Seriously.
The Wall Street Journal today literally proposes ending the subsidized school lunch program for low-income kids in order to force them into Depression-style starvation, on grounds that this will solve the obesity epidemic.
Haven’t we been hearing for years about the obesity epidemic? . . .
Federally subsidized school lunches date back to the National School Lunch Act of 1946. Before then, when there was no such thing as a free lunch, men in the 30s and 40s were trim enough to enlist in the military. “Reducing junk food in schools” is no doubt a good idea, but given the federal government’s nearly 65-year record of fatting up America’s schoolchildren, shouldn’t Congress instead be thinking about cutting back this program, if not ending it altogether?
They aren’t joking. This is how conservatives think.
There simply aren’t words for how stupid, vicious, and inhuman they are. Oh, and remember – the WSJ editors are the respectable conservatives.
Judd
Kevin
Kevin T. Keith
leanleft
tgirsch
Agree with you – mostly. It’s reckless and idiotic to promote the idea of cutting subsidized lunch (and probably breakfast programs – my HS had one of those as well) to address obesity. To me, though, it screamed more of ignorance than of intended viciousness. Even though starvation or extreme low calorie diets would actually be beneficial for obese kids *in terms of getting them in better physical health*, you can’t have kids going hungry in the classroom without extreme consequences. First and foremost, it’s hard to concentrate and think on a low-blood sugar state. The adverse affects on school performance would be huge. Maybe I’m just still looking through rosy-colored glasses, but I really have difficulty believing that conservatives in general (since you haven’t made a distinction otherwise) would connive to starve the poor into failing out of school. Maybe the author, but I’d say it’s more likely that his comment was one of ignorance and carelessness, not viciousness. It seemed an off-the-cuff and not well thought out comment, but there isn’t doubt in my mind that fiscal conservatism did guide him to making a rash and dumb conclusion. My request is that you consider that informed conservatives – ahem *cough cough* – can make better conclusions about how to save money on school lunch programs without starving the poor. Allow me to illustrate:
The amount and types of food being provided in public schools are the problem, not the fact that some kids receive the food on the subsidy, and the subsidy just allows kids to pay less or not have to pay for the same food being served to kids who have to pay for school lunch in the cafeteria.
There is an economic problem that needs to be addressed. We’ve geniusly found a way to pack a lot of calories into some the most inexpensive foodstuffs by using high-fructose corn syrups and high amounts of saturated fats. This was thought to be of some good because it allows people with very little money to get enough calories per day. The problem is that with these foods – fast-food type meals and cafeteria-style meals as well – you need to study up on portions to judge the *amount* of food that you *should* eat, and most people – especially children – wont be able to make this judgment before eating. This is a tough problem to solve. Wouldn’t you think the country would be better-off health-wise without McDonalds and Wendy’s? Last I checked in, however, the general feeling was that a war on fast food chains with the intention of paving the way for more local eateries springing up and more healthful provisions would be met with a lot of resistance from the low-income earners who rely on these calorie-dense and inexpensive foods for sustenance and saving money. You know the NAACP or some other group trying to get attention for their cause would through a fit about it; they’d point to some neighborhood McD’s, show that the customers were 99% poor minorities and declare it a racist attempt to starve minorities out of the country. It *would* happen. It’s not as clear-cut as many people think.
There’s very little need to restrict what the school cafeterias serve, but portions should be better controlled. It’s good that most fast-food chains are now free of trans-fats, because that was some bad juju right there, but is there really a need to go beyond that? Studies have shown that what you eat is secondary to how much you eat. As long as you have small enough portions and are not eating pure lard or margarine, the physiological response to the meal will be far better than if you eat a larger portion – even if it’s all organic whole grains and free-range no preservatives etc. Total calories are what matter. I like the idea of banning soft drinks and some of vending-machine junk foods from public schools, but other than that, there’s not much you can do to make school lunches healthier without totally restricting and monitoring the amount of food each student consumes. From my nutritional perspective, that would be fine idea and would certainly lead to health gains. Note here that I’m slightly conservative, and restricting the freedom to snack on whatever one pleases does ruffle my libertarian feathers a bit, but I’m informed and reasonable enough to understand the problem at hand and consider sound solutions. The obstacles in the way of such a route, of course, is going to involve a whole lot of conservatives and libertarians crying about how people should be able to decide their diets for themselves. But you, KTK, as a thinking man, should also be wise enough to put yourself in the kids shoes: those kids would not enjoy school rations either. So it’s not just a conservative problem, it’s an non-ideality problem: the solution to the problem is unattractive no matter what. Going the “make schools serve organic/fresh fruits and veggies etc route” is really not necessary, and it would be ungodly expensive to implement and not fair to people who fall in the middle – those who can afford to pack their kids a lunch but can’t afford to serve them organic foods, and, like I’ve said, it’s not going to prevent obesity which is caused by over-intake. The only viable solution would be to restrict the serving size where possible, which will be unappealing and is only the best solution, but not a complete one. Some kids, such as athletes who have increased caloric needs due to high physical activity, would probably need some kind of note so they could get a higher portion. Not a bad thing, if you ask me, it might inspire more kids to become athletic so they could be privileged to an increased ration (age old concept).
