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No, that's you. Look in a mirror lately?
"I was attacked in without provocation."
You are a standing provocation.
No, that's you. Look in a mirror lately?
You clearly fail to understand what stalking is.
What you did to that girl you met on MySpace is stalking.
Me responding to a stupid statement you made in a public forum (and the post was at the top of the forum list), is not stalking.
I INTEND to provoke, since the hole the VRWC/UCA has pushed the country into provokes me intensely. Can't take the pushback, can you, right-wingers?
I believe it is ultimately the responsibility of the parent to provide meals for their kids, but I don't have a problem with schools offering lunch programs. Further, I think I've stated that any decisions about the existing school program could and should be handled at a level below the federal government.
Interesting note...recently here in SA there was a news story about how the free lunch programs have become a profit center for the school districts...there is actually a financial incentive for the schools to bend the rules and get as many kids enrolled as possible because the Feds pay more per lunch than the cost of the meal or the charge to the "non-free" student lunches...
I don't always find bad in others, I just always find stupid in your posts and I'm not even trying.
I raise this question:
Whereas obesity affects the entire nation by increasing the real cost of health care for everyone, why should the cost of some school board in Alabama to serve nothing but Hot Pockets be subsidized by the entire nation?
Aside from the fact that levels below the federal government aren't handling the issue, why should a problem with a national impact be dealt with by a series of local solutions?
There's a school board in Alabama that serves nothing but Hot Pockets?
To clarify, my re-direct is a response to your assertion that school districts will default to the most unhealthy option if they aren't legislated on what to serve and not to serve. I jus think it's a bad assumption. Further, where is the research that suggests obesity, and by extension healthcare costs, are directly tied to the school lunchroom.
Is it that hard to imagine school districts defaulting to unhealthy options? Just look around.
Obviously the link isn't that unhealthy lunches cause obesity, but to require that burden seems a bit steep don't you think? Unhealthy diets lead to obesity, and whereas school lunches are part of that diet, they are a part of the problem.
"imagine school districts defaulting to unhealthy options"
the link I posted above showed how the govt buying excess production dumped some of it on the schools, who, thanks to the Banksters' Great Depression and insane tax cutting, love cheap, filling crap above any question of quality. And it's from the govt and our own BigFarm megacorps, what could be wrong with GMO/x-cide polluted stuff?
Last edited by boutons_deux; 11-20-2011 at 01:25 PM.
It also comes down to what is defined as healthy. Pizza is a perfect "food triangle" food ( The food triangle being the golden standard of a healthy meal for at least 60 years)...bread, vegetable, cheese, and meat all wrapped up in one serving...
It's a steep burden of proof, but if you want to assert that school lunchrooms are full of nothing but junk food, you have to do better than "just look around".
I posted the neisd middle school lunch menu for November upstream.
I'm also not necessarily suggesting school lunchrooms are full of nothing but junk food, rather I'm suggesting that they should have NO junk food and be nothing but balanced, healthy options. Junk food should be what parents opt into by sending it with their kids, not an option for kids to get on their own, IMO.
I've never understood why this argument tends to be based only (or at least primarily) on health concerns, rather than also potential educational benefits. It's anecdotal, I know, but the difference in my attention and energy levels after eating a healthy lunch I brought from home and after eating the fatty, processed crap available at school was night and day. Can't help thinking that a focus on healthier lunches made from actual, real food would lead to a more enthusiastic and engaged student body.
Fair enough, if you're keeping it reasonably near 40 degrees. I'm with you on skipping the mayo
What's wrong with (making your own) mayonnaise?
As usual, the BigFood industrial mayo is tasteless, chemical crap.
recipes all over place. If you've only had factory mayonnaise, you're in for a very big and very pleasant surprise when you make your own.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayonnaise
I see your argument as being a federal versus local one, a la WC. Here I assume that you're in favor of the healthiest options for your child should you ever be unable to provide lunch for them.
