Meat, Dairy and Fruit Lobbyists Fight It Out Over School Lunches

2410186168_fat_furious_michelle_obama_large_xlarge

Big government is another word for oligarchy. Even its humanitarian projects are loaded down with special interest corruption.

And so we come to Michelle Obama’s broken school lunch mandates which have led to underfeeding schoolchildren and a lot of wasted fruit. But the United Fresh Produce Association is fond of the mandate for obvious reasons.

It doesn’t care if the fresh fruit ends up in the garbage.

The UFPA tilts somewhat Republican, but it’s coming out against a waiver for schools that can’t make Michelle Obama’s starvation lunches work.

A House bill up for consideration this week by the Appropriations Committee would allow schools to apply for waivers from the federally mandated standards if the school’s food program has recorded a financial loss for six months in a row.

In the conference call, Mrs. Obama urged health activists to fight agribusiness’s lobbying efforts to allow schools to opt out of the mandates to reduce sodium, increase whole grains, and increase servings of fresh fruits and vegetables in lunches.

The waiver proposal is being pushed, in part, by the School Nutrition Association, which represents school nutrition workers and receives substantial industry funding. The group has been criticized by health activists, who say it is serving the interests of processed-food firms such as makers of frozen pizza and agribusiness companies listed as donors.

Tom Stenzel, president of the United Fresh Produce Association, which is lobbying against delays in carrying out the new rules, said he believes the school nutritionists organization is responding to its donor base.

“They are overwhelmingly dependent on the processed food industry so there is an ingrained bias toward foods like frozen pizza and chicken nuggets that have been a staple of school lunches in the past,” Stenzel said.

So as usual in Washington, we’ve got a fight between two sets of lobbyists, neither of which cares about kids, but both of whom are set to determine the content of school lunches.

Joining the fruit lobby are various non-profits like Pew, which don’t care about kids either, but want to tackle “obesity” because it’s a trendy fundraising cause.

Caught in the middle are kids who aren’t getting enough food because of Michelle Obama’s psychological issues with food… and various lobbies.

“Students may take the food components they are required to as part of the school lunch but then choose not to eat them,” the GAO said. As a result, 48 out of 50 states cited waste as a challenge.

“In our lunch period observations in 7 of 17 schools, we saw many students throw away some or all of their fruits and vegetables,” the GAO said.

The law mandated that schools increase the price of school lunches, causing students to stop buying “because they felt they were being asked to pay more for less food.” Kids who pay full price for meals declined by 10 percent last school year, the lowest rate in over a decade.

And they’re going hungry instead.

“I’ve had a lot of complaints, especially with the little guys,” North White School Corp. food service director Linda Wireman said. “They get a three-quarters cup of vegetables, but if it’s something they don’t like, it goes down the garbage disposal. So there are a lot of complaints they’re going home hungry.”

Tippecanoe School Corp. food service director Lori Shofroth said: “We did a waste study on three different schools, and there was a huge amount of waste. That was just with produce, fruit or vegetables or milk.”

Shofroth said the school system lost an estimated $300,000 in wasted food. “They’re teaching our kids with this meal pattern that it’s OK to throw away,” she complained to the local paper.

Earlier this year the Catlin School District in east central Illinois also decided to pull out of the federal program.

“When the federal government changed the nutrition guidelines, they became very restrictive,” Superintendent Gary Lewis told the local News-Gazette in June. “If a kid is hungry, they’re not going to be able to concentrate in class. We need to work to make sure they’re full. That will increase their potential.”

Naturally the Michelle Obama lunch backers are babbling about science-based diets and how much progress has been made. But as usual this is really about the money.