[...] call of capitalism hit the heights of absurdity is the rationale, as reported by the folks over at Lean Left: The Wall Street Journal today literally proposes ending the subsidized school lunch program for [...]
First, I got quite distracted by the beginning of the WSJ op-ed, which is about Perry. Very surprisingly, that commentary seems to quite accurate with respect to what’ll happen judicially, except of course for the fact that the author seems to think that it’s bad for the court to uphold civil rights. (And there’s yet another quote implying incorrectly that a rational-basis test was applied.)
Barbie, surely ignorance is no defense when it’s correctable and the actual outcome is still so very vicious.
I think your analysis here substantially undervalues caloric output compared to input. Large servings are fine if you then actually burn them off, and changes in physical activity seem at least as salient over recent history than do changes in diet.
Also setting aside the fact that the obesity “epidemic” does seem to actually be a hard problem, the author shows an astonishing degree of imperviousness to historical context.
Using military acceptance rate as a proxy for fitness? Couldn’t there be just a tiny difference in the number of personnel wanted between 2010 and during World War II?!
For that matter, hasn’t junk food changed just a tad in 65 years? Oh, look 10 minutes’ research on Wikipedia tells me that Mars Candy and McDonald’s were both started during the Depression. I don’t suppose the place of those companies in our society has changed at all between now and then.
I don’t see an “impervious”ness to historical context being demonstrated here. I see ignorance of it. The author spoke very briefly and his commentary had more of an off-the-cuff tone than one of conviction. I don’t think he demonstrated that he was impervious to history, I think it’s more likely that you’re imparting your own feelings on “how conservatives think.” In many cases, when the authors speak more at length and demonstrate a vicious carelessness, leanleft has enough substance to argue for that. I don’t think this is one of those examples and I’m not willing to grant it that the author was doing anything more than saying something without thinking it through because, on the very surface, it made sense to him. If his entire op-ed centered on this issue, then yeah, you’d probably be right, but his topic was obviously centered elsewhere and he was just kinda throwin’ it in there, and so to me those appeared to be very half-backed not-thought-out extemporaneous comments. Seriously, it was a few sentences about this, and there’s not enough opinion on that particular issue there to indict him on having such specific convictions about it.
As for the use of military acceptance rates, I don’t think the author meant to infer anything other than “we’ve gotten significantly fatter in the past 60 years.” He doesn’t seem smart enough to be vicious and manipulative, he seems like the kind of dumbass who doesn’t put 2 and 2 together, like he doesn’t look beneath the surface. If you were a kind of “lalala” person, or if you didn’t know better, and I told you that military acceptance rates have gone down based on declines in the overall fitness rates since the 1940′s, your first reaction would probably be to look around for a minute, recall hearing people say how we’re getting fatter as a country, and go,”yeah, that makes sense.”
As for caloric output, I don’t think my analysis is substantially undervaluing the contribution from output. I assumed the connection between intake and output on overall balance would be obvious. If your output decreases while your intake stays the same, then still translates to taking in too much. Both output and intake have similar effects effects on overall balance when it comes to weight gain. So, I was speaking about the results of having intake which exceeds output, and my analysis is still relevant no matter how you get to that imbalance, be it from overeating or from sitting on your ass playing with your game console or your phone all day. If you want to get into though, let me know. I can tell you all about how we’re genetically prone towards not having a precise internal “stomach is full” meter, and how that makes us as a species naturally quite vulnerable to misjudging portion size and taking in too much. When your body is deficient in calories, it thinks it’s starving, it thinks that there’s a lack of food and begins to shut down processes to conserve caloric output. One might think that, on the otherhand, when we’re in a state of excess, the body would tell us to eat less food, but that actually doesn’t happen.