Ugh...now I have a visual that I really could have done without.
CF brings up a great point above. It more than just the physical benefit. Its about an exposure to healthy foods and the messages sent with your school serving them. Identifying with healthy habits while around your peers can be quite a powerful message for some kids despite what happens at home. Thats anecdotal to be sure, but I believe it to be true for a significant number of kids.
How The Food Industry Eats Your Kid's Lunch
By Lucy Komisar, The New York Times
05 December 11
An increasingly cozy alliance between companies that manufacture processed foods and companies that serve the meals is making students - a captive market - fat and sick while pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. At a time of fiscal austerity, these companies are seducing school administrators with promises to cut costs through privatization. Parents who want healthier meals, meanwhile, are outgunned.
Each day, 32 million children in the United States get lunch at schools that participate in the National School Lunch Program, which uses agricultural surplus to feed children. About 21 million of these students eat free or reduced-price meals, a number that has surged since the recession. The program, which also provides breakfast, costs $13.3 billion a year.
Sadly, it is being mismanaged and exploited. About a quarter of the school nutrition program has been privatized, much of it outsourced to food service management giants like Aramark, based in Philadelphia; Sodexo, based in France; and the Chartwells division of the Compass Group, based in Britain. They work in tandem with food manufacturers like the chicken producers Tyson and Pilgrim's, all of which profit when good food is turned to bad.
Here's one way it works. The Agriculture Department pays about $1 billion a year for commodities like fresh apples and sweet potatoes, chickens and turkeys. Schools get the food free; some cook it on site, but more and more pay processors to turn these healthy ingredients into fried chicken nuggets, fruit pastries, pizza and the like. Some $445 million worth of commodities are sent for processing each year, a nearly 50 percent increase since 2006.
The Agriculture Department doesn't track spending to process the food, but school authorities do. The Michigan Department of Education, for example, gets free raw chicken worth $11.40 a case and sends it for processing into nuggets at $33.45 a case. The schools in San Bernardino, California, spend $14.75 to make French fries out of $5.95 worth of potatoes.
The money is ill spent. The Center for Science in the Public Interest has warned that sending food to be processed often means lower nutritional value and noted that "many schools continue to exceed the standards for fat, saturated fat and sodium." A 2008 study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that by the time many healthier commodities reach students, "they have about the same nutritional value as junk foods."
Monica Zimmer, a Sodexo spokeswoman, said that "much has changed" since those studies, pointing to the company's support for "nutrition education to encourage young students to eat more fruits and vegetables."
Roland Zullo, a researcher at the University of Michigan, found in 2008 that Michigan schools that hired private food-service management firms spent less on labor and food but more on fees and supplies, yielding "no substantive economic savings." Alarmingly, he even found that privatization was associated with lower test scores, hypothesizing that the high-fat and high- sugar foods served by the companies might be the cause. In a later study, in 2010, Dr. Zullo found that Chartwells was able to trim costs by cutting benefits for workers in Ann Arbor schools, but that the schools didn't end up realizing any savings.
Why is this allowed to happen? Part of it is that school authorities don't want the trouble of overseeing real kitchens. Part of it is that the management companies are saving money by not having to pay skilled kitchen workers.
In addition, the management companies have a cozy relationship with food processers, which routinely pay the companies rebates (typically around 14 percent) in return for contracts. The rebates have generally been kept secret from schools, which are charged the full price.
Last year, Andrew M. Cuomo, then the New York State attorney general, won a $20 million settlement over Sodexo's pocketing of such rebates. Other states are following New York and looking into the rebates; the Agriculture Department began its own inquiry in August.
With the crackdown on these rebates, food service companies have turned to another accounting trick. I found evidence that the rebate abuses are continuing, now under the name of "prompt payment discounts," under an Agriculture Department loophole. These discounts, for payments that are often not prompt at all, are really rebates under another name. New York State requires rebates to be returned to schools, but the Sodexo settlement shows how unevenly the ban has been enforced.
