Curiously familiar “concerns” being spewed by McDonald. Theoretical waste, undeserving “takers”, and the brain-fried kicker that there could, again, theoretically, be “starving children” that would eat that wasted food, which actual disadvantaged children will certainly eat if it were provided… Tape his mouth shut and ignore his garbage words.
Minnesota rep prioritizes son's taste buds over access to nutritious meals for thousands of students
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It bears repeating that there is no national food shortage, or even an international food shortage. Humanity has been able to produce considerably more food than it consumes for many generations now. The challenge is equitable distribution of that food, and that’s the problem he’s bending over backwards to avoid solving.
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[Sen. Steve Drazkowski] claimed he “never met a hungry Minnesotan”
I’m sure he’s telling the truth. I’m reminded yet again of a political cartoon from the Golden Age of Reagan. I’ve never managed to find the original so I can’t post it. Mr and Mrs Reagan are dining at a windowside table in a fancy restaurant. A pair of bedraggled, hungry children peer in at them. “We must do something about this poverty!” Reagan exclaims. “Waiter, get us a table away from the window!”
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Feed the kids. If you work with them on things like choice and menus you can see them expand what they take from the line. Things like offering cut fruit instead of whole fruits-kids will eat more than one apples worth of slices, but often toss a whole apple after three bites.
Figuring out how to get the kids eating healthier food is important-but it should never get in the way of making the food available in the first place.
Lots of people have been working on both better offerings and how to have kids choose them as often as they choose the over processed, over salted, fried stuff.
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Right? Dickens is not an instruction manual!
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Seriously…this is the ONLY good meal some children get. Unclutch your pearls and start giving a shit about hungry kids… FFS.
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“What about all those starving brown kids on the other side of the world, which I voted against sending food to while American kids are hungry?”
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Oddly, very hungry people may still not eat everything,
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0195666395997512
Excerpt:
*
As we have already mentioned, hunger is not a terribly powerful predictor of intake (although it may predict the enthusiasm with which one initiates eating). Research in our lab has documented that if you strongly manipulate the taste of the available food, people will eat a lot (if the food tastes good) or only a little (if the food tastes bad), irrespective of whether they are very hungry (24 h food deprived) or not (Kauffman, Herman, & Polivy, 1995). By the same token, if you strongly manipulate social norms of appropriateness, people will eat a lot (if others eat a lot) or a little (if others eat only a little), again irrespective of whether they are very hungry or not (Goldman, Herman, & Polivy, 1991).
and there’s some thinking that kids being finicky may have some deep evolutionary roots, in order to prevent kids who haven’t learned what’s edible or unhealthy from foraging on potentially toxic foods.
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This is always how the concern-driving trollies from conservative lawmakers works.
They say stuff like “why should we spend money on foreign aid when there are homeless veterans to take care of in our country?” or “we can’t afford to spend taxpayer money to pay off student loans when hard-working mothers are struggling to take care of their children!” but then they vote against measures that would help homeless veterans or working mothers.
It’s always been a bad-faith argument.
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It might be good for administrators who manage food programs to know that
but a public debate about it, with soundbites from Congress members, serves no purpose except to stir up culture war bullshit about how Those People eat too much food
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In 2008 a USAID deputy administrator gave a presentation at a Food for Peace seminar. His big message was that for the first time Africa was able to produce enough food to feed the entire continent. The issues with hunger were transportation, transportation infrastructure, import tariffs and regulations, and corruption.
Like many problems facing humanity, we know how to solve this one. We just don’t have the collective will to actually do it.
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A better corollary might be the college cafeteria / dining hall. My experience is +20 years old at this point, but back around 2000 I could go into the dining hall and go through the line as much as I wanted. Obviously, the admin side knew how many kids had meal plans and could base their production accordingly, but there has to be waste. The same would go for any mass served cafeteria style meal option. The question is, “what is the acceptable amount of waste?”
Agreed. The FEED THEM rhetoric makes it sound like every child is starving. I’m all for free breakfast/lunch for all school kids - but that doesn’t mean I want my child eating it 5 days a week either. There are a lot of carbs and high calorie food on the menu, that yes taste good to kids, but end up doing nothing but contributing to childhood obesity. Our oldest buys his lunch one day a week of his choosing and packs his lunch the other 4.
Public schools are one of the major areas where I want you take my money. If a teacher needs supplies, raise my taxes. If kids need food, make it available to all of them and I’ll pay for it. Tech upgrades, build upgrades, any aspect of schooling that directly affects the children, then yes take my money.
-and no we are not overly restrictive on what he eats. Fresh fruit and veggies are served with dinners we prepare, but we throw in an applesauce pouch if we do take out. I grew up with pretty much unlimited access to “food”. I have been overweight since I was 5 or so. I probably drink more actual water in a year now than I did between the ages of 5-18.
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I have zero patience for this kind of nit-picking around feeding CHILDREN…
Quite a few children in working class communities are indeed hungry. I’m all for making meals healthy, but withholding food from children, for ANY reason, when we can FEED them is just moralizing bullshit.
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… anything less than 50% sounds good to me
Don’t people have better things to worry about 
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Huh. This was Minnesota too.
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I would turn that around. “How many kids are you willing to let go hungry?” is the vital question. Any answer greater than zero is unacceptable in a country like this. If you have the resources to keep your kids well fed and choose to not partake in school lunches, that’s great. But you must acknowledge that this is a position of privilege which is not shared by all. I don’t accept any amount of childhood hunger as “acceptable.”
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…but not in the context of whether we feed school kids lunch or let them be malnourished.
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As the link I posted above says, 33% of the food grown worldwide is wasted. For the US it’s 40%. We don’t seem to get all excited about that, but if you stated these numbers for school cafeterias, there would be a storm of pearl-clutching. I suspect the figure is less.
Rhetoric? You use that word… Wanting children to be fed is not rhetoric.
If you think school meals can’t be nutritious, watch what a French school can do for less per student than American schools pay.
Note that during their one-hour lunch, these kids are learning table manners and social skills as well as getting adequate nourishment.
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