That’s why one of my favorite stories in many years was this December 2011 L.A. Times account of the student revolt over school lunches forced on them by Nanny State food fascists:

“It’s lunchtime at Van Nuys High School and students stream into the cafeteria to check out the day’s fare: black bean burgers, tostada salad, fresh pears and other items on a new healthful menu introduced this year by the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“But Iraides Renteria and Mayra Gutierrez don’t even bother to line up. Iraides said the school food previously made her throw up, and Mayra calls it ‘nasty, rotty stuff.’ So what do they eat? The juniors pull three bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and soda from their backpacks. ….

“For many students, L.A. Unified’s trailblazing introduction of healthful school lunches has been a flop. Earlier this year, the district got rid of chocolate and strawberry milk, chicken nuggets, corn dogs, nachos and other food high in fat, sugar and sodium. Instead, district chefs concocted such healthful alternatives as vegetarian curries and tamales, quinoa salads and pad Thai noodles. ….

“’It’s nasty, nasty,’ said Andre, a member of InnerCity Struggle, an East L.A. nonprofit working to improve school lunch access and quality. …. ‘Like dog food,’ said Christian Campus, 14.”

A form of massive civil disobedience

Now a government report says LAUSD-style school-food policies championed by first lady Michelle Obama and the public-health establishment have triggered what can be called massive civil disobedience:

By Chris Reed

This Associated Press story about student uprisings against federal school-lunch rules is one more reminder of how oblivious the statist left is about how people think. Of course kids want filling meals — not meals that Michelle Obama would adjudge as sufficient and character-building.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Agriculture Department is responding to criticism over new school lunch rules by allowing more grains and meat in kids’ meals.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told members of Congress in a letter Friday that the department will do away with daily and weekly limits of meats and grains. Several lawmakers wrote the department after the new rules went into effect in September saying kids aren’t getting enough to eat.

School administrators also complained, saying set maximums on grains and meats are too limiting as they try to plan daily meals.

But nothing will top the L.A. Times story from November 2011 over the student revolt against the glop served by L.A. Unified:

“It’s lunchtime at Van Nuys High School and students stream into the cafeteria to check out the day’s fare: black bean burgers, tostada salad, fresh pears and other items on a new healthful menu introduced this year by the Los Angeles Unified School District. But Iraides Renteria and Mayra Gutierrez don’t even bother to line up. Iraides said the school food previously made her throw up, and Mayra calls it ‘nasty, rotty stuff.’ So what do they eat? The juniors pull three bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and soda from their backpacks. ….

“For many students, L.A. Unified’s trailblazing introduction of healthful school lunches has been a flop. Earlier this year, the district got rid of chocolate and strawberry milk, chicken nuggets, corn dogs, nachos and other food high in fat, sugar and sodium. Instead, district chefs concocted such healthful alternatives as vegetarian curries and tamales, quinoa salads and pad Thai noodles. ….

“’It’s nasty, nasty,’ said Andre, a member of InnerCity Struggle, an East L.A. nonprofit working to improve school lunch access and quality. …. ‘Like dog food,’ said Christian Campus, 14, adding that he and his football teammates eat the lunches only to sustain them through practice.

Like dog food!

Our colleague Dave Roberts today reported on how the California Legislature might ban food trucks within 1,500 feet of schools. The trucks are selling stuff kids like — burritos and burgers — instead of the tastless slop First Lady Michelle Obama insists they subsist on.

(Even though her hubby, the prez, doesn’t follow her guidelines. How does Barack stay thin? The old fashioned way: cigarettes.)

But what’s in that glop they serve kids in public schools? TheDaily.com reports:

“The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s continued purchase of so-called pink slime for school lunches makes no sense, according to two former microbiologists at the Food Safety Inspection Service.

“‘I have a 2-year-old son,’ microbiologist Gerald Zirnstein told The Daily. ‘And you better believe I don’t want him eating pink slime when he starts going to school.’

“It was Zirnstein who first coined the term ‘pink slime’ after touring a Beef Products Inc. production facility in 2002 as part of an investigation into salmonella contamination in packaged ground beef. In an email to his colleagues shortly after the visit, Zirnstein said he did not ‘consider the stuff to be ground beef.’

