Minnesota rep prioritizes son's taste buds over access to nutritious meals for thousands of students
9 Likes
No. It’s really NOT.
Preach.
This is a simple test of morality, and letting children go hungry is the epitome of FAILURE.
21 Likes
It could be useful to incorporate the free breakfast/lunch program into a course on health and healthy eating. For kindergarteners, teach them how to use a kitchen scale and let them see what the recommended serving size of (for example) Cheerios is. Then let them eat the Cheerios. Teach them the food pyramid and let them record which section(s) of the food pyramid’s requirements their free breakfast/lunch satisfies.
As they get older start incorporating other lessons into the healthy eating curriculum. Looking at nutrition labels could feed into a biology lesson about what the various vitamins and minerals do for the human body. A simulated grocery store with various sales and different sizes of equivalent products can make the mathematical concepts of fractions, percentages, and ratios more concrete. [Brand X is $5 for a 12 oz box with 20% off. Brand Y is $4.50 for a 10 oz box with 10% off. Which is more cost effective?]
A school may not have the facilities to teach basic cooking techniques like the home economics class I took mumble years ago when I was in high school, but having older students record videos of them cooking something at home (from ingredients provided by the school) and bring a portion of the dish in for taste testing seems like a reasonable occasional homework assignment.
6 Likes
Exactly! Over the New Year’s weekend there were a bunch of “end of year wrap up” type stories on the radio and one was all about food waste. We waste SO MUCH food in the US, and I’d originally assumed most of that was from restaurants and other spaces like that, but the most waste by sector is from homes. Americans waste 1/3 of the food they bring home. So imagine going grocery shopping, then just throwing 1 of every 3 grocery bags directly into the trash.
Yet this NEVER EVER EVER comes up when everyone is whinging about how ‘Biden caused food prices to go up.’ 
Only when we talk about feeding hungry kids.
21 Likes
The United States has a $17 Trillion / year economy. That is more than enough to ensure every child gets a nutritious meal every school day.
That our nation’s “leaders” choose not to speaks volumes about us, none of it good.
13 Likes
It’s weird how they are unable to form any kind of connection between fetuses and children…
14 Likes
OK, he was an asshole there.
But yeah, what a difference real food makes.
5 Likes
Treat it like a Montessori program does, and incorporate such things into the curriculum! 
Something like this is a good idea, for sure…
It is, however, beside the point.
Let’s make sure all kids get free breakfast and lunch every day, no matter what- because that is not happening right now. If we’re gonna sit around and pretend like it’s a bigger moral failing for a kid to not clean their plate and waste some food, instead of hungry kids, then we really lost as a society and we should burn it all down. Because it should not be controversial to say that we should feed all kids in America.
21 Likes
If Ben’s against it, it’s probably a good thing!
3 Likes
One problem with the way stories about food waste tend to get reported is that they’re often framed in such a way to imply that there isn’t enough food left for poor people because so much gets thrown away. That’s the wrong way to think about the problem because we still produce more food than we need even with all that waste. People don’t go hungry because families throw out their leftovers, people go hungry because we suck at making sure food is distributed to all those who need it.
Food waste is a problem in our society, but mainly because it’s a massive waste of energy and resources and contributes to climate change.
16 Likes
You know what? Fuck this guy with a rusty egg beater.
The more I think about this fuckwit — all these fuckwits — the angrier I get. I remember the shame of buying lunch with the orange “reduced price” ticket instead of the yellow “not poor” ticket. I can’t eat canned tuna, canned chicken, hot dogs, hamburger, or peanut butter anymore because that was the main ingredient in the majority of the meals I ate growing up, and I feel physically sick smelling them. I didn’t know cereal came in anything other than white generic bags until I was in high school. The first time I had fruit loops, Apple Jacks, or granola was in college at the dining hall. I learned yogurt (and a lot of food) stays good over a month past the date on the package. Mom volunteered at the food bank because you got extra food that way.
Thanks to not having regular meals growing up I am always famished, while paradoxically I am never hungry.
I. Never. Get. Full.
It’s a terrible way to grow up, and it still negatively affects my relationship with food. I am extremely privileged that my family had an extensive support network and, quite frankly, the right Pantone color to be treated as “temporarily embarrassed”.
As @cepheus42 said: Feed them.
All kids, regardless so called “need” deserve good, nutritious meals at school, free of charge. It is literally the least the United States as a nation can do for its children.
25 Likes
That’s Home Economics. We really should teach all kids this. But not attached to getting food.
15 Likes
Would it actually help us make a decision? Right now food is wasted because a kid didn’t have money to buy it.
The bill in question is literally providing food to any child who needs it in the place you’re most likely to find children. It is hard to think of a better step against child malnutrition.
And? right now they’re doing it with purchased food, but the kids who need it aren’t getting it.
Seriously, which is a bigger issue, a vague hypothetical about food waste or actual hungry kids?
You know who that isn’t a problem for? The kids who actually need the food. The bill isn’t about requesting a different state of prep or nutrition for the food, but changing who gets to eat it.
Encouraging healthy eating is tough, but it isn’t the problem being addressed in this bill, eating at all is. If it is lard soaked cheeseburgers, or microgreens isn’t addressed, but whether the kids get to eat is.
If waste is a concern, charging for the meals doesn’t help anyway. A picky kid can throw out a paid meal and an unbought meal can be thrown out even when there is still a hungry child who needs it.
