In November, Sarah Palin made a paid appearance at a private school in Pennsylvania. Arriving with dozens of cookies, she explained, "I had heard that there's a debate going on in Pennsylvania over whether public schools are going to ban sweets, cakes, cookies, that type of thing." She characterized the first lady's initiative for school lunches as "a nanny state run amok" and later tweeted that the cookies helped her make a point about "laissez-faire government."
Palin went on to say that "the decisions [about] what you eat" could be made either by the government or by parents. "It should be the parents," she said. Similarly, talk show host Glenn Beck said that in the context of nutrition, the government "thinks you're incapable of making decisions." [See editorial cartoons about Palin.]
Here's more: "Everywhere I go, fortunately, I meet parents who are working very hard to make sure that their kids are healthy. . . . They're trying to teach their kids the kind of healthy habits that will stay with them for a lifetime. . . . But when our kids spend so much of their time each day in school, and when many children get up to half their daily calories from school meals, it's clear that we as a nation have a responsibility to meet as well." The same speaker added: "We can't just leave it up to the parents. I think that parents have a right to expect that their efforts at home won't be undone each day in the school cafeteria or in the vending machine in the hallway. I think that our parents have a right to expect that their kids will be served fresh, healthy food that meets high nutritional standards."
That last speaker was Michelle Obama. Yet most conservatives would have to agree with her that, as parents, we have a right to expect that our schools won't undo the good work families are doing at home. And most taxpayers would agree, too: As a limited-government conservative, I don't want taxpayers' money wasted on school food that is high calorie, low nutrition, and compounding America's obesity epidemic. [See photos of Michelle Obama.]
It is an expensive epidemic. A 2009 study in the journal Health Affairs found that the cost of hospitalizations due to childhood obesity nearly doubled, from $126 million to $238 million, between 2001 and 2005. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the direct and indirect costs of obesity are now as high as $147 billion annually, with Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance spending on obese patients all up over the last decade. Obesity is certainly one of the culprits in exploding entitlement costs, not to mention rising healthcare costs.
It's also causing lost productivity and days missed from work, setting the economy back about $115 billion a year due to disability and related costs for obese workers, according to an actuarial study out last month. Statistics show that more than 40 percent of young adults are now overweight or obese in 39 states, up from just one state a decade ago. In the military, the proportion of 17-to-24-year-old recruits who were rejected for being overweight jumped from 12 percent in 1995 to 21 percent in 2008. In addition, the military discharges more than 1,200 new enlistees each year because of weight issues—at the cost of $50,000 per person, or $60 million annually, to recruit and train their replacements. The costs to our economy and national security will only get worse as the rising percentage of obese children grow up.
Jamie Oliver, the celebrity chef who has started a movement to reform school cafeterias, has documented how decades of food safety rules for school lunches have resulted in nothing but precooked, processed food—such as frozen pizza, french fries, and chicken nuggets—being served because of the possible dangers of raw meat. Combine that with other safety rules about having knives in cafeterias and you've got a situation where many children eat processed "finger food" such as nuggets and fries from kindergarten through eighth grade, using their hands, never once touching a fork or a knife at school. This is what happens when food safety experts—not nutritionists or parents—are in charge of school lunches. Schools should reinforce what parents are teaching kids—not only about the value of a square meal, but how to eat one with a knife and fork.
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Michelle Curry of CA 11:23PM January 26, 2012
Deborah A O'Neill of NC 11:40AM January 21, 2011
john michael of WV 10:52PM January 20, 2011