From 2012
The food police never sleep. They are on the alert 24×7. In their crosshairs are school bake sales. They understand the threat to the children. Bake sales center around high-calorie, sugar-laden temptation. This has got to be stopped.
Beginning on August 1, 2012, it will be stopped in Massachusetts.
Massachusetts Puritans burned witches. Little did they know what evil lurks in the hearts of men. Women, too. Evil is not gender-specific. The Puritans understood this. They just did not understand the all-pervasive nature of temptation. Quite frankly, they were pikers. The Bible speaks of forbidden fruit. It failed to mention forbidden cupcakes.
Bake sales, the calorie-laden standby cash-strapped classrooms, PTAs and booster clubs rely on, will be outlawed from public schools as of Aug. 1 as part of new no-nonsense nutrition standards, forcing fundraisers back to the blackboard to cook up alternative ways to raise money for kids.At a minimum, the nosh clampdown targets so-called “competitive” foods — those sold or served during the school day in hallways, cafeterias, stores and vending machines outside the regular lunch program, including bake sales, holiday parties and treats dished out to reward academic achievement. But state officials are pushing schools to expand the ban 24/7 to include evening, weekend and community events such as banquets, door-to-door candy sales and football games.
The Departments of Public Health and Education contend clearing tables of even whole milk and white bread is necessary to combat an obesity epidemic affecting a third of the state’s 1.5 million students. But parents argue crudites won’t cut it when the bills come due on athletic equipment and band trips.
The food police know the dark side of the human heart.
Maura Dawley of Scituate said the candy bars her 15-year-old son brought to school to help pay for a youth group trip to Guatemala “sold like wildfire.” She worries the ban “would seriously affect the bottom line of the PTOs.
“The goal is to raise money,” Dawley said. “You’re going to be able to sell pizza. You’re not going to get that selling apples and bananas. It’s silly.”
One day it’s candy bars. The next day, it’s opium-laced brownies. You have to nip this in the bud.
Continue reading here.
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Posted on May 9, 2012. The original is here.
On the day I posted this, the legislature took action.
The House on Wednesday approved an amendment to a spending bill that takes the authority to ban bake sales during school hours out of the hands of the Department of Public Health and gives it to local school officials. The Senate agreed to that language on Thursday. Simultaneously, the Department of Public Health announced that it would present emergency amendments to its regulations at the June meeting of the Public Health Council to reverse the bake-sale decision. The ban was a part of regulations authorized by a school nutrition law approved by the Legislature that will remove candy and other unhealthy foods from school cafeterias and vending machines.The bureaucrats complied. Once in a while, the good guys win, at least when the stakes are not high. But this was one more example of what the bureaucrats would do if left alone by outraged voters and meddling politicians. Politicians listened to parents because they had nothing to lose by reversing the ban, and if the parents did not get their way, they would have something big to lose: the next election.
What went wrong for the bureaucrats? Parents could figure out what this bureaucratic rule meant, and they rose up in protest. This rarely happens. The issue has to be straightforward and simple. The bureaucrats had to retreat in the face of this massive opposition. Normally, they don't retreat. Normally, the public pays no attention to them. Their rules go into effect. We lose a little more of our freedom each time.
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