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The Public Policy
Calorie Cops
Bad lunches cooked up by the central planners.
The big news out of Sweden is that lunch lady Annika Eriksson has been shut down.
Eriksson was an exceptionally creative and hardworking head cook at a school in central Sweden — too creative and too resourceful as it turns out.
Uniquely motivated to offer the school kids a wide array of tasty, healthy and attractive foods, Eriksson baked her own fresh breads and changed the daily vegetable into something more than corn in a steam table by turning an assortment of 15 vegetables each day into an ever-changing, colorful, appetizing and innovative vegetable buffet.
Eriksson also did some fancy culinary footwork for the kids with chicken, shrimp and beef patties.
The kids had no complaints and nothing busted the school’s food budget.
Well, that was all too good, too yummy and too unequal for Sweden’s overstocked supply of bureaucrats, central planners, food monitors, and equity cops.
The talented and enthused lunch lady was “told to stop baking fresh bread and to cut back on her wide-ranging veggie buffets because it was ‘unfair’ that students at other schools didn’t have access to the unusually tasty offering,” reported The Local: Sweden’s News in English website.
“The municipality had ordered Eriksson to bring it down a notch since other schools do not receive the same caliber of food – and that’s unfair,” explained The Local. “Moreover, the food on offer at the school doesn’t comply with the directives of a local healthy diet scheme which was initiated in 2011, according to the municipality.”
Katarina Lindberg, the head planner of the government unit responsible for coming up with the school diet scheme, told the local Falukuriren newspaper that the diet scheme’s mandatory and uniform menu is “about making a collective effort on quality, to improve school meals overall and ensure everyone does the same.”
The “same,” even if everyone is worse off. Or as Winston Churchill put it, “socialism is the equal sharing of misery.”
What’s reportedly next up is a government investigation of Eriksson’s special and unequal smorgasbords for Easter and Christmas.
After that, a consistent next step might be a mandated switch at Sweden’s fast-food outlets from quarter-pound cheeseburgers to a more centrally planned healthy choice of small-bite soy balls.
Sending a hopeful sign, the fourth-graders at Ms. Eriksson’s school, apparently not yet pounded into full obedience and conformity, have launched a protest petition.
Closer to home and reacting to another top-down, one-size-fits-all mandate on school foods, a group of American high school students has produced a YouTube parody turning the song “We Are Young” into “We Are Hungry.”
Masked students in the video, hungry and frantic, are shown robbing classroom refrigerators, sneaking off school grounds to buy junk food, and collapsing to the floor during gym class due to a lack of energy and nutrition.
About the Author
Ralph R. Reiland is the B. Kenneth Simon professor of free enterprise and an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.
Appleby| 11.1.12 @ 7:04AM
I been tellin' ya. Ain't I been tellin' ya?
One reason I moved up here to Kanukistan was to study from the inside why socialism never works anywhere it is tried. This is not something you can understand from books, from anecdotal evidence, or from your comfy berth in a capitalist country. This is something you have to live. And believe you me, when you're trekking to the grocery store with the knowledge that you are going to come home not with what you want, but with what they have, at prices you last saw on your vacation in Jamaica or Alaska, you KNOW why socialism doesn't work. After living under socialism for 14 years, I am convinced that the only thing propping Canada up is the fact that 80% of the population lives within 2 hours of the border with the USA.
Bob Grant| 11.1.12 @ 9:55AM
"...I am convinced that the only thing propping Canada up is the fact that 80% of the population lives within 2 hours of the border with the USA."
Oh, so true!!!
I'm sure the fine folks of Windsor Canada would agree wholeheartedly.
They have the best of many Worlds. They can receive what freebies they get from the Canadian government in their cozy little town and cherry pick what good is left from their Free Market neighbors 1/8th of a mile away in Detroit - Healthcare, consumer products, sports teams, etc. - and at the same time be inoculated from the general disaster which is Detroit itself. They have this nice little firewall called a BORDER!
Windsor Canada alone would never exist without this nice little arrangement you describe.
Darin| 11.1.12 @ 7:12AM
My daughter's Girl Scout troop spent several sessions discussing how horrible the lunch program was. I told them it can be laid at the feet of Michelle Obama and her "I know better than you" attitude. The other parents understood and agreed. Tuesday should be interesting.
c. j. acworth| 11.1.12 @ 8:26AM
When I was in school (during the Paleolithic) I never bought the cafeteria stuff anyway. I brought my lunch from home (in a tin Lone Ranger box). Ham & cheese on rye, maybe a double PB&J. Thermos full of chocolate milk or Kool Aid, maybe hot cocoa in winter. Cookies or Hostess Twinkies, maybe a little box of raisins for dessert. No food police. My mom would've torn a strip off anyone who told her she was not giving me a healthy lunch. Those were the days.
