A couple years ago I attended a music concert in which a child of some friends performed at a public elementary school in Newport Beach. Afterward, they fed the kids the usual school fare. It was pasty, unnutritious garbage. And that’s one of the most affluent cities in the country.
So I understand the impulse to improve school food for the kids, which is being advanced by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s wife, Jennifer, who fashions herself “First Partner,” and others. The problem is, this is socialist food that, like all socialism, doesn’t take into account individual needs and desires, in this case especially the separate nutrition needs of each student.
Results include, “You can confidently stick to an eating plan knowing how your body responds to macronutrients like carbohydrates, fat and protein.”
Mr. Peart himself explained, “Nutrigenomics is a way to zoom in on what will help you reach your goals based on what we know about your genes and how they interact with the food you eat.”
A good way to look at it is what your ancestors ate before industrialization made food cheaper, especially sugar and other carbohydrates. It’s well know the British were beef-eaters. And folks from Greece and Italy ate what’s now called the Mediterranean diet. People from East Asia obviously ate a lot of rice dishes. But one has to be careful, because pre-industrial bread, pasta, and rice were not processed heavily and genetically modified, as today.
Diverse Ethnicity in the LAUSD
Now, although language isn’t an exact correlation with ethnicity, it’s pretty close. And the Los Angeles Unified School District now teaches students speaking 102 languages other than English, according to EdSource. The district even offers dual-language immersion programs in six languages: Spanish, Korean, Mandarin, French, Arabic, and Armenian.”Back in less socialist times, students would eat breakfast at home, and Mom would pack a lunch. The food would be based on the family’s ethnic cuisine, with additions sometimes based on the usual American fare of cheeseburgers, pizza, tacos, and Coke. In any case, it would be the family that decided, not the government school.
They offer the free breakfasts and lunches even to kids from rich families so the poor kids won’t feel bad. That’s typical of socialist-style thinking.
Politicized Nutrition Science
Another problem is nutrition science is highly political. In his book “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” Gary Taubes detailed how the sugar industry influenced nutrition studies in favor of high-carb food, including sugar, and against high-fat food, like steak.He wrote, “When Science dedicated special issues to obesity research in 1998 and again in 2003, James Hill from the University of Colorado was selected both times to write the review article on diet and lifestyle factors that influence weight gain. In those articles, Hill argued that passive overeating and sedentary behavior were the causes of obesity, and he recommended reducing fat in the diet. Hill had long been a defender of the role of carbohydrates and particularly sugar in weight regulation. He even wrote an article, paid for by the Sugar Association, promoting the use of sugar in weight-loss diets, under the assumption that a high-carbohydrate diet, even if loaded with sugar, would ‘reduce the likelihood of overeating, rather than increasing it, as some popular diet theories purport.’”
Mr. Hill also “received consulting fees from Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, and Mars (makers of Snickers, M&M’s and Mars Bars), companies that would stand to suffer significant setbacks if the notion of the fattening carbohydrate was institutionalized as a fact of science.”
Other fake research, much of it by Ancel Keys of the University of Minnesota, just omitted contradictory data. According to Mr. Taubes, “Studies of Navajo Indians, Irish immigrants to Boston, African nomads, Swiss Alpine farmers, and Benedictine and Trappist monks all suggested that dietary fat seemed unrelated to heart disease. These were explained away or rejected by Keyes.
“The Masai nomads of Kenya in 1962 had blood-cholesterol levels among the lowest ever measured, despite living exclusively on milk, blood, and occasionally meat from the cattle they herded. Their high-cholesterol diets supplied nearly 3,000 calories a day of mostly saturated fat.”
Conclusion: Low-Quality Food for Low-Quality Educations
Which brings us back to what I mentioned above: Humans may require different nutritional needs depending on neutrogenetic backgrounds. The Mediterranean diet is likely great for someone descended from Italian immigrants, but maybe not an immigrant from Kenya who’s a Masai.The way to solve this would be to go back to kids eating breakfast at home and bringing a lunch. And providing enough economic growth so families could afford to make their own food, such as by large tax cuts for the middle class. But that’s not going to happen, because the schools have taken over family life, with the programs paid for by high taxes. Alternatives include private schools and, ultimately, homeschooling.
This is another example of how socialism doesn’t work. Because nobody can replace Mom.
