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Trump Birthday present to Michelle Obama: Your school lunch program is fired!

Trump Birthday present to Michelle Obama: Your school lunch program is fired!

“The Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Food and Nutrition Service, said it is proposing new rules ‘to simplify meal service and reduce food waste.'”

President Donald Trump’s administration took another key step in making school lunches tasty again by proposing new school lunch guidelines that undo several changes made by former First Lady Michelle Obama.

The Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Food and Nutrition Service, said it is proposing new rules ‘to simplify meal service and reduce food waste.’ That would include ‘increasing flexibility in the “vegetable subgroups” requirements for school lunches.’

But the changes would allow schools to cut the amount of vegetables and fruits required at lunch and breakfasts while giving them the ability to offer more pizza, burgers and fries instead.

It would also undo rules championed by Michelle Obama as part of her Let’s Move initiative and The Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act of 2010.

Legal Insurrection readers will recall this process began early in Trump’s presidency, when Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced his department restored more local control to school lunch programs. For example, regular chocolate milk returned to many lunch programs.

The best part of this move: The proposed measures were announced on Michelle Obama’s 56th birthday! The Trumpenfreude is positively delicious.

When making the announcement, Acting Dept. of Agriculture Deputy Under Secretary Brandon Lipps argued that policies enacted under Obama had unintended consequences.

He used the example of grab-and-go food carts that require students to buy two bananas if they purchase a slice of pizza in order to be compliant with the standards.

Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue also argued that forcing students to have certain ingredients on their plates leads to food waste because children are forced to take food they will not consume.

If the new rules are implemented, schools can count potatoes as vegetables and cut back on the mandatory servings of fruits and vegetables for the 30 million students who eat school lunches each day. The new rules also allow for more sodium and fats to be present in the foods by giving more control to the cafeteria employees.

Of course, critics are predicting the usual doom and gloom.

“[It] would create a huge loophole in school nutrition guidelines, paving the way for children to choose pizza, burgers, french fries and other foods high in calories, saturated fat or sodium in place of balanced school meals every day,” Center for Science in the Public Interest’s deputy director of legislative affairs, Colin Schwartz, said in a statement Friday.

Some progressives attacked the potato industry and Trump in response to the announcement.

“The potato industry and junk food lobbyists should not be able to dictate what is and is not on school menus for 30 million students,” said Environmental Working Group President Ken Cook.

“Just because President Trump consumes cheeseburgers and fries every day doesn’t mean children want or should be given the same choice. There are far too many kids struggling with obesity in this country, and we should be making it easier for them to choose fresh, local whole fruits and vegetables, not limiting them to highly processed foods that will only make this epidemic worse.”

I will simply point out that the obesity epidemic began when the government declared that fats where bad and carbohydrates were good. Food Science: The most fake science of all.

However, for most school kids, returning to traditional food offerings is a good news.

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Comments

Slowly but surely, Trump is undoing the menace that Obama brought to America. In his second term he will have more flexibility.

    Close The Fed in reply to NotKennedy. | January 18, 2020 at 8:36 pm

    NK, I’ve been thinking the same thing. On the other hand, Ann Coulter has said after he’s re-elected, he’ll be much less motivated to deliver on the fence and other immigration items.

    I think it’s some of both. I think we’ll get the fence, drip by drip, and he’ll cut the immigration baby in half.

    Which will be a tragedy. Too many latins here, we’ll never be able to assimilate all of them, especially while they’re being encouraged to insult us to bully us into giving them what they want.

    Hell hath no fury like a PDJT unjustly acorned.

    Just wait till after the election. It’s gonna be fun.

      notamemberofanyorganizedpolicital in reply to TheFineReport.com. | January 20, 2020 at 3:34 pm

      Just think about this.

      Most of those school children Michelle dictated her food “choices” onto are now of Voting Age!!!!!!!!!

Trump is just the best. Mo’s puke inducing lunches for those she considers peasants while her daughters in private school only received the best a chef could prepare are finally history. Having this done on her birthday is icing on the lunch room cake. I hope he can honor Bo in a similar fashion – maybe help the Iranians overthrow Obama’s BFF murderous mullahs on his Bo’s birthday.

This is, I think, aimed at the possibility that Michell could be on the ticket this election.

Close The Fed | January 18, 2020 at 8:38 pm

I really like this line: “I will simply point out that the obesity epidemic began when the government declared that fats where bad and carbohydrates were good.”

Brilliant. I love the timing.

This is a great thing. I worked at a school for the past few years and I saw the quality of the food just nosedive after the new program went into effect. To the point that I kept basically a closet full of snacks and food for the kids because they were throwing the food away and would come to me complaining of being hungry.

I can understand because I stopped eating the food.