Historically speaking, we used to be more active, and we used to be less independent from homelife and structured meals as kids. You’re right that McDonalds has a new place in our culture: tired parents getting home late from work don’t want to hassle with making dinner so they pick up fast food. But there’s still a little bit of the olden days, where fast food is the cheapest option for meeting calorie needs for those who are impovershed, similarly to how things were during the depression. I would guess that people back then worried less about getting fat by having high calorie meals. But most people today, besides being only slightly aware that McDonalds isn’t great for you, still don’t actually know how to judge portion size, or that even a small imbalance towards over intake will result in high weight gain over a short period of time if the imbalance persists.
It’s more fundamental though, Barbie. We have the technology, and the subsidy dollars, to make whatever kind of calories we choose be the cheap calories. We happen to allocate them in a way that makes the worst grade beef far cheaper than brocoli. As far as the libertarian view, right now there’s only the illusion of choice anyway – the same way I have the choice between buying a used Ford and a brand new Bentley.
The true libertarian solution here would be one that I’d actually support – unfettered market forces leading to market based choices for consumers, both individually and mass providers like the school systems that must provide meals. The prerequisite here though is to de-rig the system such that various foodstuffs cost the consumer what they actually cost to produce, what the model costs to sustain, and covers it’s share of environmental cost. (The latter two are more difficult to figure and more prone to debate, I guess, but I’d settle for the first one for starters.) Then, many shitty foods become luxury goods; and that’s fine with me. If that were to happen, the health crisis would largely take care of itself. The way it’s currently set up, it’s rational for the poor to make decisions that get them fat and give them heart attacks in their forties.
The idea in this editorial isn’t new, btw. The Heritage Foundation has long been using the obesity rate as an argument that means-based benefits are too generous.
Oh, and also btw, conservatives don’t have believe in conniving to starve the poor into failing out of school. They just think that poor, brown people don’t deserve to eat. The failing out of school part, well the conservative line here is these people are poor and often brown, so they’re stupid and lazy and will take care of the failing out of school part on their own, regardless what we do or do not feed them.
“We have the technology, and the subsidy dollars, to make whatever kind of calories we choose be the cheap calories.”
hmmmmmmm. I’m not so sure about that. Can you substantiate that claim for me? I think processed foods – which are less healthy than non-processed foods – are still going to be substantially cheaper than fresh, more healthful foods when you take into account the transportation and storage costs. On a molecular level, the best foods are fresh and as unprocessed as possible. With time, the molecular structure of the nutrients break down – especially true of foods like broccoli and apples, which contain oxidizable phytochemicals – and the foods themselves may spoil and rot. If you freeze the foods, you lose *some* of the nutrients. If you process the foods with preservatives, the molecular structure of the food can become significantly altered to the point where the cost of ridding your body of unrecognizable chemically altered substances i.e. hydrogenated oils or nitrates, nearly trumps any nutritional benefits. I think the cheapest foods to provide en mass are foods which will store the longest and easiest, meaning fewer shipments would be needed, and if the foods are preserved in such a way that they don’t require freezing, then the cost to store them is also decreased.
Frankly, I just don’t see how non-processed foods can be provided to an equal extent and as cheaply as processed foods. I don’t think it’s a matter of technology.
“The way it’s currently set up, it’s rational for the poor to make decisions that get them fat and give them heart attacks in their forties.”
Not so fast, there. Over intake is the predominant cause of obesity. You’d be better off maintaining caloric balance while eating junk food than overeating healthfood. I already pointed out that fast food has the highest caloric density, which makes it difficult to judge portion size. People need to be better informed about making good dietary choices. That they aren’t weighs more on the poor, if you go by the numbers, but its not as limited as you make it seem. Anyone who doesn’t know better will over eat. It’s just harder to overeat on meals prepared from fresh ingredients than on McDonalds.
The fact that obesity rates in kids are climbing should garner some more thought. I think we need to do a better job of educating people on nutrition and instructing them to be more consciencious when it comes to portion size. I don’t think it’s the responsibility of food providers to tell people how and what to eat.