Last week, a nanny group that wants to make sure your child eats only food deemed “appropriate” by smart people filed lawsuits against the Poway and Los Angeles unified school districts.
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine in Washington, D.C., is upset that kids are eating bacon, sausage, and other processed foods in their school lunches.
They ask the court to bar the districts from serving meals with cured and otherwise modified sources of animal protein on grounds that such foods violate the California education code’s requirement that all school foods served to students be of the “highest quality” and “greatest nutritional value possible.”
“Scientifically, there is no argument. Everybody knows we shouldn’t be serving this stuff to children,” Dr. Neal Barnard said.
It’s none of your business, Mr. Nanny Scientist. If parents don’t like what their schools sell for lunch, they can pack a brown bag with arugula and hemp hearts.
So what’s on the menu that’s so dangerous?
A quick look at the menu for Poway’s elementary schools, which is posted on the district’s website, shows that one processed-meat option was served each day of the first week in April. It was turkey hot dogs on Monday, French toast and sausage on Tuesday, chicken corn dog on Wednesday, chicken nuggets on Thursday and stuffed-crust pepperoni pizza on Friday.
Corn dogs. Who didn’t love corn dog day in school? Someone needs to stop these food Grinches!
There were other non-processed options available to the school students.
But there were also plenty of non-processed options available, from bean and cheese burritos on Monday to orange chicken with rice on Thursday. Yogurt with wheat or Cheez-It crackers is available daily.
The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that Dr. Barnard “said the goal is to remove all processed meats even if districts are doing a decent job offering a variety of choices for students.”
“Simply providing the foods sends the message that processed meats are healthful and part of a nutritious diet, which is clearly at variance with scientific fact,” Barnard said.
It doesn’t send that message. No kid, unless brainwashed by the food police, is thinking about that when he is eating his lunch. Scaring a kid about what he eats is a great way to turn a child into a neurotic, eating-disordered mess. If they are worried about what the school is serving, then they can bring their own lunch.
Just to give you a sense of how off-the-rails these food freaks have become, bologna is in Group One of the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s evidence-based carcinogen classification system. Do you know what other products are in that group? Cigarettes and asbestos.
“A lot of people are taken aback when they learn that bologna is in the same category as cigarettes, but they need to understand that the estimated number of cancer deaths from processed meat is about 34,000 per year while it’s 1 million for smoking,” Brawley said.
American Association of Meat Processors Executive Director Chris Young is pushing back and released this statement.
“Processed meats make up a safe and nutritious part of a balanced diet and there is no scientific data to support removing them from school menus for being unhealthy,” Young said. “When it comes to prevention of cancer and other chronic diseases, it is impractical to segregate a single food as a cause of those issues. Many of the naturally occurring chemicals from healthy fruits and vegetables in our food could be classified as carcinogens. But that doesn’t mean schools should stop serving them since they do not present a health risk at normal levels of consumption. We stand by the nutrition benefits that meat, both fresh and processed, provide for growing children.”
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