Lousy School Lunch Bill One Step Closer to Passage in Senate

[Better Believe It]

Lousy School Lunch Bill One Step Closer to Passage
By Jill Richardson
March 29, 2010

Why do Democrats put their least loyal Senator in charge of one of their highest profile issues? Michelle Obama started her government-wide “Let’s Move” program to improve children’s health and nutrition, but Blanche Lincoln’s the author of the Senate child nutrition bill that just passed out of the Senate Agriculture Committee yesterday. And Blanche Lincoln is no Michelle Obama. She’s not even as progressive as Barack Obama, who called for $10 billion in new money over 10 years for child nutrition, a number Lincoln reduced by more than half.

To put that in easier to understand terms, Obama’s proposal would have given up to $.18 in addition funds to each child’s school lunch. Lincoln’s bill gives each lunch $.06. Compare that to the School Nutrition Association’s request to raise the current $2.68 “reimbursement rate” (the amount the federal government reimburses schools for each free lunch served to a low income child) by $.35 just to keep the quality of the lunches the same and make up for schools’ current budgetary shortfall. School lunch reformer Ann Cooper calls for an extra $1 per lunch to actually make lunches healthy. So any amount under $.35 is no reform at all, and Lincoln gave us $.06.

If that’s not disappointing enough, consider where Lincoln “found” the extra money for child nutrition: conservation programs. Under the Democrats’ “paygo” (pay as you go) budget practice, Lincoln has to find a way to pay for every new dollar spent, either by cutting funds in other programs or by raising taxes. Some have called for cutting agricultural subsidies to the largest farmers, but Lincoln instead took $2.8 billion from the Environmental Quality Incentives Progam (EQIP), an agriculture conservation program, to fund school lunch.

It’s true that bad food is better than no food at all, but why are we forced to choose the lesser of two evils? Current school lunches are, on average, lousy. Of course some schools stand out by providing excellent, healthy lunches to students, but most do not. In fact, only 6-7 percent of schools meet the USDA’s current lax nutrition standards. The USDA will soon upgrade its nutrition standards based on recommendations fro the Institute of Medicine, but how can they expect schools to meet the new, stricter standards when they can’t even meet the current ones? And a recent University of Michigan study found that children who eat school lunch are more likely to be overweight or obese than children who brought lunch from home.



The school lunch bill is about as appetizing as, well, school lunch.

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[HillbillyBob]

1. Blanch you ignernt slut