SUNDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2010
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This is just another method to sort of throw the bad guy off.” —Metro Transit Police Chief Michael Taborn after Metro announced random bag searches on trains and buses
K EZ BD
B3
December 2010
Dear Friends and Family, It’s hard to believewe’ve been in the WhiteHouse for
twoyears.That’s about as long as
Barackhadbeena senator before starting his presidentialcampaign—a really long time! As in years past, we’d like to use this space to take a break from politics and talk about what really matters: Each other. Honestly, it’s been a tough year in our non-political lives. Barack was still reeling from
the ’09 loss of a good golf buddy,whosadly left the course after 47 years,whenthis friend was unexpectedly replaced in January by a pretty boy from Massachusetts who keeps shanking the ball right. Then Michelle had to calm all our friends down when that shawarma place moved in two blocks from our favorite all-American burger joint—it has every right to be there! To top it off, Barack was forced to extend the worst policy of his predecessor: the Christmas Eve reindeer hunt on the South Lawn. Sashahashadastellar year in Girl Scouts,whereshehaslearnedathing or twoabout leadership. During her troop’s trip to the National Zoo, she and some other scouts got lost on the Asia Trail. Sasha, the group leader, had an exit strategy: Start withdrawing from the zoo right away. But another girl defied her in front of everyone, arguing that they should call for more troops to help—all the while risking that everyone might get eaten by bears. Sasha promptly demanded her resignation. Malia got her own taste of controversy when a girl at Sidwell Friends blogged all of
Malia’s private text messages. They revealed everything—Malia’s candid thoughts on her teacher (“feckless, vain, and ineffective”) as well as who she liked, who she like liked, and her list of frenemies. The culprit finally turned herself in to the principal. Some parents are calling for her extradition to another school but Barack and Michelle just want to make sure nothing ever happens again to upsetMalia’s social status. One bit of good news: Michelle’s work in the garden finally paid off last spring.
We’d been trying to grow Brussels sprouts for a year but had run into resistance from the gardening
staff.The soilwasn’t
right.The sproutswouldbe too
expensive.They’d kill old people. Finally, with the right proddingandpersuasion—not to mention lots of fertilizer — we got their consent and reaped a historic harvest. (Vice President Biden even said itwasa big deal.) But thenwelearned that peopledon’t like Brussels sprouts. You probably heard this next story, but we have to tell it anyway: Barack clogged
the toilet in the East Wing and — sorry, this is so embarrassing — the thing overflowed. It just kept spilling and spilling and spilling. At first the White House plumbers said it was under control. But the geyser only got worse. They tried mopping it up. They tried reverse suction.Michelle finally told Barack to “plunge the damn hole.” That did the trick. As for Bo, we’re really losing patience with that dog. He got everything he
wanted this year. He had a cough, we took him to the doctor. When Carla Bruni’s poodle ate all his food, we refilled his bowl.He wanted a giant rubber ball, we got him a giant rubber ball. And what thanks do we get?He peed in every single room of the WhiteHouse onNov. 2.We think he’ll come around by 2012. Sorry if this letter sounds negative—we really have had a wonderful year. The
nice thing is, next year there will be less pressure, since we now have some extra help around the House: someone to drive the kids to practice, help them with homework, and all that. If stuff doesn’t get done, we can blame the newguys!
Much love, Barack Michelle Malia Sasha Bo
BY CHRISTOPHER BEAM, SLATE POLITICAL REPORTER | ILLUSTRATION BY BARRY BLITT, FOR THEWASHINGTON POST
“sleeping on the couch.” His wife, Michelle, laughed this off: “Let’s just say, it got done so we don’t have to go down that road,” she told the crowd at a D.C. elementary school for the signing. The bill, which was a priority for the first lady, is designed to improve both access to and quality of school food, and it contains many provisions that will help in Michelle Obama’s campaign to end childhood obesity within a generation—and a few that may actually hurt it. The fight over how and what we feed our kids at school is a complex one; clear thinking about what we need is often hampered by persistent myths.
Myths about school food W
5 BY JANET POPPENDIECK
hen President Obama signed the Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act on Monday, he joked that if he hadn’t been able to get the bill passed he would have been
1
Schoolmeals are free for the children who really need them.
This is certainly the intent of theNational School Lunch and Breakfast programs, which offer
free and reduced meals to children, based on their families’ income, as well as full-price meals to any student. Currently, students are eligible for free meals if that income is below 130 percent of the federal poverty line—$23,803 for a family of three, for instance—and for reduced- price meals if it is somewhat higher— up to $33,874 for that family of three. Unfortunately, these thresholds are
unrealistically low, especially in areas with high living costs. The 2008 Household Food Security survey by theU.S. Department of Agriculture found that more than a fifth of households with the most severe form of food insecurity—in which children themselves sometimes went
without meals—had incomes above the cutoff for reduced price school meals. Even some children whose family incomes are low enough to qualify for free school meals never actually get them. The process for establishing eligibility is cumbersome, expensive and prone to mistakes. In a recent USDA study, more than a third of children denied certification for free or reduced price meals were found to have been denied in error. Finally, there is a stigma attached
to free meals, which deters some families from applying and discourages some students from eating the meals for which they qualify. Direct certification, a process in which state or local welfare agencies notify schools of eligible children, has been shown to reduce mistakes and bring more kids into the program. The newlawcontains a modest expansion of that procedure.