PolishKnight| 11.1.12 @ 9:43AM
On a related note, I'm reminded of the school board in San Clemente 15 years ago needing to save money so they required parents to pay for their childrens' school bus trip. The parents' response was predictable: they all decided to forego paying for the bus and instead drove their children to school. So the school then had a mile long line of cars dropping kids off. However, the children with "free" school lunches got their school bus for free also. Keep in mind that the operating expenses were the same. The buses cost the taxpayers the same whether they had 10 low-income children in them or were full so it was a net loss for the school board and waste of time for the parents.
So the middle class that the left loves to claim they care about was shafted. Again.
Butch| 11.1.12 @ 4:46PM
Me too, c.j. We kids who brown-bagged it were the envy of the schoolhouse. Everyone called the cafeteria food "slop," which it was. And they slopped it on, too, with food sopping over all the sections of that three-sectioned school plate. The poor kids without home lunches would sit beside us and beg us for some of ours. Good ole Mom!
Pecos Pete| 11.1.12 @ 8:56AM
One good aspect of the food police regime is that kids in school are learning a lot about the controlling nature of big government. They are certainly learning that, given a chance, the government will make them eat broccoli (or whatever). Poetic justice in that teachers are indoctrinating them with socialism's tenets and the school cafeteria is teaching them that the free enterprise system provides them better food. Won't take a whole of this to create a whole new world of entrepreneurs.
PolishKnight| 11.1.12 @ 9:54AM
One of the amusing things about socialism in the states is how awful it is yet socialists here live vicariously through Sweden even as most of them never set foot in it. It's like a religious fanatic blowing themselves up for a vision of paradise they don't understand.
Let's review: Half of the costs of the much ballyhoo per-capita costs of healthcare in the USA compared to Europe and Canada are directly due to medicaid/medicare which covers only 1/3 of the population. Granted, these recipients probably are more expensive than most, but the remaining young and adult recipients would have to get healthcare for free under American socialism to match per capita socialist costs in Europe.
American education is also funded by the state and federal government similar to Europe but per capita spending is highest while results are the lowest. Again, American socialism is a failure.
And Amtrak? Enough said!
In a way, gentlemen,we've "won" the culture war but nobody realizes it. We broke socialism, or the socialists broke it themselves via their political cynicism and dishonesty, that in the long run it will fail because it's already failed.
Bob Grant| 11.1.12 @ 10:40AM
Tell that to Paul "there's no such thing as a bad deficit" Krugman.
This moron's belief is that there's no problem that can't be fixed by spending more money; if there's a problem in the economy, it's because not enough money has been spent.
Now, this would all be amusing if his rants were limited to occasional appearances on Meet The Press or his weekly editorial in The New York Times but DID YOU KNOW he served as an advisor to obama and there is speculation that he will be a KEY economic adviser to him in a second term????
That scary prospect should keep you up at night.
So, yes, it's failed but CERTAIN people believe it cannot possibly fail, under any circumstance!!!!!
PolishKnight| 11.1.12 @ 11:06AM
I'm reminded of one of my wife's friends who married an alcoholic and has to drive him to work every morning. She's a classic enabler of a functional alcoholic.
See where I'm going with this? The left are functional alcoholics and the right has tolerated them because the elites like some of what the left has brought to the table including:
1) "Undocumented" and H1B immigrants to work at lower wages and dump the extra costs upon the taxpayer. This is like running a factory and dumping poison in the water and letting the taxpayer clean it up. Crony capitalism and socialism working together!
2) Bailouts. Can't let real estate values be determined by the market, can they? So pump it up with trillions in taxpayer money and let the realtor mafia control it. Don't want to buy a house through a realtor? Good luck! The banks require it for foreclosures.
3) Want to read a book? Now they're "software" on ebooks and you only "buy" the right to read one maybe for a year or two. And copyrights will be extended indefinitely care of Disney. And now maybe it will extend to anything made overseas as well.
4) Unwed and welfare mothers are ideal socialist voters and the right can't say no to them for fear the women might get an abortion. "Do what we say, or the little brat gets it!"
Say what you like about the left, but they're usually pretty smart when it comes to winning elections or just plain winning. Look and learn!
