Dear Editor:
An AP news article in the Feb. 2 News Tribune, titled "Healthier schools: good-bye candy and greasy snacks," left me flabbergasted and I went to a Mark Steyn commentary in National Review Oct. 15, 2012.
The AP article, dealt with the federal Department of Agriculture mandating schools to take responsibility to "combat child obesity." Accordingly, the government will now determine "fat, calorie, sugar and sodium limits on almost all foods sold in schools .... snacks sold in school would have to have less than 200 calories. Elementary and middle schools could sell only water, low-fat milk or 100 percent fruit or vegetable juice. High schools could sell some sports drinks, diet sodas and iced teas ... drinks would be 8-ounce and 12-ounce respectively.
School administrators, in addition to existing preposterous government mandates, will now have to wrestle with vending machine companies to revise most if not all their offerings.
Mark Steyn's article, titled "Let Them Go Hungry," helped me put all this in perspective. " In 2012 the president signed into law the Healthy, Hunger-free Kids Act ... America is now a land in which a government bureaucrat at the Department of Agriculture sets the maximum permitted calories for school lunches across the fruited plain and all the way to Guam."
Indeed the Department of Agriculture promptly decided to reduce the permitted lunch-time calorie intake of American middle-schoolers from 785 calories to 700 calories. "If you've ever attended a middle-school choir concert and watched a 4'10" boy warbling along with a 5'6" girl from the grade below, you'll know that things can get really wacky developmentally round about grade six. But a bureaucrat in Washington has decided that, food-wise, one size fits all."
Mark Steyn notes: This is how liberty withers away ... "under cover of bright shiny novel "liberties' and "freedoms' - "free' health care, "free' college education with "free' contraceptives for 30-year-old students. Until eventually you reach a point where a man in an office thousands of miles away is determining how much your child can eat - and nobody finds that unusual."
Didn't Oliver Twist have something to say about this?
"Please, sir, I want some more"
Dickensian London: "Do I understand that he asked for more, after he had eaten the supper allotted by the dietary?" Obamafied America: "Do I understand that he asked for more, after he had eaten the luncheon allotted by the National Dietary Commissar?"
Forward.