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Government just going to make our nutrition boondoggle worse
When earlier this week President Obama signed into law The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, the first lady’s signature issue, my stomach turned (no pun intended). The $4.5 billion bill expands the school lunch program, increases the reimbursement rate to school districts and replaces fast-food and vending machine snacks at schools with more nutritious options.
I don’t dispute the fact that we have a growing problem of childhood obesity and a serious rise in related diseases like Type 2 diabetes. Nevertheless, I recoil from the idea of the federal government — rather than parents — overseeing childhood nutrition. The fact is, government played no small role in creating our nutritional boondoggle, and now they’re doing their best to make a bad situation worse.
In conversations about our national nutrition, the issue of why “food deserts” exist in our poorest, urban neighborhoods comes up. Some claim businesses shy away from high-crime neighborhoods, but that’s not quite accurate. (In fact, it’s the Big Box stores that so many liberal local officials keep out of the inner cities that can best absorb the added cost of crime and security.) Rather, one of the leading causes of “food deserts” is that the public sector — federal, state and city agencies — own the majority of our urban centers, from public housing to food stamps, making it nearly impossible for legitimate businesses to compete and provide affordable, healthy alternatives.
Then, of course, there’s that pesky issue of agriculture subsidies. Mrs. Obama could have helped end the decades-long push for healthier eating by encouraging the federal government to get out of the business of agribusiness. Our current agriculture policy — and the aggressive farm lobby — encourages the production of a few staple crops like corn, wheat and soybeans, at the expense of healthier fruits and vegetables. The government manipulates the market and makes it attractive for more farmers to produce a few staples, leaving fewer farmers to produce everything else. These subsidies drive the supply down and the price up of healthier fruits and vegetables. Perhaps this was more than Mrs. Obama wanted to tackle, but our agriculture policy hurts American families who have fewer reasonably priced healthy choices at the grocery store.
Michelle Obama knows that what we eat is an extremely personal decision. She also understands dietary decisions are best left to parents or guardians, who are closest to the children. In fact, she talked with Jim Lehrer on national television about the dietary and lifestyle changes she made for her daughters Sasha and Malia after their pediatrician raised concerns about their weight. But this new bill reveals that the first lady clearly doesn’t have the confidence in the rest of America’s parents to make those same kinds of decisions.
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