Nina in MA| 11.1.12 @ 9:25AM
All the experts on socialism and what's good for us, have never lived in a socialist country..they have nothing to base their arguments on. They just don't think things are "fair"...what a bunch of whiners...my friend who is a cafeteria worker in a public school sees so much waste...food thrown away because the kids just will not eat it...they're not used to it and no one is going to force kids to become vegetarians just because they are forced to buy them. Parents need to stand together on this...they are marching to their own demise and losing their rights as parents!
I'm totally amazed that I've lived so long already without someone telling me what, where, when, how....I didn't wear bike helmets, I didn't use seatbelts, nor did my kids sit in carseats! We didn't check Halloween candy for the suspected razor blades...those that keep an eye on the regular people have let the fox in the hen house behind their backs!
Vasu Murti | 11.1.12 @ 11:16AM
The following points and facts are excerpted from Please Don't Eat the Animals (2007) by the mother-daughter writing team of Jennifer Horsman and Jaime Flowers:
When analyzing 8,300 deaths in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany among 76,000 men and women in five different, large studies, researchers concluded that vegetarians have a 24 percent reduction in death from heart disease.
Similarly, in the famous Oxford Vegetarian Study, where 6,000 vegetarians were compared with 5,000 meat-eaters over nearly two decades, scientists found that the rate of death from heart disease was 28 percent lower in vegetarians than in meat-eaters.
"I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on powerful cholesterol-lowering drugs for the rest of their lives."
--Dr. Dean Ornish, author, Reversing Heart Disease
The Oxford Vegetarian Study found cancer mortality to be 39 percent lower among vegetarians when compared with meat-eaters. The European Prospective Investigation of Cancer found vegetarians suffer 40 percent fewer cancers than the general population.
"Vegetarians have the best diet. They have the lowest rate of coronary disease of any group in the country. They have a fraction of our heart attack rate and they have only 40 percent of our cancer rate."
--William Castelli, MD, Director, Framingham Heart Study
Who Knows?| 11.1.12 @ 11:52AM
Spot on!
I'm a 70 year old vegan. The body is 140 pounds with little fat, blood pressure just taken yesterday, of 105 over 65.
Haven't been to a doctor for decades.
Tom Kyba| 11.1.12 @ 11:55AM
Unfortunately, that was several paragraphs of bull. Nowhere in the annals of human history is there any more outright propaganda than from the fields of health and the environment. Yours are quotes alike in kind to the mountebanks warning of dire climate consequences and the liars making up large numbers of peole dropping dead from second-hand smoke. Your authorities are crackpot scam artists(and I mean that in the most derogatory manner possible) and you are a fool. Sorry.
Frekki| 11.1.12 @ 11:59AM
If I want to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, while drinking a quart of whiskey, That's my choice. It's MY choice. My Choice! My freedom to chose!
Any system that stops me from doing what I want to do to me is a Dictatorship. Are you going to tell me I have to change my behavior so the Government doesn't have to pay extra for my health care?? I do not want your healthcare. I would scream this but you never listen. All you want to do is control my life. Well F you. Go to H-E double L. Oh, and I have lot's of guns and money. Come to my farm and try to make me. That is what this election is all about. Good luck. I am an American, and I resist.
fmm| 11.1.12 @ 12:27PM
Even if these statements are true, that does not give anyone the right to tell individuals what to eat, especially since the downsides, such as weakened bone structure, are not detailed. Even more so since the concern is faked by those who support genocide via abortion and rationing health care for the elderly in favor of letting them die.
PolishKnight| 11.1.12 @ 1:05PM
There's an old saying: "correlation is not causation". Many vegetarians may also be committed to an overall healthier regimen.
JP| 11.1.12 @ 3:15PM
Yes,
American should take lessons from India - the land of starvation, class strife, and black-outs!
JP| 11.1.12 @ 3:21PM
"When analyzing 8,300 deaths in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany among 76,000 men and women in five different, large studies, researchers concluded that vegetarians have a 24 percent reduction in death from heart disease."
Vegans are normally effette urbanites who obsess over food. Their obsessions stems from the fact that they are always hungry. And like Hunter, Gatherers of old they may not suffer from heart disease but they do suffer from an array of pathologies associated with the ingestion weeds, thistles, moldy acorns, and and crab grass - startvation.
Humans quickly adapted to meats and fats for a simple reason - survival. Onlt a society that is awash in Big Macs, Big Gulps, and Steak Fries can afford to go Vegan.
Butch| 11.1.12 @ 4:56PM
I sympathize with your weakness, Vasu. I am sorry you feel so helpless you fear meat, since you just cannot imagine yourself to be enough of a predator to eat any. Use those wide-apart eyes to sense all the dangers around you, and be safe.
