The Agriculture Department says it will issue new rules on school lunches that will increase the daily and weekly allowance of meat and grains. This follows on the heels of several well publicized lunchtime protests by students who rebelled against the mostly vegetarian fare that the Agriculture Department had previously recommended.
Associated Press:
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told members of Congress in a letter Friday that the department will do away with daily and weekly maximums of meats and grains. Several lawmakers wrote the department after the new rules went into effect in September saying kids aren’t getting enough to eat.
School administrators also complained, saying set maximums on grains and meats are too limiting as they try to plan daily meals.
“This flexibility is being provided to allow more time for the development of products that fit within the new standards while granting schools additional weekly menu planning options to help ensure that children receive a wholesome, nutritious meal every day of the week,” Vilsack said in a letter to Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D.
The new guidelines were intended to address increasing childhood obesity levels. They set limits on calories and salt and phase in whole grains. Schools must offer at least one vegetable or fruit per meal. The department also dictated how much of certain food groups could be served.
While nutritionists and some parents have praised the new school lunch standards, others, including many conservative lawmakers, refer to them as government overreach. Yet many of those same lawmakers also have complained about hearing from constituents who say their kids are hungry at school.
Though broader calorie limits are still in place, the rules tweak will allow school lunch planners to use as many grains and as much meat as they want. In comments to USDA, many had said grains shouldn’t be limited because they are a part of so many meals, and that it was difficult to always find the right size of meat.
Moderation is the key to life. Eat well, but don’t overdue it. There’s nothing wrong with snacks, or sweets, and high calorie deserts as long as they don’t make up the bulk of a kid’s diet. A child will have many more meals with their parents than at school during the course of the year. The primary responsibility for teaching children healthy eating habits lie with the parents and not government.
Why do the feds find it necessary to go completely overboard by force feeding kids healthy food? Teaching kids about nutrition is great. Showing them alternatives to sweets and snacks is fine. But sending a child back to class after lunch hungry either because the portions are too small or the student refused to eat something on the menu is not the answer to inculcating good dietary habits in children.
Excerpt from “Michelle!, the Musical”….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STXco3O2PHI&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Yes, I am especially wary of feeding my child high calorie deserts. I hear the Gobi is especially hard on the wasteline. (lol)
For future reference: desert, one “s”, think “sand;” dessert, two “s,” think “sweet stuff”
That being said, children are hard to come up with a one-size-fits-all diet for. They are notoriously finicky eaters. They have all sorts of different activity levels depending on their varying extracurricular activities. And, because they are still growing, their metabolic needs are going to increase and decrease randomly as they hit growth spurts. Why the Dept. of Ag, thinks they can construct a diet plan of iron-clad guidelines that will absolutely work for every kid across the board and be adequate is beyond me.
Waste should waist. I wish we had an edit feature.
You would be hard pressed to find more corruption and junk science than in the food chain industries. Nutrients for lifes ‘maintenance’ and the process of metabalism have long been fairly understood with scientific consensus for some time. Then comes the competitive nature of free enterprise riddled with competitive and scientific corruption.
Can you imagine the marketing complexity of accepting everybodys nutrient needs and metabolism is uniquely different based upon and endless number of DNA and environmental variables.
There are some great headways being made in the fields of nutrition and metabolism and as they continue, don’t expect them to be compatible with the free enterprise food chain industries.
If only we all fit perfectly into the one size fits all cookie cutters that the government expects us to. Sure obesity is a problem for some individuals, but other kids may be just fine and some may be underweight. Should underweight kids also have limited portions?
Jeez, what is it with the “whole grain” thing– grains, grains, grains– w/ left/liberal dietician folk… what about vegetables and protein?
Who or what gave the Great Intruder (i.e., the federal government) the right to tell us as parents and our children how much and what they may eat? Of course the Obama regime is the extreme, but all of them – since Wilson – have tried to turn our republic into an oligarchy. Perhaps the government has a right to tell the freeloaders, the people who eat at our expense in taxes, what, when, and how to eat but even that is so wrong! As a child of the Great Depression living in Eastern Kentucky I regard it as shameless for people to be on the dole anyway and plain robbery for the government to take A’s money to feed slops to B gobbling at the government trough.
Tyranny. That is all.
“While nutritionists and some parents have praised the new school lunch standards, others, including many conservative lawmakers, refer to them as government overreach.”
My, my! Now, isn’t that typical these days from the conservatives. Scream government overreach? Seems to me that if federal, state and local governments were not predominately paying for the education and the feeding of their children it would be a less hypocritical scream.
Thats why I’m all for returning all public schools to local district funding void of any state and federal assistance. Then each community can come to a consensus of how their children should be fed (if at all) and how they should be taught.
There is nothing preventing people from converting their public school districts from government funded public schools to independent funded schools.
Take your kids OUT of government indoctrination centers. You’ll be doing them a huge favor.