Feds Target School Bake Sales
On December 3, the lame-duck House passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, previously approved by the Senate. President Obama, doubtless preoccupied with such trivia as taxes, unemployment, Korea, and China, has yet to sign it into law. A mere two hundred and twenty pages long, it has lots of provisions for allocation of funds, demonstration projects, and the like. Many may be worthwhile.
However, included in the legislation is a provision authorizing the secretary of Agriculture to regulate school fundraising bake sales to ensure that they are infrequent and that the goodies sold are nutritionally acceptable. Far from innocuous, that is yet another distasteful and unnecessary intrusion of the federal government into our daily lives.
Under Section 208 of the Act, the secretary of Agriculture is to
establish science-based nutrition standards for foods sold in schools other than foods provided under this Act and the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act (42 U.S.C. 1751 et seq.)
With the two noted exceptions, the standards are to pertain to all foods sold on school campuses at any time during the school day. The standards are to be:
consistent with the most recent Dietary Guidelines for Americans published under section 301 of the National Nutrition Monitoring and Related Research Act of 1990 (7 U.S.C. 5341), including the food groups to encourage and nutrients of concern identified in the Dietary Guidelines.
In establishing the standards,
the Secretary is to consider authoritative scientific recommendations for nutrition standards; existing school nutrition standards, including voluntary standards for beverages and snack foods and State and local standards; the practical application of the nutrition standards.
He can but need not grant:
special exemptions for school-sponsored fundraisers (other than fundraising through vending machines, school stores, snack bars, a la carte sales, and any other exclusions determined by the Secretary), if the fundraisers are approved by the school and are infrequent within the school.
In fewer words, the secretary is required to regulate school bake sales unless he chooses to grant special exemptions. The steps a school district would need to take to secure a special exemption will likely be sufficiently onerous that very few will be sought. At least some schools sponsor bake sales because they need the money; the costs of securing special exemptions could easily outweigh any funds raised.
It seems like a good idea. Healthy kids learn better. I doubt the fundraisers are going to pose a problem. The actual language of the amendment is:
The “infrequent” is obviously to stop schools from just calling every lunch a fundraiser and having nothing but deep-fried mars bars on the menu. As long as the school actually approves the event, I really doubt they’re going to have a problem.
A bit of common-sense, people. Take it down a notch. If the secretary really does ban bake-sales, then there’s going to be a fair bit of resistance to that. It won’t last.
You may,of course, be right. However, the text of the statute says that the Secretary can grant only “special exemptions” for infrequent school sponsored fund raising events (such as bake sales). In construing statutes, it is common to consider the meaning of the words used and to assume that words were not merely included for the fun of it or to take up space. If the word “special” had not been included, or if the word “blanket” had be used instead, then the Secretary could arguably issue a blanket exemption for “infrequent” bake sales. As it is, however, he most likely must make special case by case determinations, based on information contained in individual waiver requests.
There is a related problem involving the word “infrequent.” How often is “infrequent?” Does it matter whether the school involved has several thousand students with multiple organizations to benefit from such sales, or only a few hundred with fewer such organizations? Would ten bake sales per school year be too “frequent” in the latter case but acceptably “infrequent” in the former? Would a school in a poor area and needing substantially more fund raisers (perhaps to purchase school supplies) than a school in a rich area be treated differently? I don’t see how rational determinations as to waivers could be made on other than a case by case basis, following the submission of tedious and expensive waiver requests, the costs of which could well be greater than the benefits of holding such fund raisers.
Sure, the wording will be interpreted by the regulator. And it’ll be an issue if it’s abused.
Here’s my prediction: It won’t be a problem. Schools will hold their bake-sales and multicultural barbecues and they’ll get by with a fax or an email. The secretary is not going to be poring over every application in his evenings, it’ll be devolved.
But people WILL whinge and complain about it anyway. Slightly dubious stories containing unsubstantiated claims will proliferate
Just because healthy food is a good idea does not mean it is a good idea for the government to be mandating it.
It is also a good idea to be “early to bed, early to rise” — so are you alo ok with the federal gov’t specifying what time you go to bed at night and also what time you set your alarm clock to in the morning? Very slippery slope…
Of course! The feds know all and see all, so regulation of ever increasing aspects of our lives is needed for our own good. However, the process can’t be rushed. The article linked below suggests just a few more areas for similarly benign programs.
According to this article,
Hence, it is obvious that
IndianNative American gambling casinos, unlike school bake sales, are good. That seems reasonable to me, I guess. However, lest all who want to protect our children and everyone else from all non-federal stupidity be offended (hardly difficult to do), the resolution should be amended once it hits the Senate to require casinos to serve only food and beverages approved by the Secretary of Agriculture on the same bases as school bake sales. Otherwise, it could be suggested that casino patrons and employees do not deserve federal protection from the wiles of demons sugar, fat and rum. Oh! The horror of it!The possibilities are endless. The congressional dining halls, the White House mess, the dining rooms enjoyed by the military chiefs of staff and lots more need such protection immediately. Mrs. Obama will be proud.