“Made by grinding together connective tissue and beef scraps normally destined for dog food and rendering, BPI’s Lean Beef Trimmings are then treated with ammonia hydroxide, a process that kills pathogens such as salmonella and E. coli.”

“The resulting pinkish substance is later blended into traditional ground beef and hamburger patties.”

I wish I hadn’t just had lunch. I’m getting queasy just reading about what the government is shoving down our kids’ gullets.

“‘For retired microbiologist Carl Custer, a 35-year veteran of the Food Safety Inspection Service, the idea of mixing in BPI’s Lean Beef Trimmings into more nutritious, pure ground beef was itself problematic.

“’We originally called it soylent pink,’ Custer told The Daily. ‘We looked at the product and we objected to it because it used connective tissues instead of muscle. It was simply not nutritionally equivalent [to ground beef]. My main objection was that it was not meat’.”

“Soylent Pink.” There, he said it.

That’s a reference to the classic 1973 Sci Fi movie, “Soylent Green,” in which Charlton Heston discovers — spoiler alert! — that a special food the government is feeding everybody is made of …

…let’s let Charlton tell us…

March 9, 2012

School officials said that the lunch was missing a “milk equivalent.”

So her mommy’s lunch was taken away, and the little girl was provided a nasty cafeteria lunch of chicken nuggets, apparently a government gold standard of nutrition, if overweight, government-dependent kids are the future.

Exactly what part of a chicken is a ‘nugget’ anyway?

I can just see the crime scene: “Freeze kid! Drop the lunch box, and put your hands up.”

The government is now sending “inspectors” into taxpayer-funded, government schools to force children to eat government approved food. What has the American experiment come to?

“In 1787, when the Founding Fathers had hammered out the U.S. Constitution in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin told an inquiring woman what the gathering had produced, ‘A republic, madam, if you can keep it,'” the Heritage Foundation wrote in 2007.

Limited government is perhaps one of the greatest accomplishments in history, but the U.S. is now failing at even this. The United States was created to provide limited government, while still protecting basic human rights. But these rights do not include a government school lunch. Nor do they allow government officials to abuse or supersede parental rights.

The North Carolina Pre-Kindergarten “is a state-run enrichment program to help 4-year-olds at risk of starting school lagging behind their peers. Ninety percent of the children qualify for free or reduced lunch.The program has 1,100 sites serving 25,000 children and is required to supply a healthful lunch,” the Peoria Journal Star reported. “The U.S. Agriculture Department defines that as a serving of milk, two servings of fruits or vegetables, one serving of grain, and one serving of meat or protein.”

So where did the chicken nuggets fit in to that perfect menu? How about a Cinnabon for breakfast?

“I am so sorry this happened to this little girl,” Hoke County Schools Assistant Superintendent Bob Barnes said. “On that day, the policy wasn’t followed, and hey, we’re the grown folks here. That’s our fault. The teacher never should have sent that little girl into that line. She should have gone over and picked up the missing item and brought it to her.”

The Peoria Journal reported, “It was a tale of government meddling that outraged radio talk show hosts and a pair of Congress members.” Do you think that maybe the parents were also just a little outraged?

“This is also kind of adding on to a lot of things that we’re seeing coming out of the Obama Administration” that conservatives oppose, like requiring insurance coverage of contraceptives, Republican U.S. Representative Renee Ellmers ‘ press secretary Tom Doheny told the Journal. “We’re joining this bipartisan call to get any and all information. It’s one of those things that if it looks like a rat, and smells like a rat, odds are it could be.”

“We’re not trying to force government down anybody’s throat. All we’re trying to do is make sure that our children get a good education and a nutritious meal every day,” Superintendent Barnes said.

But forcing government down parent’s throats is exactly what happened, and happens everyday in U.S. schools. Teachers and school administrators are stepping in for parents, whether it is welcomed or not. The arrogance is stupendous, as well as unconstitutional.

I have argued with a family member who is a teacher about this subject. She insists that because today’s parents are so lousy, teachers are forced to step in. Perhaps. But the question is, ‘what came first – the chicken or the egg?’ Did teachers and government schools force themselves on children, or did parents start the process first by shirking their responsibility?