No, it really isn’t. To get to that question you have to answer a bunch of other questions, including does putting a price barrier in front of the food actually reduce waste. Once the determination is made on how access to the food is set, then you work on program design to minimize waste. Ask around at your nearest Food Not Bombs chapter, they regularly provide food at zero cost, without a capital motive, but still take steps to minimize waste.
No they aren’t all starving, but some are. The child poverty rate in MN is a over 11%.
Then don’t waste your breath pretending arguments against it are legitimate.
And if you are a person with the money to do so you would be free to send your child with meals that suited your needs and desires, but the kid who needs it gets the food they need to actually function through the day.
So I actually grew up right in the income bracket this bill targets and witnessed a lot of kids not having access to food because of price barriers. About 1/3 of the kids in our school qualified for free or reduced lunch. Our school didn’t engage in some of the major stigmatizing actions, but you did go through a separate line (elementary only later our ID could be scanned to let them know what to charge us). Every single day someone didn’t have food because of money. Some kid’s parents never filled out the forms, because of any number of reasons. Some could afford the 40 cents on paper, but struggled with it in reality. Maybe mom worked late as a waitress and the kid felt bad waking her to get the money for lunch. Some kids got the money in those situations by doing stupid tricks for other students, some just lived with it (I certainly did both at times). Every teacher in the school knew based on afternoon behavior the economic state of the city on a given day better than any economist. So sure access to the wrong food causes problems, but I can’t even begin to express how warped my relationship to lunch is decades later because of that system. I can tell you exactly what it is to buy zebra cakes because they were 25 cents and you lost the dime to pay for your lunch. Dump a fucking trailer of food in a landfill to keep kids from going through that.
22 Likes
“Children are starving somewhere so they should also starve here.”
Yup this happened as an outright rev share bribe to the schools, and everyone turned a blind eye on the damage it was doing until a whole generation was obese and had associated health problems. THEN they blamed the parents for this result, and put it on the teachers to monitor children’s meals from home and send ominous notes home ostensibly threatening the parents for choices that were FAR less damaging. Maybe it’s swung back to no more notes, but none of that junk food at the cafeteria.
In public school before any of this, pizza day was always a good day. It’s not that it was objectively great pizza but all the other stuff, not so good. I still ate much of it.
This is important - kids ostracized and not able to break bread together with other kids, it’s no wonder they drop out. The first magnet school I went to (in South Central) had a creative principal who had a hard policy to “look the other way” (re food allocation and budget) while the poorer local kids’ parents and siblings were also fed each morning, resulting in better home lives, family bonds and healthier kids who had great attitudes as it also led the entire student body to develop zero tolerance for making fun of poorer kids - on their own, by osmosis and respect for the principal, without being “instructed” to take up that attitude. Because we saw their families every day. This was in elementary school.
I also remember Jamie Oliver doing this whole thing to cure schools of unappealing food, and then South Park shredding him (Season 14 Episode 14, “Creme Fraiche”).
The rejection of the “wasted food argument” is spot on. Fresh produce is “wasted” along the entire cycle. Check out the bins behind any supermarket - is anyone going after them for “wasting” food that isn’t pretty enough for the market shelf? What about school gardens? I suspect few who are presently griping about food wasted by feeding all students have lifted a finger to help get those going.
One way to address overeating patterns and prevent them from following people through their lives is to enculture away from the sense of “scarcity” and guilt for leaving food on the plate. Most of this stuff can go into the compost without leaving campus.
We’re not shipping that lettuce to refugee camps. Politicians who are concerned about food scarcity could also start looking at the metrics of (subsidized) protein production. But that may be too “woke.”
16 Likes
The feelings of food scarcity that developed from the Depression of the 30s still influence public food issues. The “clean plate club”, eating whatever is served and so on lead to huge uproars over perceived waste. “We paid for it, they had better eat it!” seems to be one big complaint. No interest in figuring out why they don’t want to eat it. Most of these folks would feel right at home criticizing someone’s food choices after seeing them using a SNAP card at the grocery store.
3 Likes
Insensitive willfully ignorant bonehead conservatives tend to run with single data points and assume all from that.
4 Likes
(gift link—no paywall)
(ETA: Dateline MARCH 17, 2023 — 6:26PM)
“We will feed our children,” Walz said.
The Minnesota program, which takes effect Monday, is expected to cost about $200 million per year, according to state projections.
I love that it takes effect right away!
24 Likes
Good!
And for those conservative shitweasels worrying about the “cost” of the program, Minnesota’s GDP in 2021 was $412 Billion.
That’s 0.05% of Minnesota’s economy.
A negligible price to pay to do the right thing.
15 Likes
Yeah, and we have a big surplus this year, and some people said don’t put free lunches into a permanent law because we may not have a surplus in future years—they would just rather have the surplus returned to the taxpayers as a rebate, or have a tax cut. That’s why the STrib article includes this:
Sen. Heather Gustafson, DFL-Vadnais Heights, estimates that a family of four living in White Bear Lake would save about $1,900 per school year if their children ate two meals at school. She sponsored the bill in the Senate and called it a “lunchbox tax cut,” at the signing ceremony.
15 Likes
As an aside this is one of the few things millennials get roasted for that I think is fair. I know so many people who aspirationally buy a bunch of expensive produce, particularly fruit and veg that has to be prepped and eaten within days, and then unsurprisingly can’t or don’t deal with it and throw it away in a shame spiral.
9 Likes