But the only way to fully eliminate the errors, the administrative burden and the stigma, is to provide school meals the way we provide books, desks and chairs: free for all.
2
Most students who don’t participate in the National School Lunch Programeat a healthy lunch brought from home.
Even if eligibility for free lunch is problematic, students can always brown-bag it,
right? That’s not what I’ve seen in school cafeterias across the country. In theUSDA’s most recent comprehensive study of school food, 62 percent of students chose the school lunch and about 10 percent of the students brought lunch from home on the day being surveyed. What happened to everyone else?
Some did not eat lunch (4 percent of elementary students and 8 percent of high school students). Others bought food from a la carte options in the cafeteria, left the campus to purchase food, or bought from vending machines or school stores. What they were getting on their
own was typically not as healthy as the school lunch that met the federal nutrition guidelines, known as the reimbursable meal. According to one recent nutrient assessment, high school students who participated in the lunch program consumed significantly greater amounts of Vitamins A and B12, calcium, potassium and other nutrients than non-participants did. Other studies have found that kids
in the national school lunch program drink more milk and eat fewer snack foods, sweets and sweetened beverages than others. While certainly some households
send carefully crafted healthy lunches, far too many children arrive at school with a brown bag containing a sweet drink and a bag of chips.
3 Kids won’t eat vegetables.
This is the belief at the heart of many school menus—kids won’t eat anything green, so
we shouldn’t waste time and money trying. It’s true that it’s a challenge, but a number of schools are systematically disproving thismyth. In Compton, Calif., Tracie Thomas introduced salad bars, which are now one of the most popular options for students. InNewOrleans, chef April Neujean conducts fruit and vegetable tastings with her kindergartners—
one for each letter of the alphabet— as they learn their ABCs (Apples, Bananas, Carrots, Daikon radishes). I have seen students enthusiastically eating all sorts of healthy options, especially where they have first encountered the foods in a school garden or classroom cooking demonstration, helped to plant or harvest the vegetables or even met the farmer growing their greens. Kids will eat vegetables, even in the
cafeteria, though they are far less likely to do this if they can purchase salty snacks and sweets from a display near the cash register, a vending machine or a snack bar. For example, a study in Texas
found that students with access to a la carte foods ate only three-quarters as many fruits and vegetables as did those without such access to other snacks. A survey in Kentucky found that students who bought extra snacks to go with their lunch had greater fruit “plate waste”—or uneaten food—than did students who passed up such purchases.
Schools need to sell junk foods to break even.
healthy meals that are federally reimbursable. The food service directors I have interviewed uniformly believed that they must sell such items in order to break even and that the a la carte sales were subsidizing the official, federally regulated school lunch. A newcost study, however, shows this to be yet another school foodmyth. Junk food sales don’t even pay for themselves: On average, they bring in just 71 percent of the costs associated with offering them. Thus, school districts wind up diverting to a la carte sales substantial portions of the federal cash reimbursements intended to subsidize healthy meals. The newlegislation seems to recognize this challenge, and will help the cafeterias doing battle with vending machines. It gives the Secretary of Agriculture the authority to regulate all foods for sale in schools participating in the NSLP.
4 5
Higher federal nutrition standards will ensure healthy eating.
Take a look at what happened last time Congress mandated higher nutrition standards for
school food. In the mid-1990s, Congress
Most cafeterias have them: pizza, chips, french fries and cookies for sale alongside
decided that school meals should comply with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which specified that no more than 30 percent of calories should come from fat. In an effort to comply, many schools eliminated whole milk, but then found their meals falling below the calorie minimums set by theUSDA. They couldn’t afford to add another fruit or vegetable, so many schools began offering sweetened, flavored milk, replacing the now-forbidden calories from fat with calories from high fructose corn syrup. The newstandards, developed by
the Institute ofMedicine, call for a dramatic reduction in sodium to be phased in. This might work well if sodium were simultaneously reduced in the foods sold at corner stores and fast-food restaurants, but without such changes everywhere, it could actually lead to a drop in participation as school meals become more healthy. Nutritional standards can do only
somuch to get kids to eat balanced meals. The basic federalmeal guidelines used by amajority of schools require themto offer five components:meat ormeat alternate, a grain product, fluid milk, and two servings of fruit and vegetables. The schoolmeal is counted as reimbursable if students pick at least three of those components. A grilled chicken breast, a green salad and a carton of low-fatmilk constitute a reimbursablemeal, but so do a hot dog roll (the grain), a serving of french fries (the vegetable) and a dish of canned peaches (the fruit). We need to do much more with
food and health education, and make sure that what we offer in the cafeteria reflects what we are teaching in the classroom. That kind of integration with the curriculum is far more feasible in a universal free program where eating school lunch becomes the norm. TheHealthy,Hunger Free Kids Act authorizes pilot programs in individual schools and districts to experiment with universal free-meal approaches. TheNational School Lunch and Breakfast programs will come up again in five years, the next scheduled ChildNutrition Reauthorization. Let’s start now to make universal free school meals the goal for that legislation.
janpop@verizon.net
Janet Poppendieck, a professor of sociology at Hunter College, is the author of “Free for All: Fixing School Food in America.”
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