Meatless Monday: special interests and law making.

This could easily turn into a rant. I'm going to try really hard to not rant, but fair warning: it could happen.

I was listening to NPR the other day - the Diane Ream show - and the topic was Occupy Wall Street. One of the guests, a professor of economics at George Mason University, made the argument that in order to have less corruption in government, you needed less government. That the way to insure that corporations and wealthy individuals paid their fair share and were generous to the rest of us was to limit the ability of government to interfere in their business. Less regulation equals more income for everyone.

...

This has been outed again and again as a blatant and outright lie. Having less government regulation is what got us into this mess in the first place, so I have no idea why people keep insisting that continuing down that path will fix everything. Banking regulations disappeared or were severely curtailed in the past decade, which led to increasing predatory behavior, bad lending policies and general douche-baggery on the part of large finance-based corporations. So how will even less regulation fix that? I'm digressing a bit, but it's coming full-circle, I promise.

The way this relates to Meatless Monday is the following article from the Washington Post. It showed up on other news outlets, as well. The story is that Congress is trying to pass a bill that would count school lunch room pizza as a vegetable, because it has some tomato sauce on it. I'm not kidding. Remember Reagan and "ketchup is a vegetable"? Yeah, like that only worse. This is a good example of Congress bowing to special interests at the expense of our children's health and safety. The USDA and FDA are trying to insure that kids who eat school lunches are getting good nutrition. It's an uphill battle considering those two agencies are also operating at the whims of some pretty powerful groups - meat and diary industries, etc. But the bottom line is that your senators and congressmen (and women) are selling out to lobbyists and special interests, and any child in the public school system is the sacrificial lamb on the alter. (I'm mixing metaphors here a bit, I realize. I'm just so mad about this that I can't seem to keep them straight.) This is, in part, what the Occupy Wall Street movement is all about. Corruption in our government that has a direct impact on the people who rely on that same government to keep them safe.

Let's not beat around the bush about this. If you do even a tiny bit of investigation into what passes for nutrition in a public school cafeteria, you will be appalled. This information isn't even hard to come by! You can just watch any episode of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution. They're free on Hulu. Go ahead - look them up! I won't quote statistics, because I don't have any at my fingertips, but there are many children - I'd venture to say millions - who rely on the public school they attend for at least one meal a day. So feeding them pizza and calling it a "full serving of vegetables" is borderline criminal.

You pay taxes, I pay taxes, we all pay for these services. The public school system is certainly underfunded, but we all have a stake in it if we pay taxes. So why aren't we demanding better? Why aren't we raising more of an outcry about this kind of abusive treatment? This isn't just an issue of corruption in our government, though that's certainly a huge issue here. This is also an issue of public health - we are allowing these children to be fed foods that will turn a large number of them into obese, or diabetic, or heart disease, patients who rely on our crumbling health care infrastructure. This will cost hundreds, thousands, millions more to the taxpayers than just insuring that they get a healthy lunch! This is also a social justice issue. Some of the poorest kids in our communities are relying on the school meals as their source of food. "Bring your lunch from home" isn't an option for a lot of these kids because there is no food at home. And instead of providing them with a full meal that will feed their brains and bodies, we are feeding them to death. And our governing leaders are aiding and abetting the people who are profiting off of our children's health and well-being.

So where is the outcry? Why is this story not being ridiculed in the public sphere? It is, sort of, but on such a small scale compared to the "ketchup is a vegetable" incident. I was alive then. I remember how ridiculous everyone thought it was. I remember how much backpedaling had to be done over it, and the outrage that something that stupid could even be considered by our great government. So where is that same outcry now? Maybe it's slipping under the radar because we have some many other problems confronting us? Maybe it's outrage overload? Maybe a combination?

Okay, I admit it, this totally turned into a rant. But how can we call ourselves civilized, how can we call ourselves "the greatest nation" if we can't provide good, nutritious food to all of our citizens? If we let special interests and profit margins dictate how we feed and raise our children? I just really don't think we can.