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| Thanks to quick action by the Senate, your kids can still eat tater tots more than once a week in their school lunches. (image by Major Small) |
By Linda Felaco
You'd think with millions of Americans out of work, massive deficits, people losing their homes, ongoing wars in two countries, citizens marching in the streets demanding change, the Senate might have more important work to do. But no, they're more worried about making sure potato-growing states have a big enough market for their wares.
Because, you know, Mickey D's and BK and Wendy's don't sell enough French fries.
I couldn't make this up if I tried. The Obama Administration wants to make school lunches healthier by limiting the number of servings of starch. But senators from potato-growing states (specifically Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Mark Udall, D-Colorado) objected. The New York Times reported Senator Collins as saying, "The proposed rule would prevent schools from serving an ear of fresh corn one day and a baked potato another day of the same week, an utterly absurd result."
Actually, what's absurd is thinking that school cafeterias are serving fresh corn rather than canned or frozen, or baked potatoes rather than fried. This to me sounds about as out-of-touch as George Bush's dad's puzzlement over supermarket checkout scanners.
So by unanimous consent, unanimous consent mind you, the Senate passed an amendment on Tuesday to the 2012 spending bill for the U.S. Department Agriculture that prohibits the department from setting "any maximum limits on the serving of vegetables in school meal programs."
OK what's wrong with that, though, you're thinking. Of course we don't want to limit vegetables.
Consider the very elastic definition the school lunch program has of "vegetables." Reagan wanted to call ketchup a vegetable.
But we're living in more enlightened times now, I thought to myself. I should take a look at the Chariho menus and see what they're actually serving kids nowadays.
There's definitely a lot more variety in the current school menus than when I was a kid, which is great. I recall there being pretty much five meals offered in the Cranston public schools: American chop suey, burgers and tater tots, Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes, Chinese chop suey, and the inevitable fish on Fridays. Which if you want to talk government imposition of religion was probably way more egregious than the school prayer.
But I digress.
The Chariho menus are still pretty heavy on the starch. Burgers, sandwiches, pizzas, and wraps figure prominently. Even the chicken nuggets and buffalo tenders inevitably involve some starch in the breading.
And perhaps that's unavoidable. It's industrial food after all, you can't really cook to order in a school cafeteria.
But given that potatoes are far from the only source of starch in the school lunch menu, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to limit potatoes to once a week. Heck, I don't eat potatoes once a week, and I don't feel potato deprived.
But then again, I'm not a potato grower, or the senator of one.