I shall now go commune with Demon Rum and have a piece of cheese cake.
“A slippery slope?”
Pardon me, but this law doesn’t mandate that children eat healthy. If you want to feed your child potato chips soda and chocolate bars, you’re free to place these items in his or her lunch bag.
Even if some bureaucrat decided to nix the bake sale at the school there is nothing to prevent a PTA group from having a bake sale at another location, say a village green. My old school used to have one outside the A&P simply because it got better foot traffic.
That said, at what does nitpicking things for anti-PC become as ridiculous as PC?
I can’t see that a “School Carrot Sale” would bring in as much money as a bake sale. This is just another way for the Federal Government to control your life and the lives of your children. I’m sure the next law will specifically state the exact number of calories you will be able to consume in school. Then the Federal Government will be able to control not only what you can eat, but how much you can eat as well. This is just to condition the general public to accepting less and less over time, so when our economy finally does collapse people will be used to functioning on very little.
Tell me, are the Obamas going to strictly regulate what is eaten in the White House during state dinners and holiday parties? I would like to see them give a 1,000 calorie meal to President Sarkozy of France when he comes into town for a state dinner. Good luck with that, guys, especially selling that idea to the French!
Its not just on the federal level:
My brother has a son in an advanced class in grade school. There is (or rather was) an incentive to keep the kids focused by offering once a month or so, ice cream sundaes. If the kids made the grades, behaved themselves, etc., they got to have ice cream with their choice of toppings. This actually became a very big deal for the kids and according to my brother, it was acted as prize to keep his VERY energetic 8 year old focused (as much as an 8 year old boy can be expected to focus).
Well, the school gets a new ultra-libbie principal. His first order of business? Banning ice cream! You know.. this war on obesity (bro’s son is skinny). Now the kids are only allowed to have yogurt.
Next I would expect meat to be banned (save the world from the global warming effects of animal husbandry.. or some other nonsense).
Wow…of all the problems we have in this country, we chose to center in on the time honored “bake”sale..next the car wash as the kids get too wet.
The officials that passed this need to be tested for bull$#!t disease . Lunches I fully understand. There should be a balanced lunch…
HOWEVER!!!
A good everyday p.e., program would work wonders. Make the kids put down the phone, ipods etc, and exercise everyday. leave the bake sales etc alone
Also, there is so much more to this. It has to do with power, control etc. eroding our freedoms, chipchipchip
A retired pastor in our church helps with serving school meals. The poor kids with free breakfasts throw their milk and fruit away. How can that be changed? He says people that pay for food eat more of what is served.
My kid was no problem. She had a university track scholarship and tried to gain 5 pounds. We never served any proccessed food. We cooked our meals from scratch. If Miss Michelle is concerned about health, she can ask Mr Barry to stop smoking.
We watched a program this summer about changing the school diet in a small town.
> It was disgusting the amount of good food that was thrown away by the kids. The kids gobbled the crap food, threw away fruit, milk, just as the pastor said. It’s a lot to do with what is served, but how the kids are oriented at home. It’s easier to throw fried processed food on the table than to take time to actually cook.
There are crock pots, microwaves, and few if any excuses to raise kids on empty calories. These kids are learning their habits “at home”,
NOTNOTNOT at school. The school program and what they actually eat are mirrored on what goes on at home. Love fruit and milk at home..you will at school too. The bake sale control is a smoke screen.
I wonder though if the price matters so long as they pay something. Might we see some improvement if they had to pay a dime for each meal? It’s a meager enough price that even the impoverished shouldn’t have too much trouble mustering it, but it gives them skin in the game.
I recently found out that even churches are no longer allowed to have bake sales because of some regulation about needing to inspect the facilities where the food was made. So now they do without that little, usually very tasty, fund raiser. Then I heard some mother explaining during the morning commute this week that they have some kind of rules about what sort of food the mothers can send in with kids to school, that it’s better to buy a bag of chips at the school than buy it at the grocery store for some strange reason and something to do with the extreme care taken about nut allergies. So it’s far more than just a desire to minimize the number of bakesales a little.
It is laughable that the rather corpulent FLOTUS is the dictator behind the new Fed Food police. These Marxists in the white house want to control everything. Solution: remove your children from government controlled schools; there will be plenty of government dependents to keep the government schools going. The last thing that the Americanized public schools want or can do is to teach a young person how to read, write and or think.
teacher’s union…get rid of those fat unproductive teachers. The kids and our nation will be better off.
A few years ago, my niece started 9th grade at a brand new high school. They had an innovative approach to weight control. See the school was very large, the lunch time was very short so those kids, 9th graders low on the totem pole, with classes at the far reaches of the school near noon didn’t have time to leave class, traverse the school, eat lunch, then traverse back. So instant diet and exercise program. Although with lots of grumbling, stomachs and generally.
