived somewhere, etc.)
I used to teach elementary school in a major city in California, and I just wanted to pipe up with a couple of comments:
1. I have no problem with birthday cupcakes. Hostess cupcakes day after day for snack are another matter entirely.
2. Many of the students in my low-income district got most of their food at school. I have had more than a few students who eat nothing on the weekends. When writing an essay about her week-long spring vacation, one student wrote that she couldn’t wait for school to start again because she and her siblings ate nothing but cereal for 9 days straight. There were large signs posted on the cafeteria doors reminding parents that they were not allowed inside during breakfast-serving times and that children were not allowed to bring food out of the cafeteria and give it to their parents or younger siblings.
3. The food in the federal lunch and breakfast programs is TERRIBLE. Salty, sugary, microwaved, pre-packaged RUBBISH. They published the average nutrition content of the lunches in a school-wide newsletter once - lunches averaged 850 calories and over 30 grams of fat, breakfasts 600+ calories and 25 grams of fat. For 6- and 7-year olds. Pizza, burritos, corndogs, hamburgers. No vegetarian food during Lent in a predominantly Catholic Mexican-American community. It was DISGRACEFUL and DISGUSTING.
6. People in our country are literally starving. Food stamps are not enough. WIC is not enough. I won’t rehash all of the problems with the availability of nutritious and accessible food in low-income communities here - it’s enough to say that providing good food to low-income students is a social justice and civil rights issue.
5. Bad food makes kids sick. One year, in a 20-kid class of 2nd graders, I had 2 with diagnosed kidney problems that caused them to pee uncontrollably and unpredictably, two 7-year-olds who weighed more than I did, and more cavities than I care to remember. When poor kids have tooth issues, they don’t get fixed - a dentist paints them with some silver stuff and waits for them to fall out. One kid cried for weeks because her teeth hurt her so much and there was no way to get her to a dentist.
6. I once saw a teacher cry when, after asking a parent whether anything in her child’s diet might be contributing to his behavior problems in school, the parent responded that the 4th grader generally drank one or two Red Bulls with breakfast.
I am not blind to the issues of racism that come into play when white teachers and school administrators step in on issues of child-rearing, and food issues strike close to home there. At the same time, there is some urgency here. I wish we lived in a country that made it a priority to make sure that every child had access to three nutritious meals every day, but such is not the case.
Kids stopped going outside because media-fueled hysteria told parents that if their child ever — even once — set foot outside unescorted by a parent, the child would be immediately swooped up by roving bands of pedophiles, never to be seen again.
The school in my neighborhood used to be surrounded by patrol kids with stop signs on long sticks, etc. But, hardly any kids walk to school any more, and those who do come with their mothers. Instead, so many kids are dropped off by their parents that the school dug up a 60′ x 100′ plot of lawn, and replaced it with a paved dropoff area. So child paranoia means a healthy walk to school has been replaced by a line of idling SUVs.
But, Megan’s Law made parents aware that there is a pervert on every other block or so. So I can’t really really blame them.
But, Megan’s Law made parents aware that there is a pervert on every other block or so. So I can’t really really blame them.
The way I usually put it is, there’s a one-in-a-million chance that your child will be abducted and murdered by a stranger … but no parent wants to end up as that one. So, no, I don’t blame them, either, but it’s a factor that can’t be ignored or dismissed.
As a teacher, I’m enjoying the nutritional standards. At first, most of us were panicked. “What, I can’t give them a Jolly Rancher?” Now, it makes perfect sense. Why were we rewarding them with food? What sort of message were we sending?
Another nice side effect: we regularly drowned our community with fund-raisers. Beef jerky, Hickory Farms sausages, See’s Candy at Halloween and Christmas and Valentine’s Day and Easter. Every week, it seemed, a new fund raiser. And I had to drum up support in my homeroom, even though I hated every moment of it (technically, I volunteered my support, but I was “strongly encouraged” to do so). There’s a lot less fund-raising now. Yeah, we’re a little short. Less funding for sports (incidentally, there is $0 in our budget for sports. All sports are paid for with fund-raisers). But I feel much better now, knowing I’m not milking our parents to pay for their child’s educational experience.
Hector B.
December 4, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Because DARE is ineffective, schools should sell marijuana, too. Then kids would have the munchies, which would increase sales of profitable junk food. Everybody wins!
@hector b.:
laaaugh!
healthy beverage out the nose!
I’ve been in elementary education for 20 years, and the changes in children’s health, fitness, diet, exercise, etc. has been significant–and like any major shift, has more than one cause, and more than one result.
There’s no denying junk food is part of the problem, and the marketing being targeted at kids to make them users-for-life is another part of it. (They don’t call it “branding” for nothing.) Schools don’t need to be enablers.
If you offer kids the lunch choice of broccoli or birthday cake, most of them will opt for cake. (Let’s face it, some of us would, too.) Offer them the choice of broccoli or fresh fruit, and no matter which they choose, everybody wins.
Don’t ask me how to pay for it: I’m playing an imaginary game already…
If you truly think that demonizing junk food and scrutinizing what our kids eat–and encouraging them to obsess about it–is a good thing, I invite you to read a recent post at my blog: http://harrietbrown.blogspot.com/2007/11/mom-im-too-fat.html.