My answer is ‘who cares?’ The government’s job is not to do anything at public schools other than educate. And they are doing a lousy job of educating. I think that because they are failing so miserably at educating America’s youth, they’ve compensated by stepping in as surrogate parents. And America’s children are a great deal worse for it.

Kids are testing lower than ever, ill-prepared for college and the workplace, and don’t even know America’s history. If kids were familiar with U.S. History, they would rebel against public school teachers and administrators for pushing socialist programs and liberal ideology on them, and angry at the  attempt to replace their parents.

But alas, instead, too many of the little drones show up at school most days, eat the government-mandated breakfast, listen to the government-mandated lectures, eat the government-mandated lunch, and go out into the world qualified to do nothing, unable to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, or tell you who their own council member or Congressman is.

But they are able to tell you who won American Idol, and who the WWE Raw wrestling champion is.

This is only about the statists taking control of American citizens at government-run schools. How scary – that’s what our children should fear.

Instead, they have their lunches taken away – lunches prepared by mommy – and are told that mommy isn’t feeding them properly. Government officials are trying to instill fear in the youngest children in society, to create another generation of government-dependent blobs.

School officials in North Carolina could have given the little girl an apple or a carton of milk, but instead they gave her chicken nuggets. Are they trying to get her hooked early on salt, sugar and grease?

This is about as sick as it gets – and it’s our tax dollars paying for it.

FEB. 16, 2012

Food fight!

I love it when kids rebel against the government schools. Reported CBS Los Angeles: “The revamped school lunches at Los Angeles Unified School District have won awards, commending them for improving the menu at the second largest school district in the nation. Too bad the students don’t agree.

“Rejecting healthful alternatives like vegetarian curries and tamales, quinoa salads and pad Thai noodles, students are throwing them in the trash by the thousands, bringing junk food from home and buying instant noodles and other decidedly unhealthy fare from the ‘black markets’ that have begun to thrive at campuses across the district, according to the Los Angeles Times.”

If the food smugglers get caught they really would have a “Twinkie Defense.”

More: “The kerfluffle led to LAUSD’s decision to change the menu in favor of healthier options. The district decided to do away with chocolate- and strawberry-flavored milk.

“Now, the Times reports cartons of plain milk are being thrown away en masse, unopened, along with uneaten entrees. Participation in the school lunch program has dropped by thousands of students, who are ditching lunch and are suffering from hunger-related ailments.”

One problem is that it’s much disputed what’s a “healthy” lunch for kids. The schools push the federal government’s vegetable/carb-heavy Food Pyramid.

But what about the low-carb/paleo/Atkins diets that emphasize meat, eggs and cheese? What about kids with Celiac disease, who can’t have gluten (in bread, pasta, etc.)?

Food Diversity?

Usually, the LAUSD is ultra-politically correct when it comes to ethnic diversity. Its Web site boasts: “The Office of Human Relations, Diversity & Equity is committed to fostering a safe and respectful District, school and community culture where the seeds of peace and justice are sown so that all students and staff can lead safe, purposeful and academically fruitful lives.”

The district has identified 92 different languages spoken in the homes of its students, a rough approximation of ethnic background. Why then does it push only one food menu? Shouldn’t it have 92 menus, with the food adjusted to what the kids chow down at home from Mom?

As usual, the government doesn’t like dissonance, even in a system that prepares 650,000 lunches a day. It can’t accept that there can be conflicting, unreconcilable explanations for something. It can’t get beyond the lobbyists, such as the powerful grain and processed food companies that push the “healthy” food on kids.

The LAUSD has responded the only way it knows how: “The complaints have been heard and LAUSD is planning changes to the menu, the Times reports. Burgers and (healthy) pizza are coming back, and dishes like quinoa salads and brown rice cutlets are out.”

Let’s hope this food rebellion turns bigger and overturns the whole rotten government schools system. The kids hate the system, so why make them stay?

Abolish the government schools. Kids who want to study then will do so with enthusiasm, in private schools. Those that don’t can work. But better than the government schools would be to unleash the kids to run wild in the streets.

Jan. 21, 2012