Alternate title: The Stupidity Crisis

Hey guys!  Happy Sunday! I wanted to point your attention to an article in The New York Times a few days ago called “‘Yes!’ to Pop Tarts! Panel Approves Bake-Sale Rules” (2/25/10) here. The article discusses a decision made by New York’s Panel for Education Policy to ban home-made goods from school bake-sales and yet allow processed foods so long as they meet a list of agreed-upon criteria (generated by the panel). If you haven’t been keeping up on NY schools and their bake sale policies (why am I — grad student on the West Coast — paying attention, you ask? For some of us it’s scantily-clad vampire and werewolf men, for others *cough,* it’s food debates! , then here’s the gist:

• A while ago (and before the article referenced above), most bake-sales used to raise funds for school programs were banned in NY city school. See article here (10/2/09). Reasons cited for this include, “Roughly 40 percent of the city’s elementary and middle school students are overweight or obese, according to the Education Department. The department also found a correlation between student health and performance on standardized tests, according to a survey it released in July.” Read the city’s proposed changes memo here, which includes only using vending machines from those the city has a contract with (hmm sounds fishy, no?) and putting timers on the machines so that its contents are inaccessible during meal times.
• Because the above regulation left school programs, clubs and activities hurting since they had relied on bake-sales to raise funds, the city panel amended the rules this past Wednesday.  “Under the new rules, students may sell fresh fruits and vegetables, or one of 27 specific packaged items that have been approved for sales in city vending machines, between the start of school and 6 p.m. on weekdays. The same goes for parent groups, except for an exception carved out for one no-brownies-barred Parent Teacher Association bake sale during the school day per month.”
• Some of the criteria the packaged foods have to meet include that they are one serving only, under 200 calories, without Splenda, and with less than 35% of the calories coming from sugar or fat, among other restrictions.

I guess I’ll say a couple nice things before I unleash the cranky. It’s great that school officials are talking about and taking seriously the fact that we rely too much on processed junk in our schools — both from the vending machines and served up in the cafeteria. Just the fact that people are noticing how kids are duped by lack of information and by misrepresentations by food companies — serving size tricks, crap foods masquerading as health foods, yadda yadda yadda — is awesome. But is saying no to home-baked foods because “’it’s impossible to know what the content is, or what the portion size is’” and yet allowing certain foods like Doritos and Pop Tarts to pass the check-list appropriate? Maybe “appropriate” isn’ the right word. Is this the smart thing to do? If we’re talking about the impossibility of knowing “content” of food, I hardly think Pop Tarts’s ingredients list would fall into a “knowable” range given you’d need to hand a kid a dictionary and chemical engineer to translate.

(Don’t mind my half-ass art. I couldn’t find a picture that said “LAYS in a state of a nature” so I made my own!)

I can just imagine little Johnny goes home from school to a mom who greets him excitedly with home-made banana bread to which he briskly asserts, “mom, I don’t know what you put in that crap, now hand me my Doritos!”

I think skepticism of packaged food is seriously warranted. But we’re kinda talking out of both sides of our crumb-filled mouths if we then allow specific food companies to monopolize our vending machines and “bake-sales” with their pre-approved packaged garbage. Sure, it’s a great idea to limit the sheer volume of crap being sold to kids on campus. Even better to limit it to items that are one-serving and under 200 calories, versus those king-sized monstrosities I so enjoyed in my youth. But what kind of message our we sending if we’re saying, in one breath, take control of your health! And then in another saying, “and it’s only food companies who can show you the way!” I get it if people worry that PTA moms add too much sugar to their blondies and macaroons and serve up cookies the size of baseball mitts, but is banning home-made goods the smart thing to do? Also, we’re sending the wrong message if kids equate the healthiness of an item with its being under 200 calories. We all know you can eat 200 calories of crap. We also know that calories from processed foods are not accepted and treated the same by our bodies as whole foods are.

Howell Wechsler with the CDC said something that stuck with me: “’Schools are supposed to be a place where we establish a model environment, and the last thing kids need is an extra source of pointless calories.’”

Hmm. Stripping responsibility from kids and families and putting it in the hands of food companies doesn’t seem like a model environment — though I can see how it would certainly be a profitable one for food companies and the politicians lobbying for them. Wouldn’t this be a great opportunity for kids and families to discuss how to read food labels, how to decipher what all that ingredient crap is in the foods they buy, how to make healthy home-made treats? (I’m sure parents need to learn this stuff as much as, if not more than, their children do!). Shouldn’t we be empowering people with knowledge? If we didn’t have food companies banking off of misguided consumers and monopolizing our airwaves, t.v.s, and grocery stores it certainly would be easier for families to navigate the basic human necessity to eat. But it ain’t that simple these days, my friends.

What do  you think about policy makers banning home-made goods from schools and yet advocating portion-controlled processed foods? Where do you draw the line between school responsibility and personal responsibility? Who should be teaching our kids about nutrition?

I’d love your thoughts!

<3,

The Cranky One

Tags: bake sales, CDC, food policy, New York Schools, New York Times, Panel for Educational Policy, processed foods, school lunches