    Dathurtz in reply to Gremlin1974. | January 18, 2020 at 9:24 pm

    Same. The amount of food waste has been incredible. I sure stopped buying the school lunches; I would rather be hungry. Have you ever had low salt, sugar free, skim milk? I don’t recommend it.

    There was lots of press about food waste and kids just not eating the new, “better for you” menus that were imposed. Big Daddy/Mommy libs like Michele and Bloomberg May have loved the change, but the kids voted with their appetites and often went hungry rather than voluntarily eat what was offered.

    Reminded me of a little protest I did back in HS. Went to a parochial school, lunch was ok but for some reason the desert of no-choice was most often two pecan sandies cookies. The way lunch worked was you could go back for (paid) seconds on a food item, but the initial offering you had to take one of two menu choices, including the desert item of the day. I hated those things, tasted blah to me, and I can only describe the sandy way they crumbled as “bad mouth feel”. I suspect they were cheap to make or something, idk. Anyway, I stopped eating mine, and couldn’t help but notice at least half the other kids still had those things on their trays when they finished. Soooo, I, being a smart ass, started going around and asking others if they were going to eat theirs, and returning a tray piled high with the little hockey pucks so it was unavoidably obvious how unpopular they were. Chocolate chip or other desert choices eventually replaced the things.

    Also, I got to see the change from the viewpoint of a food supplier. Local school district – as a treat for the kids – had a once a week Pizza Day where kids could choose pizza slices supplied by a regular store instead of a regular cafeteria meal. RFPs would be requested, district food service would look at the numbers (and taste test), and pick a bidder for the school year. Worked at a Dominos, we won the bid for years in a row, either outright or a few weeks in when the initial winner proved unable to produce and deliver fresh hot pizza in the quantity (usually 500-600 pies, sometimes even more) and timeframe (lunch hour) needed.

    Anyhow, store owner was happy, kids were happy, district was happy. Then the Feds intervened “to help”, as per Michele’s little school lunch project. Now, I was previously in the army, so I’d heard about the ridiculous detail military food specs had to go into, like 50 page rules on what constituted an acceptable chocolate chip cookie to serve. So I winced internally. And.,.., yup, the inevitable ensued. Under the new regime, “pizza” was allowed, as long as it had “special” crust and “special” sauce and “special” cheese and “special” pepperoni. Now in the military, at least some attention was paid to taste and whether the food would be eaten. Perhaps it was because kids are normally not armed, but that wasn’t a concern here. Sooooo, we did the required switch, ordered the required ingredients, and started delivering the schools their onceaweek “healthy” pizzas which bore little resemblance to what the kids were used to. And watched the school orders drop and drop and drop as the kids realized Pizza Day was now a cheat and stopped eating that cr@p. Eventually It was ended. Just as well from our viewpoint, as it was now negative advertising for our product, as kids would inevitably think our regular product was this sh@t. (Yes, yes, I realize someone here will want to post that chain stores (like Dominos) isn’t “real” pizza anyway, and I eat occasional mom and pop pizza store pizza myself, but let’s not digress from the topic, which is “Federally imposed you must eat healthy sucks” as opposed to “(insert brand name here) pizza sucks” please).

      Gremlin1974 in reply to BobM. | January 19, 2020 at 4:02 pm

      I can explain how bone headed this whole “program” was in just a few words.

      “Healthy dinner was considered to be “Whole Grain Hot Pockets”. I kid you not, there is only one thing you can do with a hot pocket to make it “healthy” and that is throw it away before eating it.

As long as schools still offer arugula, it’s all good.

Michelle obama is the quintessential corrupt hog: she voraciously ate and vacationed on our money, then stuck her racist snout into business she had no talent to be sticking it into.

Follow the money: who kicked back money to the slob in exchnge for this too-stupid-to-be-true-without-a-bribe ‘program’?

Fat, sugar, salt, caffeine….finally! We can return to the four essential food groups. OK, there are regional differences….in Alaska the four food groups are alcohol, alcohol, alcohol and alcohol.

Jokes aside…Michelle’s food choices would get kids used to present day Venezuela menu.

It’s all about control, everything all the time. Lunches are just a small part of it.

buckeyeminuteman | January 18, 2020 at 11:28 pm

Here’s an even better idea; get the Feds completely out of school lunches. Leave it to states or even the local districts to decide. I don’t remember my kids’ lunch options being enumerated in the Bill of Rights, which means it’s up to the states or the people.

Predictable ranting about “Big Potato”. Yet it was Big Cereal who pushed the 6-a-day grains and ultimately gave two generations of Americans type II diabetes. Human digestion handles tuber-based carbs better than grain-based carbs.

