Michelle Obama’s Unsavory School Lunch Flop
by Michelle Malkin
MichelleMalkin.com
The road to gastric hell is paved with first lady
Michelle Obama’s Nanny State intentions. Don’t take
my word for it. School kids in Los Angeles have
blown the whistle on the east wing chef-in-chief’s
healthy lunch diktats. Get your Pepto Bismol ready.
The taste of government waste is
indigestion-inducing.
According to a weekend report by the Los Angeles
Times, the city’s “trailblazing introduction of
healthful school lunches has been a flop.” In
response to the public hectoring and financial
inducement of Mrs. Obama’s federally subsidized
anti-obesity campaign, the district dropped chicken
nuggets, corn dogs and flavored milk from the menu
for “beef jambalaya, vegetable curry, pad Thai,
lentil and brown rice cutlets, and quinoa and
black-eyed pea salads.”
Sounds delectable in theory. But in practice, the
initiative has been what L.A. Unified’s food
services director Dennis Barrett plainly concludes
is a “disaster.” While the Obama administration has
showered the nation’s second-largest school district
with nutrition awards, thousands of students voted
with their upset tummies and abandoned the program.
A forbidden-food black market — stoked not just by
students, but also by teachers — is now thriving.
Moreover, “(p)rincipals report massive waste, with
unopened milk cartons and uneaten entrees being
thrown away.”
This despite a massive increase in spending on
nutritional improvements — from $2 million to $20
million alone in the last five years on fresh
produce.
This despite a nearly half-billion-dollar budget
shortfall and 3,000 layoffs earlier this year.
Earlier this spring, L.A. school officials
acknowledged that the sprawling district is left
with a whopping 21,000 uneaten meals a day, in part
because the federal school lunch program “sometimes
requires more food to be served than a child wants
to eat.” The leftovers will now be donated to
nonprofit agencies. But after the recipients hear
about students’ reports of moldy noodles,
undercooked meat and hard rice, one wonders how much
of the “free” food will go down the hatch — or down
the drain. Ahhh, savor the flavor of
one-size-fits-all mandates.
There’s nothing wrong with encouraging our children
to eat healthier, of course. There’s nothing wrong
with well-run, locally based and parent-driven
efforts. But as I’ve noted before, the federal
foodie cops care much less about students’
waistlines than they do about boosting government
and public union payrolls.
In a little-noticed announcement several months ago,
Obama health officials declared their intention to
use school lunch applications to boost government
health care rolls. Never mind the privacy concerns
of parents.
Big Government programs “for the children” are never
about the children. If they were, you wouldn’t see
Chicago public school officials banning students
from bringing home-packed meals made by their own
parents. In April, The Chicago Tribune reported that
“unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat
the food served in the cafeteria.” The bottom line?
Banning homemade lunches means a fatter payday for
the school and its food provider.
Remember: The unwritten mantra driving Mrs. Obama’s
federal school lunch meddling and expansion is:
“Cede the children, feed the state.” And the biggest
beneficiaries of her efforts over the past three
years have been her husband’s deep-pocketed pals at
the Service Employees International Union. There are
400,000 workers who prepare and serve lunch to
American schoolchildren. SEIU represents tens of
thousands of those workers and is trying to unionize
many more at all costs.
In L.A., the district’s cafeteria fund is $20
million in the hole thanks to political finagling by
SEIU Local 99. The union’s left-wing allies on the
school board and in the mayor’s office pressured the
district to adopt reckless fiscal policies awarding
gold-plated health benefits to part-time cafeteria
workers in the name of “social justice.” As one
school board member who opposed the budget-busting
entitlements said: “Everyone in this country
deserves health benefits. But it was a very
expensive proposal. And it wasn’t done at the
bargaining table, which is where health benefits are
usually negotiated. And no one had any idea where
the money was going to come from.”
Early next year, Mrs. Obama will use the “success”
of her child nutrition campaign to hawk a new tome
and lobby for more money and power in concert with
her husband’s re-election campaign. It’s a recipe
for more half-baked progressivism served with a side
order of bitter arugula.
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Copyright 2011