Ah, the ubiquitous school winter garden. If you put enough rocks in it, it doesn’t look so barren. This requirement seems to belie the brilliance of our credentialed class. It should be noted that not so long ago, school was organized around winter because that is when the garden (farm) didn’t grow. Not to mention, that to even make a decent impact on the caloric needs of just a class of thirty, it’s not a garden you need but a farm and long hours in the field tending those crops.
huh
When Mr. Soetero quits smoking and stinking up the White House, we’ll change our eating habits to conform to what they dictate. (We can lie just as good as him!)
By the way; How much is it going to cost to remove the smoking stench from the White House when he’s gone? They’ll have to repaint, too. Isn’t there ‘no smoking’ rules in effect there? It’s a Federal building?
Just had to add this article: You just can’t dream this stuff up!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101209/ap_on_he_me/us_obama_smoking
More half-baked ideas from the fat @sses in the zero admin.
Hey, here’s an idea! Since so many folks are on unemployment or unemployed, why not home-school your kids and remove them from the ‘system’ altogether?
I know, I know. Craaaaaaaaaaazy talk.
They are nothing if not relentless.
No control is too large or too small for them to eschew.
Your thermostat, your gas mileage, the food you eat, the medicine you take…all just grist for the statist mill.
Don’t forget that China banned 2 child families. And uber-statist Tom Friedman (and many others) view China as the penultimate state in the universe. He oozes love for the totalitarians there and prays to Gaia that Obama can somehow acquire the same power that Mao’s successors have.
Coming soon to a town near you.
Leaked memo from Michelle Obama to Arne Duncan on “fat kids”, read it here… http://beautifulletters-bls.blogspot.com/2010/12/no-cupcakes-for-you.html
You do realize that the cited article is a *spoof* right? Someone other than Michelle Obama wrote it and put her name on it in an attempt to satirize her views.
Anyone who thinks America is the “land of the free” should probably line up xeroxes of the paperwork that represents paying the Maldives our tax money to favor climate change agendas, their mandatory car insurance and health insurance, paying our tax money to Palestinian Arabs and 1 million other entities that have nothing directly to do with America and then have their heads examined.
Now bake sales are to be regulated. Soon, selling pants in size 40 will come with an extra tax.
God forbid Michelle and Congress should concentrate on something like, you know, actually rebuilding our crumbling schools and teaching the kids to read and learn, instead of making a big deal out of whether they eat a damn cupcake.
GM spends more on obesity-related healthcare costs than they spend on steel. Just because conservatives have given up and decided to live the rest of their life in stretch pants and wife-beater T-shirts doesn’t mean you have to doom the next generation to a life of similar sloth.
I am seriously sick of some bureaucrat in Washington having the ability to reach into my high school and tell me whether or not I can have a bake sale.
It’s time to buy feathers and rails. Start heating up the tar.
Have our Reps and Senators ever even read the Constitution?
Any kid who reads it in class will know that the Federal Government has no legitimate power to regulate their bake sale.
Drip, drip, drip. Yet another encroachment on individual rights. The intrusive federal govenment continues to attempt to regulate every aspect of our lives. The feds tackle the life and death threat posed by cupcakes. Not the America I grew up in. Not the America the founders envisaged. We must slay this metastasizng monster. Or are we sheep? Baa, baa, baa.
Here’s what the Soetero Regime is really trying to turn us into:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1337077/World-s-fattest-woman-Terri-Smith-told-Diet-die-hitting-50-STONE.html
Isn’t all this wonderful! The kids have to have regulated bake sales but can go right down the street from the school and buy dope to smoke or what ever and no one in the Department of Agriculture seems to care. Would bake sale brownies be ok if they had certified non global warming organic Maryjane in them? I mean, we know sugar is a real killer!
You can hit yourself with a hammer if you want to. You’re right – there are some things that nobody can prevent.
But they can make sure that schools don’t have a financial interest in letting kids eat nothing but junk.
There has not yet been any serious attempt to ban the highly dangerous chemical dihydrogen monoxide from school lunches; for the sake of the children this must be done immediately.
Shamefully, dihydrogen monoxide
Not only is it a “major” component of acid rain, it greatly exceeds all others in volume.
You fell for that, huh?
Nope. I thought it was obviously satire and so saw no need to state the obvious.
The end result of the ‘It takes a village’ nonsense.
Fine. Let’s sell cigarettes in school, too.
Do we really and truly need
Big Nannythe federal government to deal with that and everything else? That’s the question. There are lots of things, some of them bad and some of them worse, which might advantageously be changed.I seem to recall having read somewhere (doubtless a right wing blog) that there are
fifty-sevenfifty states, many counties, many cities, many towns, many school districts and perhaps a few parents capable of reading, writing and even occasional rational thought who care about their children. While the federal government is all wise, all caring, omnipotent and has resources to burn, I’d much prefer to leave everything possible to the locals who, incredible though it may seem, just might have better insights into local conditions than do the wonderful folks in Washington.I’ve been browsing online more than three hours these days, but I by no means found any attention-grabbing article like yours. It?s beautiful value sufficient for me. Personally, if all website owners and bloggers made excellent content as you probably did, the internet will be a lot more helpful than ever before.
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