The food service companies I spoke with denied any impropriety. "Our culinary philosophy, as a company, is to promote scratch cooking where possible and encourage variety and nutritionally balanced meals," said Ayde Lyons, a Chartwells spokeswoman. "We use minimally processed foods whenever possible."
There are economic and nutritional consequences to privatization. School kitchen workers are generally unionized, with benefits; they are also typically local residents who have children in public schools and care about their well-being. Laid-off school workers become an economic drain instead of a positive force. And the rebate deals with national food manufacturers cut out local farmers and small producers like bakers, who could offer fresh, healthy food and help the local economy.
Children pay the price. Dr. Zullo found that privately managed school cafeterias offered meals that were higher in sugar and fats and made unhealthy snack items - soda, cookies, potato chips - more readily available. The companies were also less likely to use reduced-sugar recipes. Linda Hugle, a retired school principal in Three Rivers, Oregon, told me that when her district switched to Sodexo, "the savings were paltry." She added, "You pay a little less and your kids get strawberry milk, frozen French fries and artificial shortening."
Advocates who fight for better food face an uphill battle. Dorothy Brayley, executive director of Kids First, a nutrition advocacy group in Pawtucket, R.I., told me she encountered resistance in trying to persuade Sodexo to buy from local farmers. (Sodexo says it does buy some local produce and has opened salad bars in many schools.) Donna D. Walsh, a former school board president in Westchester County, N.Y., told me she worked with a supportive superintendent to get Aramark to stop deep-frying food and to open a salad bar. But after a new superintendent came in, she said, the company went back to profit-driven menus of pizza and bagels.
The federal government could intervene. The Agriculture Department proposed new rules this year that would set maximum calories for school meals; require more fruits, vegetables and whole grains; and limit trans fats.
Not surprisingly, the most committed foes of the rules are the same corporations that make money supplying bad food. Aramark, Sodexo and Chartwells, as well as food processing companies like ConAgra, wrote letters arguing, among other things, that children may not want to eat healthier food.
Any increase in fruit and vegetables might result in "plate waste," wrote Sodexo. A protein requirement at breakfast, Aramark said, would hamper efforts to offer "popular breakfast items." Their lobbying persuaded members of Congress to block a once-a-week limit on starchy vegetables and to continue to allow a few tablespoons of tomato sauce on pizza to count as a vegetable serving. Thanks to that cave-in, children will continue to get their vegetables in the form of potatoes for breakfast and pizza for lunch.
One-third of children from the ages of 6 to 19 are overweight or obese. These children could see their life expectancies shortened because of their vulnerability to diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Unfortunately, profit, not health, is the priority of the food service management companies, food processors and even elected officials. Until more parents demand reform of the school lunch system, children will continue to suffer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/op...pagewanted=all
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UCA doing its evil deeds once again, sucking in taxpayer dollars (federal subsidies and local property taxes) and delivering the tiest, cheapest possible.
Let's hear a ROARING CHEER go up from all you blindly PRO-corporate lovers!
That's The Way, uh huh, uh huh, We Like It!
Score One for the Crony Capitalists in the School Lunch Program
In general, the USDA, which seems more concerned with getting food sold than making our children healthy, gets a very poor grade as a nutrition advisor. But it gets worse. Far worse.
Congress just passed an appropriations bill including a particular rider (an additional provision added to a bill which has little connection to the subject matter of the bill) forcing USDA to change its feeble new guidelines in ways that further benefit special interests—and harm kids’ health. Serving the interests of giant food companies, the rider seeks to preserve pizza as a “vegetable” under the school lunch program and also to be sure that unlimited French fries can be served.
http://www.anh-usa.org/crony-capital...lunch-program/
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UCA and its captured USDA and Congress dumping their ty, industrially processed, food-like substances into school children. Corporate-Americans ing up Human-Americans for profit.
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