Michael Gaynor
Putting unconsumed food favored for school children by First Lady Michelle Obama to good use
FacebookTwitter
By Michael Gaynor
September 8, 2014

Count of American decency and ingenuity to salvage some of the healthy lunch items famously promoted by the First Lady that school children would rather leave untouched than eat or drink.

Part of the Obama plan to fundamental transform the United States of America is changing the eating happens of Americans, especially school children.

It hasn't gone well in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Bob Livingston, "Another Economics Lesson For The Statists" (http://personalliberty.com/another-economics-lesson-statists/):

"Lured by the promise of federal subsidies (read 'free' money), school systems across the country went all in on the Michelle Obama pet project National School Lunch Program's Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act that posed strict limits on calories, fat, sugar, carbohydrates and sodium in school lunches and also limited the types of snacks available and foods served at other school activities. As was usual with the collectivists, we were told it was all about the children: particularly, childhood obesity.

"School lunch programs and vending machines have long been cash cows for school systems. The more 'needy' children that schools could recruit into their 'free' or 'reduced' lunch programs with the lure of two or three 'hots' a day, the more federal largess the school districts received. Vending machines peddling Twinkies, Ding-Dongs, chocolate bars and sodas could pull in incomes of five figures in a single year. Bake sale fundraisers typically pulled in hundreds more to help fund extracurricular activities.

"But it turns out kids don't want what Obama is peddling. School districts have seen a sharp decline in school lunch participation and a sharp increase in school waste. The lost sales have school cafeterias struggling to make ends meet. The end of fundraisers has restricted extra activities the kids could pursue.

"According to a survey by the School Nutrition Association (SNA), about 25 percent of school lunch programs have lost money for the past six months because of the new Obama-inspired menus. In New York, more than 75 percent of school districts are losing money because of the new federal lunch and snack regulations, Todd Fowler, food service director at the Bloomfield and Canandaigua schools told The Henrietta Post.

"The SNA reports that statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show a decline in student lunch participation in 49 states since the new standards took effect. Millions of kids are now shunning school lunches.

"'The students are clearly voting with their pocket book,' Warren Consolidated Schools Superintendent Robert Livernois told the EAGNews.com. 'What I see down the road, as these regulations become stiffer, is our paying customers continuing to vote with their wallet and going elsewhere for their meals.'"

Those students receiving free or subsidized meals aren't voting with their pocketbooks, but many of them have been expressing themselves by tossing unwanted food and drink into trash bins in their school cafeteria.

Count of American decency and ingenuity to salvage some of the healthy lunch items famously promoted by the First Lady that school children would rather leave untouched than eat or drink.

Fox News's Elizabeth Hasselbeck recently commented that "not only do [school children] refuse to eat [some of the food they are served], it's costing schools even more money when they throw it away."

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act enacted in 2010 incorporated nutritional guidelines from the First Lady's campaign to end childhood obesity.

Predictably, school children, even school children receiving free meals at school, did not always like what they were supposed to like and threw it away.

Trash bins in the school cafeteria filled with some good food and drink, including apples, oranges and still sealed juice containers.

On September 4, 2014, Daniel Greenfield, in "Michelle Obama's Inedible School Lunches Lead to Food Redistribution" (www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/michelle-obamas-inedible-school-lunches-lead-to-food-redistribution/) reported:

"The U.S. Agriculture Department has found an upside to all those 'healthy' school lunches that students refuse to eat: It says schools can use the plate waste as a 'learning opportunity' to turn young students into 'civic-minded, community-conscious adults.'

"A blog on the USDA website explains that an elementary school in Northern Virginia is now donating untouched food to a local food pantry."

Greenfield's snarky, but spot on analysis:

"That's great. We can spend money on 'lunch programs' that won't go to the kids. The entire setup is already pork city (the political kind) with lobbies for various agricultural concerns competing over what should be in the 'healthy' menu.

"Now money will be spend on food that kids won't eat. So maybe the deliveries can go straight to the food panties. Because it's all for the kids."

BUT...while individual schools can't change federal law or federal policy, they can make the best of the situation and it's better that the health food be consumed by people who appreciate it than used as landfill and taken away for free than paid for to be taken away. Food picked up by a food pantry won't have to be paid to be taken to the local dump.

Kudos to those schools whose students may put those uneaten apples and oranges and sealed juice containers they have been served in bins from which they will be distributed to poor people who'll appreciate having them!

Is it "food redistribution"?

Of course.

But it also American ingenuity making the best of a bad situation until food that students prefer to eat rather than throw away is made available to those students.

That will taken a new administration.

© Michael Gaynor

 

The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)

Click to enlarge

Michael Gaynor

Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member... (more)

Subscribe

Receive future articles by Michael Gaynor: Click here

More by this author

August 7, 2023
Elections can be 'stolen' in many ways, and the 2020 U.S. presidential election is a 'perfect' example


April 11, 2023
'Politics ain't beanbag,' but investigation and prosecution of Donald Trump by rabid partisans must stop


January 16, 2023
Perhaps learning why the Pearl Harbor attack was a surprise in Hawaii but not in Washington can help us appreciate and learn from other federal government mistakes and move forward wisely


November 4, 2022
Free True the Vote's Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips


October 3, 2022
Who Sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines?


August 13, 2022
Mar-a-Lago raid shows Trump derangement syndrome has fortuitously worsened


July 5, 2022
From the Warren Court to Roberts Court to Thomas Court


May 21, 2022
Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been barred from receiving Holy Communion at last


November 19, 2021
Justice ultimately prevailed in the Kyle Rittenhouse case


September 1, 2021
Is Afghanistan President Biden's Waterloo, or America's, too?


More articles

 

Stephen Stone
The most egregious lies Evan McMullin and the media have told about Sen. Mike Lee

Siena Hoefling
Protect the Children: Update with VIDEO

Stephen Stone
Flashback: Dems' fake claim that Trump and Utah congressional hopeful Burgess Owens want 'renewed nuclear testing' blows up when examined

Jerry Newcombe
Church should be about worship, not entertainment

Laurie Roth
Trump, the truth, and America will prevail in spite of leftist evil plans

Cliff Kincaid
Terrorist attack in Baltimore

Tom DeWeese
DOJ ignores 2nd Amendment

Linda Goudsmit
CHAPTER 11: Critical Race Theory: A species of the ideological thought genus Marxism

Pete Riehm
They have tried everything to destroy Trump, but assassination

Tom DeWeese
When your red state governor dresses in blue

Rev. Mark H. Creech
Revelation Chapter 22: Eternal recompense

Tom DeWeese
YIMBYs, workforce housing, and community land trusts: All means to an end to private property

Jerry Newcombe
The vice president visits an abortion clinic—and the people yawn?

Pete Riehm
Like our Commander-in-Chief, America is clueless, feckless, and powerless

Selwyn Duke
Did anti-white, DEI bias steal a state final spot from a white basketball team?
  More columns

Cartoons


Click for full cartoon
More cartoons

Columnists

Matt C. Abbott
Chris Adamo
Russ J. Alan
Bonnie Alba
Chuck Baldwin
Kevin J. Banet
J. Matt Barber
Fr. Tom Bartolomeo
. . .
[See more]

Sister sites