Fatcats for Fat Kids: The School Lunch Lobby
Business interests are making billions of dollars selling scripted curriculum and ineffective tutoring services to raise student scores on standardized tests (that they also sell). Less talked about are more billions being made by other business interests raising something else: childhood obesity in America.
The National School Lunch Program comes up for renewal in Congress this year. Decisions then will stay in place for another five years. Watch this space for a petition to Washington soon, and weigh in with comments on your own ideas. Here's some background. [Update: Reader Greg offers this excellent NYTimes op-ed with more background and suggested actions.]
Minorityfilms writes, in a post you should read in full,
[W]hen I learned that 2009 was the year Congress and the USDA would be renewing the National School Lunch Program, I decided that I would pay close attention to who the movers and shakers would be.
This lead me to a Jan 28 meeting at the Institute of Medicine. A team of scientists had been gathered to come up with revisions and updates to the vastly outdated lunch program. But when I went to the meeting, I looked at the name tags of those in the room and realized that science was in the minority...
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I've already featured California's Chef Ann Cooper on the "Top Education Videos" page, but here she is again - as proof that the "make our kids fat to keep the fatcats rich" norm in our schools can be successfully overturned:
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(France shows us a healthy alternative too, if we're over our "freedom fries" hissy-fit and willing to be friends again - sheesh, they helped us win our independence from England, anyway.)
One thing I admire about President Obama is his ability to "think laterally," to connect issues that others keep separate in their minds. Think of how, in his speeches, he connects renewable energy projects to jobs creation to climate change to consumer savings to health and welfare to Middle East peace - that's lateral thinking.
School lunches also connect to a web of other issues. Less sugar in our lunchrooms increases concentration in classrooms, which increases learning and test scores. Healthier children cost parents less and spreads their dollars across the economy, instead of sucking them into HMOs and Big Pharma. Lunchrooms buying locally-grown foods from real farmers likewise spread the money around, instead of sucking it into the junk food corporations. On and on.
All the school reform talk about test scores and achievement turns a blind eye to this outrage. Where is Arne Duncan on this?
And as for Bill Gates, Nathaniel at the Social Entrepreneurship blog on Change.org tells us where Bill stands on childhood diet. In a classic case of putting your money where your mouth is not, we learn that Gates, in order to continue to be able to afford to help our kids - is increasing his investment in McDonalds:
The New York Times and Silicon Alley Insider yesterday reported that the Gates Foundation's assets had plummeted by almost 20%. This is obviously a huge bummer considering the scope and magnitude of their work. In Bill's first annual letter, he said that the Foundation was still planning on increasing the size of its giving this year, in spite of the recession.
One of the interesting things in the NYTimes story is the breakdown of where they are shifting money, including buying 1.5 million additional shares of McDonald's. It seems like a decent financial bet, if only that in bad economic times people buy cheaper food, but it also might be seen as validating the critique that some have levied at the Foundation that they divorce their giving from the social impact of the money they invest.
The Gates Foundation is one of the better known firms to disavow "mission-related investing," instead preferring to put its foundation's assets in whatever has the best financial returns. The most inflammatory criticism of this practice was a piece in the LA Times a couple years ago "Dark cloud over good works of Gates foundation.":
Ebocha, Nigeria — Justice Eta, 14 months old, held out his tiny thumb.
An ink spot certified that he had been immunized against polio and measles, thanks to a vaccination drive supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
But polio is not the only threat Justice faces. Almost since birth, he has had respiratory trouble. His neighbors call it "the cough." People blame fumes and soot spewing from flames that tower 300 feet into the air over a nearby oil plant. It is owned by the Italian petroleum giant Eni, whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Read the rest.
Funny how you don't read this on the Gates Foundation website.
h/t to Ann Van Meter
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