Stormy| 11.1.12 @ 11:18AM
This is a tremendous example of what is wrong with Socialism. It makes people equal by taking them down to the lowest common level. Capitalism rewards individual effort and work, bringing those up, but also a rising tide floats all boats. Not equally, but at a higher level than before.
Who Knows?| 11.1.12 @ 12:05PM
Another amusing article about food fascism.
What’s NOT so amusing, though, is the growing “plague”, our own Black Death experience, not caused by fleas on rats, but by people too full of self esteem---I’m right!---to recognize they have a problem, and to change THEIR ACT.
Oh, how many people pay ONLY lip service to proven truths!
Every awake person KNOWS they should eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. And, SO WHAT!
I remember my own misguided youth, and even middle ages, when I’d buy lettuce, say, knowing I SHOULD eat it, but end up choosing sweeter foods, etc, and seeing the lettuce wilting away, have to pick off the bad leaves and eat just the core that was still alive. Thankfully, for me, wisdom came before it was BODILY too late!
Here’s a perfect example of the utter food confusion rampant today---
It’s not about calories! Or fat.
Google Dr. Lustig, of UCSF, and watch his youtube tour de force---over a million hits---wherein he proves that it’s the HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP that’s the main problem.
HFCS, or processed sugar, essentially, is in everything. Eating so much of it is so stupid.
Imagine a 200 pound pile of sugar before you on January 1st, and knowing that was your allotment for a year—yuck!
fmm| 11.1.12 @ 12:31PM
Uhhh, the HFCS and processed sugar in foods is exactly about calories. Calories in versus calories out is the only thing that matters, irrespective of the source. You can not argue with physics.
PolishKnight| 11.1.12 @ 1:08PM
It's not necessarily physics. My mother could gain a half pound from a teaspoon of sugar in her tea it appears. Some people have the ability (if you want to call it that) to process foods more efficiently than others. A real "empty calorie" is nutrasweet although people who drink diet sodas may have a tendency to splurge on other fattening foods (A blonde at a previous job bought two half calorie candy bars and wondered why she was still gaining weight.)
Appleby| 11.1.12 @ 2:28PM
I had a brother in law who ate his weight every day and never gained an ounce. My sister (who later divorced him) said he was descended from gerbils.
Who Knows?| 11.1.12 @ 5:40PM
fmm---have you seen Dr. Lustig's HFCS lesson?
HFCS is not about calories. EVERYTHING you eat has calories, fool. Well, not water.
JFGalt| 11.1.12 @ 1:05PM
Friends that have kids in the Miami-Dade School System in Florida have told me that kids ARE NOT ALLOWED to bring lunch from home anymore. THEY MUST EAT THE SCHOOL LUNCHES. If they can't afford them they will be subsidized. Kids bringing lunches from home are punished. What's happening ? - the kids are throwing away most of the school's lunches or are choosing not to eat until they get home. The effect is that the kids are having a hard time concentrating on their school work because of hunger. This sounds almost like something out of a Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist - where the heads of the workhouse were telling how they kept the kids underfed so that they wouldn't have the energy to rebel. I wounder if that's the real goal here. Parnt's complaints are met with threats of retaliation against the child. I honestly don't even see how this is legal.
PolishKnight| 11.1.12 @ 2:17PM
I would solve this by lawyering up. Go to the doctor, have the doctor write up requirements which demonstrate the school lunches are inadequate, and then present the note to the nurse.
Skippy| 11.2.12 @ 4:31PM
Accompany Junior to school carrying his lunchbag.
Go directly to the Principal's office and sit down.
Inform him/her that your child will eat what you pack or he will no longer attend.
If he says go ahead, he loses his State $$ for each day Junior is absent.
It's likely he will fold.
JD| 11.1.12 @ 3:14PM
HuffPo shockingly carries this story, but with a twist - apparently the protest worked and Eriksson has been told she can resume her old menu, so now the HuffPo crowd is painting it as a story of the crazy Right making up a lie that socialism shut her down.
JP| 11.1.12 @ 3:26PM
A diet that includes beef, fats, carbs, and veggies rich in vitamins is just fine. If you like poultry, no problem. Throw in some excercise and try to avoid stress and most American are just fine.
There is a village in Italy, that 60 Minutes did a segment on some 20 years ago. The average male life expectancy there was 89 years old. For females it was around 91. The average adult in this village at plenty of pasta and breads, along with a bottle of wine everyday. However, their main diet included fish (eaten usually once a day). The natural fish oils prevented a slew of maladies that most people get as they age (namely heart disease). In Norway and Japan similar results were found.
Petronius| 11.1.12 @ 4:51PM
Listen to the song Cholesterol by Ian MacCalman