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.