school

School lunch sanctimony
11/03/2011 - 21:23

I know I've been blogging about public school lunch a lot lately, but I think it's a great example of everything that is wrong with the food system in America and what will happen if we allow the government to be in charge of more and more of the food system.

A few months ago I noticed that the USDA school lunch standards were restricting starchy vegetables (like potatoes), corn, and legumes. I neglected to blog about it, I suppose because I was so busy. Had the USDA read Gary Taubes?

Nope. Apparently, it was based on a report by the Institute of Medicine that recommended restricting them not for any problems with the foods themselves, but in order to encourage schools to try other vegetables. 

That seems a little sanctimonious to me, like something a moralistic grandmother would do. In the meantime, I don't see any USDA restrictions on fried food or chocolate milk. 

If you read the IOM recs, it's clear they are unable to think about food holistically. They are not seeing that it's not the potatoes or the chicken that's the problem, it's the fact that they are often breaded and/or fried. If only our problem was overeating potatoes and lima beans! And we could solve that be eating them less and making sure we get our chalk-colored fortified water, I mean 1% milk. It's laughable once you think about it. 

But never fear, don't forget the government guidelines are often a combination of paternalism and lobbying interests. This time, I guess they canceled each other out and the USDA abandoned the plan.

The kids aren't alright because they are eating 15 teaspoons of sugar for breakfast
10/19/2011 - 15:14

How rebates and monopolies allow processed foods to dominate school cafeteria menus:

Here in the District of Columbia, children were being fed meals manufactured in a suburban factory until Chartwells in the fall of 2009 introduced something it called "fresh cooked." As I discovered while spending a week in the kitchen at my daughter's elementary school, what that entailed was reheating pre-fabricated meal components such as chicken nuggets and tater tots. For breakfast, children were often consuming up to 15 teaspoons of sugar in the form of processed cereals, flavored milk, cookies and muffins...The manufacturers of those sugar-laden products pay hefty rebates--some call them "kickbacks"--to giant food service companies as an inducement to purchase their highly processed goods. But I have now learned it's not just the lousy food that's fueled by rebates. Just about everything that goes into running a public school cafeteria comes with a rebate check that helps make sure the industrial version of food wins out.

This makes me furious because any nutritionally sane person would abhor these foods. But nutritionally sane people are few and far between. I've seen interviews with dieticians that excuse sugar in kid's food because they say kids wouldn't drink their low-fat milk without it. What's even more scary to me is that all these food service companies, from odious Chartwell to somewhat "sustainable" Bon Appetit Management company are owned by the same "Compass Group." Compass Group serves the world 4 billion meals a year. 

But the list of companies providing rebates is a great resource because if I could engineer a diet to make people sick, these are exactly the foods I'd pick: 

 $ 41,218.07 General Mills: breakfast cereals (mmm sugar flavored sugar)

$ 36,165.78 Kraft General Foods: salad dressings, condiments (mm vegetable oils!)

$ 34,991.20 Country Pure Foods-Ardmore Farms: fruit juices (it has fruit in the name, so it must be healthy right?)

$ 24,561.45 Schwan's: frozen pizza 

$ 21,377.88 Otis Spunkmeyer: muffins

$ 20,717.38 Kellogg's: breakfast cereal

$ 14,324.32 Frito Lay: chips and snacks

$ 13,974.08 JAFCO Foods: breaded chicken

$ 4,388.70 Cargill Meat Solutions: processed beef

The perfect foods to fuel all the fun standardized tests kids get to take:

I’m pissed that my students spend almost a quarter of the year taking tests and that the annual 30 hour test is longer than the Bar Exam, the MCATS, the teacher certification test and pretty much every other test required of adult professionals. And I’m pissed that when a teacher points out the flaws of the test, he or she is accused of “low expectations” and trouble-making.

I’m pissed that the laws are formed by transnational corporations who create curriculum, “advise” on standards, push for accountability and then provide the resources, tutoring and conferences that help people reach a standard that they cannot attain (as long as every question is re-normed for fifty percent). It’s more rigged than a casino and Chuck-E-Cheese combined.
 

I'm glad to see that the government has found a way to make public schools into corporate subsidies. 

Yes, we are smothering our children
06/26/2011 - 19:57

 In negative reviews of books on so-called "attachment parenting" like The Continuum Concept people often harp on about how it's "smothering" and emphasis the children at the expense of other social relationships. I suspect those people haven't read the book. The foraging horticulturalists in that book, for example, do breastfeed their children, sleep with them, and carry them around close to their bodies. But overall, these women are not "smothering." The book describes an incident where a toddler is carrying around a rather sharp knife and banging it around. The mother ignores him and chats with another mother. That is, until the toddler drops the knife. Then the mother picks the knife up and gives it back to the kid. Their culture is one where children are biologically fulfilled, but socially the children are not the center of the social life. 

Contrast that with our culture, where children are biologically unfulfilled, but our social culture is obsessed with them. We have to endow them with "good self esteem" and make sure they don't get hurt on "dangerous" playgrounds. Our time with our children has increased, but not through passive activities like having dinner with them, but through taking them to extracurricular activities and helping them with homework. 

There is an interesting article in The Atlantic asking whether this has been a good thing. The author is a therapist quite surprised to see so many patients who had attentive "good" parents:

Until, one day, another question occurred to me: Was it possible these parents had done too much?

Here I was, seeing the flesh-and-blood results of the kind of parenting that my peers and I were trying to practice with our own kids, precisely so that they wouldn’t end up on a therapist’s couch one day. We were running ourselves ragged in a herculean effort to do right by our kids—yet what seemed like grown-up versions of them were sitting in our offices, saying they felt empty, confused, and anxious. Back in graduate school, the clinical focus had always been on how the lack of parental attunement affects the child. It never occurred to any of us to ask, what if the parents are too attuned? What happens to those kids?

 

I became seriously worried about raising my own children when I was a camp counselor in a wealthy suburban area and found out the games that were "banned", which included:

- Star Wars (and anything else with wars)

- Cowboys and Indians (and anything else politically incorrect)

- Police and Robbers (and anything else with "weapons" even if you used your hand and went "bang bang".)

- Good old fashioned Tag and Hide and Go Seek... too "dangerous"

Meanwhile, everyone was unconcerned with the massive amounts of sugar we fed those kids. I was also quite alarmed by the large "food allergy" table we maintained and heavily policed. I don't remember having such things when I was a kid. Seemed like every child was allergic to something. 

When I was a kid we ate junk food, but we played Star Wars and often our version of Dagobah was a seriously gross insect and snake infested creek...completely unsupervised. I'm sure it was probiotic and tons of exercise :) I'm hoping my kids can have a childhood like that, but seems like it's bucking the trend enough that it means public school and whatnot just aren't options, despite some backlash such as Free Range Kids. I'd love to find a private school that has a good philosophy, but since I was homeschooled myself, I know it doesn't kill you or anything :P Increasingly, members of the ancestral health community seem interested in this approach, given that most public and private schools

- feed kids sugar and fried crap, among other poisonous foods

- force them to sit for hours and hours a day when they should be playing outside 

- structure them into a social strata alien to our evolutionary context. I wouldn't be surprised if putting children of all the same age together all day instead of mixing children by ages and with elders is the cause of much social stresses like bullying. 

- socialize them into a homogenous worldview, causing the loss of unique cultures

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