Then tell me what you think.
If you really think demonizing “junk food” (read: anything with fat or sugar in it) and teaching kids to obsess over “healthy eating” is an excellent idea, I invite you to read a recent post at my blog: http://harrietbrown.blogspot.com/2007/11/mom-im-too-fat.html
Then tell me what you think.
Oops–sorry for the double comment. It’s my first time here and I thought it hadn’t gone through.
McMegan on school lunch ‘paternalism’:
“For some reason, this puts me in mind of the discussions one hears about birth control and child labor in the developing world: to wit, there seems to be an assumption that people in far off places, particularly ones with funny religions and/or skin colors, do not have children for the same reasons that the right-thinking folks around here do. Because they seem to regard their children as some sort of undifferentiated herd animals, rather than loving the heck out of those adorable little tykes, we need to step in and make some decisions about how they should go about this reproduction business.“
MH: AND ANOTHER THING: even if you want to go down the “schools are a business” road - in this metaphor, the product the business turns out is EDUCATED, DISCIPLINED, KNOWLEDGABLE graduates.
Bet you that there is a significant number of folks claiming which religious fervor that the goal of any business is not to produce anything, or serve anyone, but to make money. Products and service (as anything else) are optional and should not get in the way of making money.
MH: Spoken like someone who has never had to teach. You gotta be a monumental jackass to suggest that classrooms need LESS discipline.
Pretty sure that “disciplined” was an adjective in the sentence you took exception to, not a verb.
Mnemosyne, way to completely avoid my point!
When I was a child I was told never to take candy from strangers. One day an elderly man tried to hand me a piece of candy and I screamed “No! I won’t take your candy, you stranger!” and then I ran away in terror. Not to mention the constant stories of poisoned Halloween candy (or the candy with the razor in it - take your pick). The point being that while times might be more paranoid than ever, it’s not like parents didn’t put fear in the hearts of their children back in the olden times of the 70s and 80s! I’m also willing to bet that there are still children who go outside to play. Not every parent is keeping their kids under lock and key because of Megan’s Law - I mean c’mon!
My point, which you didn’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole, was that in this OBESITY CRISIS!!! hysteria, we’re relating to kids like a bunch of lazy, junk-food swilling dummies, who learned their wicked ways from their fat, lazy parents. It’s simply bogus. Because obesity is a bogus crisis. The average person weighs about 7 - 10 lbs more than they did 20 years ago, and the reason overweight has skyrocketed is because the standards of overweight have been lowered. There is a real skyrocketing of teen suicide rates, particularly teenage girls. Bullying fat kids is practically public policy now; it’s gotten out of hand. This obsession with weight and fitness is unhealthy! Especially for children.
So while I support taking on the big food companies in demanding that they stop corrupting our food supplies for bigger profits I don’t support people who call themselves progressives expressing contempt, ooops, I mean concern, for our so-called epidemic of fat, inactive children.
Kids should play sports and run around outdoors because it makes them happy and they love doing it. Once you turn it into something they have to do for their health, you strip the joy right out of it. And yeah, I think that’s a real shame.
Harriet:
I think the anonymous who replied first to your post pretty much nails it.
Regarding walking to school:
While some parents might not allow their kids to walk to school because they’re afraid of crazy perverts, the parents I know are worried about a much more prevalent threat: cars.
As many of you know, cities these days are usually designed around the car not the pedestrian. Roads are wide, often without bike lanes, and uninviting sidewalks. There is often very little shade or protection from the elements or the road. Not even bus stops have shelters. Couple that with more and more cars (where now each family has two cars when ‘back in the day’ they only had one) and more and more driving (living further away from work and school) and you’ve got unsafe pedestrian environments.
For the vast majority of children growing up in today’s American suburb, it simply isn’t safe to walk to school. They’ll get hit by a car.
City/urban planners are realizing this and changing heir plans to cater less to the automobile and more towards the humans, but it’s going to be slow-going. You can’t transform suburbia overnight.
Fresh fruit and veggies are not as expensive as we’re led to believe. The reason for that is that meat and dairy are heavily subsidized by corporate welfare programs. So, if we stop subsidizing the foods that are less healthy and start subsidizing the foods that are more healthy, we’ll see a drop in consumer prices of healthy foods.
See “Why A Salad Costs More Than A Big Mac” for details:
http://www.pcrm.org/magazine/gm07autumn/health_pork.html
It’s all about the Farm Bill - all of it. The farm subsities, the WIC and food stamp stuff, the school lunch programs. When we ask “what can I do about it?” the answer is make a big stinking deal about corporate welfare. The answer is lobby for change. The answer is pressure your representative. The answer is change the laws.
If one is talking carrot sticks, whole apples and oranges; spoilage really isn’t so big a worry either. Strawberries, tomatoes, other highly parishable and easily bruised fruit; okay. When my kids were kids, they would have preferred grapes to most of the school lunch “sweets” available.
The town one over has banned peanut products from the elementary schools - not provided by them and segregated to a special table if brought from home for a decade. This year the local Vo Tech sophmore class fundraiser is frozen cookie dough - including peanutbutter.