Kids getting Tastykaked

Remember high school lunches? I remember the choice: soggy gray food from steam trays, or yummy sweet goodies from the snack bar. One could spend $2 on limp pizza and mashed potatoes made from flakes (that tasted and felt more like grits), or for the same price get a bottle of Coca-Cola, three butterscotch krimpets, and a bag of Cheetos. Really wasn't a hard choice for me.

The snack bar gives kids what they want, but also treats parents and schools. Schools get money for textbooks and scoreboards, and parents get lower taxes. Meanwhile, their kids blow up and feel entitled to eat junk food all the time.

Now, as I go to the gym every morning to burn off those krumpets, I wonder why I was even given the choice. As a 16-year-old, I just wanted what tasted good all the time. As a 30-year-old, I know healthier food is better for me and (usually) make the choice for better nutrition and lower calories over savory, sweet snack food.

And as an adult taxpayer, I've learned a lesson: unhealthy youngsters grow into unhealthy adults. The small tax savings come back as a burden to kids when they grow up to pay for gym memberships, surgery, etc. Your insurance premiums go up as more and more obese people must get surgery to maintain a semblance of healthy living. Your taxes go up as more people on Medicaid and the poor have heart and respiratory problems. Simply put, feeding kids junk food is bad for America.

Now people are realizing it. Connecticut has enacted the nation's strictest junk food ban in schools, and 17 other states have similar policies. In a recent article about the school lunch program, Ron Haskins asks hard questions:

Consistent with the intent of the original school-lunch program, created by Congress in 1946 to provide “nutritious agricultural commodities” to children, the major purpose of today’s school-lunch program is to ensure that children, especially those from poor and low-income families, have nutritious food at school. The school-breakfast program started as a pilot in 1966 and was made permanent in 1975. How these programs, and the money that travels with them, have grown steadily over the years is a story that illustrates many of the underlying mechanisms of social policy creation in the nation’s capital. But can this aging machinery adapt to the demands of a fast-food culture? We created school lunch to feed the hungry. Can we now ask it to fight obesity?