Saturday, December 18, 2010
Lunch
President Obama signed the hunger free child act this week setting standards for food quality and allocating money to increase the number of children getting free or reduced cost lunches. One would think there could be no disputing the benefits of such a bill. My question is how much government intervention do we need. When did it become such a burden to feed our own children?The school lunch programs aren't aimed solely at the poorest of the poor in 2009 31.3 million children received free or reduced cost lunches. This is a totally absured waste of tax payers money. When did it become my responsibility to feed someone else child and the governments job to decide what they eat. When I was a child I'm sure my family probably could have applied for the school lunch program and received it because there were so many of us nine all total. We didn't need it though prioritizing and economizing allowed my parents to feed their own children. Sure we ate a lot of peanut butter and jelly and baloney but we did O.K. I'm not for starving children but isn't there a better way than having Washington poke their noses into family finances and dynamics. Wouldn't a little observation and intervention on the local level be a better recourse.
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Not sure how relevant this is to your point, but it occurs to me that school lunches did not come about as a "service" to kids or families who needed something to eat, but as a way for mega-farmers to dump low grade food at a profit. It was essentially a subsidy to big food producers, not a handout for poor kids.
ReplyDeleteMy own feeling is if we're going to be handing money to the rich to dump their excess product, it's okay to give a little to the poor too. My stronger feeling is we shouldn't be allowing producers to dump their crap on schools, but should enforce some kind of standards as to health and quality. No, it's not the role of govt to regulate everything that parents feed their kids, but if we're going to force kids to attend school for 7 hours a day, we should at least make sure that the food options being offered to this captive consumer audience are not destroying their bodies and contributing to the obesity/diabetes/every other dietary disease you can name epidemic ripping the country apart.
For what it's worth.
And hey, Merry Christmas Eve.
I still carry a brown bag to work so how captive are the children. Most times when we say we are captive we are really only captive to our own fears,selfishness' laziness, or preconceptions.
ReplyDeleteMerry Christmas to you and your family as well.