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School Lunches
We are always told how important school lunch (and now breakfast) programs are for our communities; nevermind all of the churches, food banks, and other government programs out there to help the poor. We are supposed to believe that poor parents won’t feed their kids so schools need to do it for them. A few years ago New York City kept schools open during a blizzard because kids “don’t get a hot lunch and, in many cases breakfast, unless they go to school.“
Now we have a situation where schools are closed and students are engaged in remote learning from home. School lunches are handed out from the school parking lot now in my town.
While it is nice that the school found a way to provide this service during these strange times, there is one problem. Hardly anyone was going to get free food. This week the superintendent sent out a note pleading for people to come and take the food, regardless of your income level. Now, this program which was meant for the needy is open to everyone because people were not so needy that they would be willing to walk a few blocks to pick up their free food.
As a frustrated taxpayer I had to tell my kids, “Go get some of that!” So now we have Cocoa Puffs for breakfast and Chef Boyardee for lunch. I suppose I can see why the biggest problem for poor people in America isn’t hunger but obesity. Anyway, this is the first time in about four decades that I drank chocolate milk out of an eight once cardboard carton. And yes, I am a grown man with an above-average income drinking milk meant for underprivileged children . . . you got a problem with that?
Published in General
That milk is the “rotting pelts” that Tom Sowell referred to in Basic Economics. You will recall from your many readings (heh heh) of that volume that he uses as evidence of the failures of centrally planned economies the rotting pelts that were ordered by the government and stored in warehouses throughout the Soviet Union.
The United States has placed a priority on dairy production. Some tell us (and they may be right) that drinking cows milk isn’t all that healthy for us, on balance. But yet our dairy producers churn out (see what I did there?) more milk than we can use. So it goes in the brown bag for the underprivileged children, and ends up, by the half pint, in my fridge. I AM that above average grown man drinking milk meant for underprivileged children.
I feel ya. But they won’t. So lacking that I’d like them to provide food for kids that actually need it, but healthy food, instead of plastic wrapped vessels for enriched white flour and corn syrup delivery.
When I look at the photo of the “food” provided, I see products that contribute to the condition that arguably underlies our biggest health problems (heart disease, diabetes, etc), which is obesity. Obese, but undernourished, that’s us, and it is exactly that condition that makes it more likely that if you get the Wuhan flu you will get very sick. Great! No wonder conspiracy theories abound, but on this one I’ll stick with stupidity.
When school is open the cafeteria food is freshly prepared (whether it is healthier or not?) but now they are handing out several days worth of food at a time so it has to be prepackaged.
“If you can’t accomplish the simple act of feeding your kids, they need to go into foster care. ……….If you can’t muster the drive to provide sustenance for your children, God knows what other kinds of neglect and abuse are happening in that house.”
Adam Carolla from In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks
The logic is that providing food is a whole hell of a lot cheaper than foster care, CPS hearings, lawyers assigned to represent children, etc.
Of course, that logic assumes that people won’t change their behavior based on being offered free stuff.
During my rides in the morning, I see school buses at a lot of stops near cul de sacs and other normal pick up areas. They aren’t picking anyone up, they are distributing food to the kids. It is a bit of a surprise to me since most of these areas are new neighborhoods with all new houses, not by any means low-income housing.
I taught in what would be considered ghetto schools, school with more than 60% minority populations for more than 4o years. I was always amazed that parents who had no problem spending $100+ for a pair of Air Jordans had no compunction asking the schools to provide free meals for their kids. I used to sit at the side of the school every day to greet the special ed kids as they unloaded from the “cheese buses” (so named because they looked like a loaf of Cheddar cheese wrapped in wax.) Parents would drop their kids off at the same location. The cars were anything but modest, and frequently a kid would get out of the car holding a $5 cup of Starbucks coffee (if those weird confections can be called coffee.) The same kid would go to the lunchroom and get a free breakfast and later lunch.
I guess if the kids respected the building, appreciated what they were being given, I wouldn’t mind. But my last year we moved into a brand new building, really nicely designed and appointed, a major upgrade from the rat infested junk pile I had been in for 17 years. It didn’t take the kids very long to begin destroying that new building, smashing the stainless steel mirrors in the bathrooms, dismembering toilet paper dispensers, pulling molding off the walls, and, of course, the endless graffiti. By the time I retired at the end of that year, it was pretty easy to project where the building was going. This, of course, is not to mention the destruction of books and materials.
Richard Epstein’s latest Libertarian podcast discusses the condition of a Detroit school that was sued because its books and materials were inadequate. I have no doubt that the reason for that was not a lack of financial investment by the district, but, rather, the complete absence of respect for that which the students and their families had no financial responsibility.
My logic is if you can’t figure out how to feed your kids you shouldn’t have any. Hell you could buy them taco bell every day for a few bucks. Try buying a bag of rice or dried beans, make corn bread……pennys a day to feed kids.
The fact that people don’t need the food now when they would have to go get it tells me one thing, they never “needed” it in the first place.
Either that or they’re so freaked out and/or obedient they would rather starve their kids than leave the house. It’s a bad sign however you look at it.
I did indeed encounter a small number of situations where kids went to school without breakfast. There was a common denominator: drugs. The parent – or grandparent – or whoever – was strung out in the morning. Well, they were usually strung out all day, but anyway. In the thankfully rare times I ended up going into the abode of such a situation . . . the stench. It’s probably a good thing nobody was eating anything prepared in that . . . place.
HOWEVER: When I was in elementary school in the ’50’s, we had a school lunch program. Everybody paid I think it was 30 cents. My brothers and I kept pleading for Mom to make us sack lunches. She just couldn’t understand why we would want sandwiches rather than a hot meal. Then came Back-To-School night. One of the meetings or something was in the school cafeteria. The staff had taken one of those stainless steel trays, with that day’s lunch, and covered it with this new stuff called plastic wrap, and put it on display. And the gods were shining on us.
Because that day, of all days, the lunch main dish was tacos. Now school lunch tacos were a sight to behold, if you had to. Small corn tortillas, filled with maybe a teaspoon of ground somethingorother, then cooked on a griddle that must have had high sides to keep all the grease in. The tortillas dutifully soaked it all up, and when you tried to eat it, it was very much like chewing on soggy leather. And by that evening the grease had congealed on the plastic wrap. Mother came home, said, “I understand.” And we got our sack lunches every day after that.
So Coco Puffs, eh? The more things change, the more they stay the same.