It’s a time-honored tradition of childhood. If your mother loves you, she bakes cupcakes or maybe cookies for your class at school to enjoy on your birthday.
In about a year, shock will no doubt ensue among the moms of school-aged kids at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools when birthdays roll around. Mom’s cupcakes are now illegal contraband. Congress essentially outlawed them last month when it passed a new child nutrition bill giving government bureaucrats the right to dictate what foods are served in public schools. Now, if a food doesn’t conform to the federal government’s nutritional guidelines, it will in most cases be illegal to possess or consume it on public school property.
Remember when mom used to bake stuff to sell to raise money for new band uniforms? Remember doughnut fundraisers? That too will be illegal without a special waiver from the federal government.
According to a recent article published in the Star Tribune, parents in St. Paul, Minn., where schools announced they will implement these new federal policies early, are the first in the nation to see them rolled out and they are already reeling. Schools in St. Paul will transition to “sweet-free zones” by the end of the year. Initially, children caught with sweets of any kind on school property, even those sent in their lunches, will get a warning. Eventually, they’ll likely be punished if the food they bring on campus doesn’t meet federal guidelines. What’s next? Carb-sniffing dogs?
The success our federal overlords are having at dictating what we can eat, a choice I’d argue is profoundly personal, has been remarkable. In less than a year, “food justice” activists — that’s what they call themselves, no joke — have made great strides in erasing the taste of childhood.
San Francisco recently banned Happy Meals in their current form, and McDonald’s is facing a class action lawsuit by food Nazis that seeks to criminalize the kid-centered food creation. And Chuck E. Cheese’s, the pizza joint with games and prizes for kids, was subpoenaed by the Federal Trade Commission as part of the FTC’s criminal investigation into whether it is marketing unhealthy foods to kids. Burger King, Kellogg, Hershey Inc., Hostess brands and a host of others also face subpoenas.
Either the marketing practices will have to change or the food will, the FTC says, because American kids are too fat. That would destroy Chuck E. Cheese’s business model, which profits from the sale of admittedly unhealthy — but pretty decent tasting — pizza to kids and their parents.
Remember how good that skating rink pizza tasted when you finally slowed down enough to grab a slice? That’s also marketing to kids, and it eventually must go. What if the skating rink you couldn’t wait to have your birthday party at can’t make enough money selling granola bars and skim milk on the side to operate profitably? Too bad. It may have to shut down or face federal investigation.
Those parties were the highlights of my childhood, when you’d look forward to the festivities surrounding your birthday for months. So were Happy Meals. I got one every Saturday morning for lunch after dance class. Afterward, if mom wasn’t in a hurry, I’d play on the tubes in the little playground outside the restaurant. As silly as it sounds now as an adult, the whole experience was pure joy. I’d look forward to it all week, hoping to collect whatever cool toy they were putting in it that month. Sure, it was genius marketing designed to maximize profits, but it was also just plain old fun.
Already the marketing is working on my 2-and-a half-year-old. She sees a Chick-fil-A and points to it. “I want to go in,” she says. The whole process takes an hour. It would be much easier to go through the drive-thru, but she likes to sit across the table from me, slowly eat her lunch and then maybe play on the slides. We don’t buy the fries, and the chicken isn’t half bad.
We sit across from each other and talk, in the simple terms you use when making conversation with a little kid, and we chill and we enjoy each other in what I am beginning to realize is becoming our own Saturday tradition.
So much more than nutrition is at stake here.
This article appears in Jan 4-10, 2011.
Sh*t like this is really not all that surprising anymore. The government is chipping away at all of our liberties and won’t be completely satisfied until it controls every aspect of our lives. When the government can mandate the type of LIGHTBULB you use for pete’s sake, you know it’s game over. How do we stop this infringement on our lives is what I want to know. It seems when we go to the polls the candidate choices are “Dipsh*t #1” or “Dipsh*t #2”.
First of all corporations should not be serving up death to save a buck but this is all part of depopulation agenda that Americans deny is in effect because of our flawed world view whereby we think we are so much more special than other countries that our government would never do anything to hurt us. Our government is killing us right now with fluorinated water, poisonous food additives, chemtrails, and on and on and on but Americans, especially whites, refuse to believe that greedy whites and Jews in power would do this to them. They are doing it. Henry Kissinger even admitted it so there is really nothing else to say except sit back and die if you don’t believe the conspiracy. Your credulity is not required to kill you and stop whining when the people you love keep dropping like flies from preventable disease while you bury your head in the sand as the US becomes a third world country. In a nutshell white skin don’t make you special anymore except in your head. The elite hate all of us and only care about green, not white. Restricting our choices is all about control. Why do we want to fight to keep things around that are bad for us? They have Americans so confused from playing both sides that we don’t know which way is up. We are at their mercy at this point in the land of confusion.
Why does CL put John Grooms’s every fart on its homepage but bury Tara’s articles three layers deep?
Will putting a cupcake into your child’s lunchbox be a Class 1 or 2 misdemeanor? Example #101 of the nation’s transformation into fascism. As usual, political hacks and hustlers focus on everything but what’s really wrong.
The occasional sweet treat is not the cause of the so-called obesity epidemic. The bigger issue is what’s going into foodstuffs. If the hormones injected into livestock make them grow faster and bigger, people who eat the end result will do so too. Add to this factor the puberty years when kids experience growth spurts, and the probability of fatter children increases. In addition, genetically modified seeds and plants are engineered for bigger and faster growth. HFCS may be the same as sugar but it’s interesting that the obesity problem didn’t explode until after HFCS replaced sugar and was added to practically every foodstuff out here.
Factory farming does us no favors either. The antibiotics injected into livestock due to the crowded, unnatural, unsanitary conditions in industrial agriculture are already reducing the effectiveness of antibiotics given to patients in hospitals. These animals are also stoked with hormones galore to speed up their trip to the market and increase milk production. These hormones and genetically modified products will be this generation’s tobacco. Decades later it will be revealed that industry and govt knew of the dangers of Frankenfoods and hormone injected livestock on human health but hid the info from the public.
The real issues as usual will never be addressed because to do so would take a few bucks out of some corporation’s already bursting bottom line. So we’re stuck with smokescreen crap like a war on cupcakes.