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.
Emanating from a campaign by Michelle Obama to tackle childhood
obesity, we now have federal “calorie maximums” for grades K-5,
grades 6-8 and grades 9-12.
For a sixth grader, the recommended maximum amount of calories
per lunch is dropped to 700 calories this year. For high school
students, the new lunch target is 850 calories, whether the student
is fat or thin or whether he’s sitting around all day or on the
track team.
The problem is that the kids are getting tired of the
federally-prescribed lima beans and tossing lots of food away.
Responding to charges that the “Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act”
is causing hunger, a USDA spokesperson said, “One thing I think we
need to keep in mind as kids say they’re still hungry is that many
children aren’t used to eating fruits and vegetables.”
