House of Eratosthenes

So it was decided that Michelle Obama would go to war on childhood obesity. Democrats and Republicans should be able to agree that there’s a lot of it about, and it doesn’t say anything good about where we’re headed. And so it was that the president signed into law the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. Like I said, all very bipartisan: It passed in the Senate by unanimous voice vote — because who’s against healthy, hunger-free kids? And thus, in order to lend credibility to a make-work project for the Queen Consort, America is now a land in which a government bureaucrat at the Department of Agriculture sets the maximum permitted calories for school lunches across the fruited plain and all the way to Guam. “I’m confident we have a core healthy set of proposed diets for children,” said Kevin Concannon, the U.S. undersecretary for food, nutrition, and consumer services. At the European Commission, the chef de cabinet, despite his title, does not actually determine the national menu. But in Washington, Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture, is literally the chef de cabinet. He sets the set menu — and there’s no ordering à la carte, not when the carte stretches from Maine to Hawaii.

Okay, that’s enough lame francophone punning. This year some guy working in some office someplace some ways down the chain from the chef de cabinet decided to reduce the permitted lunchtime calorie intake of American middle-schoolers from 785 calories to 700 calories. I chanced to read this news while sitting in my doctor’s office staring at a Body Mass Index chart on the wall. If you’ve ever attended a middle-school choir concert and watched a 4′10″ boy warbling along with a 5′6″ girl from the grade below, you’ll know that things can get really wacky developmentally round about Grade Six. But a bureaucrat in Washington has decided that, food-wise, one size fits all. The World Health Organization considers BMI 25 to be overweight for Caucasians but BMI 23 for Asians. Yet a bureaucrat in Washington can breezily impose a uniform calorific intake on the school cafeterias of Honolulu and Buffalo.

The first lady was on hand for the launch of the new federally mandated lunch limits. The stench of failure and risibility has not yet attached to this initiative as it has to so many other Obama-era bureaucratic excesses. But, through September, returning schoolchildren complained about their new, insufficient lunches. Teachers and parents who took up their cause did so in statist terms, beseeching the commissars to raise the mandated calorie limits. Very few did so on first-principle grounds — which is to say the argument that a system in which a centralized bureaucracy attempts to impose a uniform menu on a nation of 300 million people is nuts, and cannot survive. In theory, education is the responsibility of local school districts in sovereign states. Yet somehow a bureaucrat in the Department of Agriculture wound up with a monopoly on what your kids eat.

The First Lady having a cause — that is certainly nothing new. But it is important that such causes be restricted to the “good works” section, things that all citizens of good character and conscience agree must be good works. Literacy. Nutrition. Health. Our left-wing friends are not so sharp at making this distinction, there’s a difference between being in favor of solving the problem, and being in favor of the bureaucratic machinery.

We’re going to have said bureaucratic machinery toiling away under the whim of our “Queen Consort” now, with the police power of the state behind it? Okay, fine. I want to see an Ann Romney/Michelle Obama debate.

If I can’t have that, then…I don’t know. I’d push for abolishing the office, but is there an office? If there is one, it didn’t exactly get built or anything…more like, settled in. Accumulated. Like weeds in a garden, a beehive under a tree, or rust on an iron railing. Probably wouldn’t do any good to abolish the office. Unless we revisited the issue every year or two, made sure another “Office of the First Lady” hadn’t accumulated again, and removed any trace remnants any time we found some.

Either way, this is way out of control. Promoting values versus creating binding national standards, there is a difference ya know. Can’t Michelle Obama run for some kind of elective office if she wants to have this sort of effect on things? Or, once she figures out kids should be limited to 700 calories for lunch, she could write it up and put it through Congress?

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The Queen Consort’s CauseTuesday, October 23rd, 2012

The Queen Consort’s Cause
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012