School lunches? Do they go too far?

Since I talked about the idiotic conspiracy nuttery and general overreaction to First Lady Michelle Obama encouraging kids to drink water. let's talk about her school lunch initiative.

Now I had been wanting to start writing about the subject ever since my mother and sister got into a debate over the school lunch thing. My sister being a Democrat, said  that the school lunch program was good for bringing non-possibly radioactive options to school lunches. My mother, being a Republican, said the program was bad for taking away kids' freedom of choice. Which is interesting to me because she's a religious conservative and if there is one thing religious conservatives are not about in general, it's freedom of choice (not just talking about abortion here). But I digress. The one good point to me, buried in conspiracy nonsense, is that the calorie restrictions are a bit over the top. Some dressing on the salad or cheese on the broccoli isn't terrible.

But it seems no one is willing to make this point. It's either strict calorie limits in complete disregard for the fact that every child's health is different or going back to considering ketchup as a vegetable.

This is what American political discourse has come to. No middle grounds or compromises. Just the most insane extremes possible. Yeah, the restrictions are over the top but is wanting to change the school lunch menu from mystery meat and pizza with grease that I'm still convinced could glow in the dark to something better is not a bad thing.

Some people say Michelle Obama goes too far. Personally I don't think she goes far enough. I think if we want  to tackle childhood obesity we need to re-evaluate a lot of school policies. Banning tag and running on the playground, or even recess itself, has been a response from school districts afraid of abusive lawsuits. And if it's not fear of lawsuits, it's budget concerns. Maybe we should fix that. We seem to have an infinite amount of money to intervene in civil wars, or fight wars on a plant that makes people eat Taco Bell at 2 in the morning. Perhaps  some money could be re-allocated  to building playgrounds and the like.

 I've beaten this horse before but it needs to be said that teachers have turned to assigning insanely complicated projects at every turn because they've been taught to believe that kids can't learn from a simple pencil and paper assignment. Everything must be a complex and time consuming diorama or huge poster. It gets worse now  that schools have been assigning these behemoth projects as summer work now. How many hours do these "creative" projects cost that kids could use to go outside?

If you subscribe to the defense that kids would just play on the Xbox so they deserve behemoth and often pointless arts and crafts projects in every class at every opportunity, let's talk about expense. If parents didn't have to set aside a bunch of money in case some teacher decides to show off how creative they are by assigning bank breaking projects, how many more fresh fruits and veggies could they buy? How much more time would they have to prepare home cooked meals if they didn't have to deal with overcomplicated school projects at every turn?

Heck perhaps schools wouldn't need to worry about how much instruction time is lost to recess or gym if teachers  would focus on teaching their subjects instead of trying to turn every class into art.

School lunches are just one aspect of the problem and they are a good place to start. Fighting to turn ketchup into a vegetable again is moronic. Instead of going backwards, go forwards.

More conspiracy lunacy

So First Lady Michelle Obama went to a school in Watertown, Wis. to encourage kids to drink more water. Amazingly people have a problem with this.

What?

Rush Limbaugh is calling it command and control. You have more than a few people saying that she's trying to dictate to America what they should drink. Other conservatives are calling it nagging and saying she's overstating the benefits.While the part about overstating might be true, I don't recall reading anything about conservatives criticizing Nancy Reagan for overstating the drawbacks of pot or calling her a "nag" for trying to influence what people smoke. Or proclaiming that they will roll joints for the sole purpose of ticking off Nancy Reagan like we have a bunch of people saying they will buy more soda and beer in a juvenile attempt to tick off Michelle.

At the very least the actions Michelle has taken in her First Lady social improvement crusade make more sense than Nancy's. In her crusade, we got a bunch of celebrities talking about drugs. A few of whom probably  did drugs between takes. This crusade culminated in Pee-Wee Herman explaining what crack cocaine was.

I am not making that up.

The worst we got is Disney teen pop starlets encouraging healthy eating.

Okay guys, sit down for a minute because you need to hear this. Remember how annoying it was when people saw nonsensical conspiracies in everything George W. Bush did as President?  Well I hate to break it to you but conspiracy lunacy does not become less annoying when the President is black. Nor does it endear you to the general population.