More on the new bill to restrict junk food in schools

Of course such a measure is a good one, and should be undertaken seriously. Kids don't need cokes and candy bars in school, or any of the nasty, chemically produced food packages those vending machines sell. All of that stuff should be shoved out and disposed of in space, where perhaps the Sun could use it for fuel and be none the worse for it.

However, this is not the point of my current post. I want to highlight a problem that most people probably don't even know exists, which I barely touched on in my previous post. Namely, that there is a conflict between school nutrition and the federally subsidized school lunch program. Wait, you say, the USDA provides the food and provides good guidelines for healthy eating. What could be wrong? Well, both of those points are true. But does the USDA provide the healthy food to make it work?

First of all, the USDA requires schools to buy the food they provide to qualify for the federal school lunch program, which reimburses schools up to 100% for giving free or reduced-cost breakfasts and lunches. Second, the USDA gets this food as surplus from food producers. What is this food? Here's the answer:

The underlying problem, as I came to understand it, is that the 57-year-old National School Lunch Program has a dual mission. It's supposed to provide healthy meals to schoolchildren, in many cases for free or at a reduced price. But it's also an agricultural subsidy program that props up farmers' income by buying up surplus food. And much of that food is the very stuff that clogs children's arteries and makes them fat. Using USDA's figures, I learned that in 2001 the department spent a total of $350 million on surplus beef and cheese for schools, compared with $161 million it spent on fruits and vegetables.

Because USDA is a farm agency —not a nutrition agency —its main constituency is agribusiness. In interviewing former department officials, I learned that the commodities program was considered sacrosanct, even though it was known to funnel unhealthy food to children.

Still, you may have the objection that that doesn't necessarily mean the food given to kids for lunch will be bad for them. It's a valid objection, but there's an answer to it.

When I interviewed current USDA officials, they maintained that school lunches were healthy, despite the department's finding that 85 percent of American schools fail USDA's own standard for saturated fat, a leading contributor to coronary disease. "There have been tremendous moves to reduce the fat content in school meals," department spokeswoman Jean Daniel told me.

It required only a pocket calculator to uncover the fallacy in Daniel's rhetoric. From the USDA's Web site, I downloaded the nutritional statistics of the commodities served American schoolchildren. I checked the fat content of whole milk, which many schools are required to serve under federal law. Then I educated myself about how to calculate the maximum acceptable fat levels for teenagers. When I plugged in all these numbers, I discovered this: Based on USDA's own recommendations, an adolescent girl should receive no more than 24 grams of fat, including no more than 8 grams of saturated fat, at lunch time. Yet one portion of USDA surplus chuck roast, plus a glass of the required whole milk, delivers 31 grams of fat and 14 grams of saturated fat.

And there was surely an excessive load of calories in that meal as well. Lunch is supposed to be one of three or more meals per day. Some kids only eat "real" food when they get it from the school. Some kids go home and their parents get McDonald's. Either way, these lunches are unacceptable.

I can only recommend again that everyone read Morgan Spurlock's Don't Eat This Book. He covers the same territory in a lot more depth and more entertainingly.

This is an issue that will come back to haunt us if we don't fix it when the current generation grows up with a high rate of obesity and related diseases, such as diabetes. As the article says:

Dangerous weight is on the rise in kids. This week, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the rate of obese and overweight kids has climbed to 18 percent of boys and 16 percent of girls. Four years ago, the number was 14 percent.

Do we really want to see our best and brightest dying at age 30 from heart disease? Or dying at 45 from diabetes complications? Or from liver damage due to high fat? No, I don't think we do.