And fruits are mostly water and fructose (fruit sugar). Once you’ve taken in enough vitamin C to avoid scurvy, there’s not much appreciable difference between orange juice and Mountain Dew. (Orange juice concentrate is even an ingredient in Dew.)

making school lunches tasty again

Undoing yet another fiat from the Borg Collective is great—beautiful! yyuge!—but let’s not get carried away. I’d be happy enough with merely “edible.”

When my now 35-year old son was in elementary school he preferred to carry the brown bag lunch. I asked why. He said if a student had a school lunch, the lunch ladies made the student eat all of it. Gross.

In that district the high school kitchen prepared elementary lunches the day before, those were refrigerated overnight, trucked out in the morning, and reheated at the elementary school. Double gross.

    snopercod in reply to Milwaukee. | January 19, 2020 at 8:28 am

    Whatever happened to kids bringing their own lunches, anyway?

      herm2416 in reply to snopercod. | January 19, 2020 at 9:22 am

      Didn’t mean to downvote!

      Wait, WHAT? Kids bringing their own lunch, forcing mom to be in the kitchen making it? How terribly sexist of you, dahling. Also, it’s easier to send them with money, and give up another modicum of control to the public indoctrination centers.

More local control means parents have an opportunity to get back into the decision making. Feed the kids breakfast before they leave home and send them off with a lunch bag like in the old days. It’s not nutrition if it ends up in the trash.

Slash administration costs too. It’s all just a massive misalocation of resources across the board. Too much money being redirected away from the prime purpose: education. Dependency makes politicians powerful.

The Federal government should have NOTHING to do with state and local schools, let alone controlling the diet of the cafeterias.

    Milwaukee in reply to MAJack. | January 19, 2020 at 3:22 pm

    Word up!
    How about this idea: offer to states a share of the Department of Education budget proportional to the student population in the state. Ideally the sum of the money offered equals the Department budget. States get the money in a block grant, to spend as the state sees fit. Once 35 or more states take the block grant money, the Department is dissolved and Federal taxes are accordingly lowered.
    Boom. One department at a time.

I wish I had twitter. I would have sent Mo a – happy no more crappy school lunches day tweet.

Now let’s count recess as “time on learning”.

I’m old enough to remember Reagan’s “Ketchup is a vegetable” comment. The federal government has no business dictating who eats what. It’s a classic parental choice with some leeway for local & maybe state oversight. Kids want to eat pizza, burgers and fries; so states — not the federal gov’t — can & should experiment in how to make those foods more nutritious, and no one should pretend that you can get them to eat broccoli by adding a directive to a government regulation.

    Close The Fed in reply to RRRR. | January 19, 2020 at 10:14 am

    15 years ago, when I had self-discipline, I would never eat ketchup, mayonnaise, or salad dressing. I looked on the labels and saw the calories, and I’m like, No, I don’t need those extra calories.

    Since I gave up self-discipline, I’ve gained 25 pounds….

    Where, or where, did I leave it?

    Milhouse in reply to RRRR. | January 19, 2020 at 10:21 am

    I’m old enough to remember Reagan’s “Ketchup is a vegetable” comment.

    That’s odd, because Reagan never made such a comment.

    There was a proposal within the Agriculture Department to give local administrators more flexibility in how to comply with the nutrition guidelines, so as to end up with food that the kids would actually eat and get the benefit of. As an example it suggested that although a slice of bread could not be counted as bread unless it was either enriched or whole-grain, if it came with “a condiment such as pickle relish” that could count as a vegetable.

    This was of course a perfectly reasonable suggestion, but it got so much ridicule that it became politically infeasible, to the detriment of actual nutrition. And by the same sort of political craziness that convinced people Sarah Palin had said she could see Russia from her house, people became convinced that Reagan had said ketchup is a vegetable.

    Which, of course, it is. Reagan never said it, but he would have been right to say it. In the ’90s, when it was discovered that cooked tomatoes have lycopene but raw tomatoes don’t, my first reaction was to shout “Yes! Ketchup is a vegetable”.

Trump is a puppet of Big Potato!

Why should the kids buy into an idea Big Mike(BM) doesn’t believe in? You can tell by the ever increasing size of Big Mike’s derriere that BM is no fan of government controlled lunches.

Yet the Obama daughters attended Sidwell-Friends, where the lunches were nothing like the ones Mooch mandated for public school students.

The most ridiculous thing about Michelle’s lunch menu was the idea that a 17 year-old 150-pound football player does not need more calories than an eighty-five pound non-athletic eighth-grade girl.

Those evil bastards at “Big Potato” needs to be driven out of existence and replaced by angelic and compassionate “Big Broccoli” and “Big Brussels Sprouts.”