North Carolina reporter Sara Burrows broke the story about the four-year-old whose home-packed lunch didn’t meet the USDA’s guidelines. She appeared on Fox today with Megyn Kelly. According to Burrows, the inspector who ruled against the four-year-old’s turkey sandwich was from the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Kelly found that they are paid for out of President Obama’s stimulus bill.
KELLY: Who is looking at her lunch, and the lunches of the other children?
BURROWS: We’re still trying to determine exactly who the state employee was. We do know that it was an agent from the Department of Health and Human Services.
KELLY: At the North Carolina level.
BURROWS: Right, at the state level. And according to the school principal, a division within the department comes to the school every year to conduct an evaluation related to the More at Four pre-kindergarten program. And as part of the evaluation, they look at students lunches that are brought from home to make sure that they meet USDA guidelines. And this school, we’re told, lost points this year because too many children were bringing their lunches from home and they did not meet, according to this inspector, the USDA guidelines. And this school, we are told, lost too many points because too many kids were bringing their lunches and they did not meet, according to this inspector, the USDA guidelines. And I’ve been trying to determine from the department this morning, who exactly that agent was, and they said that they are trying to get to the bottom of it.
KELLY: This More at Four, it’s a state program but it’s funded by federal stimulus dollars, and the schools now need to comply with this USDA guidelines and so forth.
Video at the link. In the aftermath of the stimulus bill’s passage, the Obama administration went about claiming that the money was being used to save jobs for firefighters, police, and teachers, essential services (while they were also doling out piles of money to Solyndras and unions). They never told us that it would be used to put the state between parents and their kindergarteners’ mouths. We keep having to pass bills to find out what’s in them.
In addition to our federal tax dollars paying for a police state activity that kings would have shied away from in ages past, there are a couple of other takeaways from this episode. One, there were several kids involved, not just the one, and these inspections have been going on for a while. But only one parent saw fit to take any action, and even that parent is doing her best to keep her name out of the press due to her fear of reprisal. It’s not hard to figure out why other parents haven’t stood up with her.
As I wrote yesterday, fear is the jackboot government’s ally. Citizens are supposed to be the bosses of government workers like these inspectors, the local principal, and so forth on up to the president. But the attitude is one of widespread subservience.
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