Saturday, June 13, 2015

Texas – where freedom means letting kids eat themselves to death



Texas is considering putting fried foods back on their school lunch menus and soda machines in the hallways, because Texas is all about freedom. Gone for a decade, fryers and soda machines were considered two major contributing factors to the growing problem of childhood obesity.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller says it isn’t about healthy children or obesity, it’s about what Texas, and our country, was founded on:
“We’re all about what our country was founded on — we’re about giving our school districts freedom, liberty and individual responsibility.”


Miller is all about giving school districts the vehicle with which to carry children to future of heart disease and type 2 diabetes. It’s okay, though, because it’s all in the name of freedom.

Children live with their parents, who make crucial decisions for them, because children typically possess neither the control nor the maturity to make decisions for themselves. 

When it comes to food choices, almost any parent would agree that given the choice, a middle-schooler will take four cookies and a slice of chocolate cake over a salad and grilled chicken breast any day of the week.

Given the choice between roasted potatoes and french fries drenched in grease, how many children will be reaching for the ketchup packets Reagan called a vegetable to drown their deep-fried delight? 

Milk, water or soda? Milk and water just don’t offer the benefits a child sees in a can of Mountain Dew: syrupy goodness with a sugar rush to get them through third-period English.

The state’s former agriculture commissioner, Susan Combs, wrote an op-ed for the Houston Chronicle earlier this year, saying she was “mystified by what is driving this effort.”
“In Texas, the Department of Agriculture is the agency charged with enforcing school nutrition standards, so it defies logic when the agency decides our kids need more sugary drinks and fried foods at school. The only people I can see benefiting from the proposed rules are the big business food and soda suppliers.”
Well somebody has their finger on the pulse of Republican politics. There can be little doubt that somebody in the form of a lobbyist for school food providers has the ear of Governor Abbott, whose executive authority maintains control over the Department of Agriculture.

Selling a horrible idea that will most definitely do nothing other than bring schools back to the kind of food choices that contributed to the obesity of generations under the premise of “liberty” is dangerously stupid. 

Adding the “individual responsibility” soundbyte immediately attached the issue to the shiny object of welfare and food stamps that so many Republicans campaigned on.

Unrelated and irrelevant, yet still effective in wooing the ignorant.

Author Charles Topher is a lifetime lefty liberal from Lowell who has managed to migrate (legally) to the backwoods of Maine. He writes from a 1 acre progressive bubble where Nobama stickers on pickemup truck bumpers are common.