When senators from two potato-producing states join hands to stop the Department of Agriculture from banning spuds in school breakfasts and sharply limiting them in lunches — all in the name of fighting obesity, of course — those lawmakers are:
A) Carrying water for special interests;
B) Striking a blow against gross regulatory overreach; or
C) Both of the above.
The answer, as it happens, is C.
Sens. Susan Collins and Mark Udall — a Republican from Maine and a Colorado Democrat — are not usually known for crusading against regulatory overreach, but parochial interests have drawn them into the fray. Who knows? Maybe they’ll develop a taste for the noble assignment.
In the meantime, the senators’ attempt to thwart draconian provisions of federal nutrition rules entered a new phase Tuesday when they successfully attached an amendment to an appropriations bill barring nutrition guidelines that set “any maximum limits on the serving of vegetables in school meal programs.”
On the Senate floor Monday, Udall predicted the rules as written would result in “increased costs, reduced flexibility and decreased school meal participation” — which is surely true.
The Ag Department’s guidelines don’t just target potatoes, incidentally. They bar lunchrooms from serving students more than 1 cup a week of any “starchy vegetables,” which include white potatoes, corn, green peas, and lima beans. (Someone should alert President Obama to this development, as he is partial to the expression “Eat your peas” to mean doing something that’s good for you.)
As Collins likes to point out, if you served a baked potato to students on Monday, you couldn’t offer a fresh ear of corn on Friday — or for that matter, fish chowder with potato chunks.
Child obesity is indeed a growing blight, but these latest nutrition proposals represent an absurd degree of micromanagement by Washington. Not only would federal bureaucrats crack down on the suddenly dangerous pea, they’d mandate minimum servings of dark green and orange vegetables, banish milk with a fat content above 1 percent, and require at least half of grains to be “whole grain rich,” rising to 100 percent in two years.
It’s as if states and local school districts had proved indifferent to expanding waistlines and had done nothing to restrict sugary drinks and fatty foods such as fries. In fact, improving lunchroom nutrition has been all the rage in recent years.
Rather than let the process play out, Washington decided to impose a single model on everyone.
But don’t blame Ag officials alone for this high-handed move. When Congress passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, it gave bureaucrats unprecedented power to impose nutrition standards “for all food sold on the school campus … at any time during the school day.” Ag officials simply took that newfound power and ran with it — and now must be reined back in.
How is it, by the way, that kids raised in the 1950s and ’60s on whole milk, hot dogs, Coke, peanut butter and many other affronts to the modern dietary ideal managed to reach adulthood without bursting at the seams?
Don’t sedentary lifestyles have more to do with kids’ growing girth than even the dreaded french fry?
Besides, for many kids (mine, for example, when they were young), you could mandate as many servings of dark green vegetables as you liked without upgrading diets — because they’d just end up in the garbage.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com
