Op-Ed: Let them eat pizza

Healthier school lunch rules fail as kids stage a vegetable rebellion

As acronyms go, HHFKA sounds as if it might be a covert insult in the jargon of government bureaucracy, a cluster of ill-chosen letters begging for contraction. It actually stands for the “Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act,” which was signed into law in 2010 by President Obama, and which returned to the news recently when the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced new nutritional rules on the food served in schools. More fruits and veggies! Less fat and sodium! Hurrah!

And indeed, there was much hurrahing in the media, in part because news organizations went to the same two activist groups for comment. One was the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which, to be fair, offered only muted applause, because the USDA had failed to limit the amount of fries that could be served with that delicious pile of kale. The other? The Environmental Working Group, a green advocacy group that has only just entered the field of nutrition, but which, nevertheless, proclaimed that the changes would save billions of dollars in health-care costs in the future.

Now, I have nothing against more veggies. As a child, I was fed from our vegetable garden. But even back in the 1970s, my mother was quickly informed by her peers that it was nothing short of miraculous that I, at 5, would willingly eat an entire head of cabbage (this was Ireland, so having it boiled to death might have helped with digestion). By way of contrast, the kid next door wouldn’t eat vegetables at all.

So the question is not whether tinkering with school menu options will produce better food — of course it will. The question is better for whom? The adults, activists, doctors and bureaucrats who want to see childhood obesity reversed — or the kids who arrive at school, their taste buds calibrated by the food choices made by their parents?

Unfortunately, there is reason to worry that the latest HHFKA initiative may do little more than create a lot of vegetable waste. The evidence comes from Britain, which implemented similar but even more stringent nutritional rules after celebrity chef Jamie Oliver exposed the ugly world of school canteen food in 2005. Naturally, all the adults thought the new menus, designed by Oliver, were worth the extra cost. To their eyes, the food looked marvelous, appetizing, nutritious — and therefore compelling.

But what did the kids think?

In a remarkable piece of survey research, public health experts at Oxford University went out into schools to get the consumer perspective just as the new nutritional rules were coming into effect. Far from being drones for Big Food, it turns out, the kids were well aware of the differences between healthy and unhealthy diets. However, here’s the problem: Health was not the driving force in deciding what to eat. Instead, lunch breaks were valued as time to socialize with their peers, which meant that vending machine food was the most efficient way of maximizing this social time. You didn’t have to line up — and you weren’t restricted to eating in an ugly canteen (which was another complaint).

Even more astonishing, the kids turned out to be instinctively libertarian: As the study notes, they were “often vociferous in defending their supposed ‘rights’ ” — and “frustrated with the government for imposing ‘unfair’ and ‘harsh’ policies on their freedom.” As one grade-school kid put it to the Oxford researchers, “We decide what we eat. It’s not their [the government’s] choice. It’s our freedom of eating.”

The Daily