Greetings one and all. We have yet another story on government running amok and leaving common sense at the door. This one also has a local angle for Anger Central. A local high school that opted out of the Michelle Obama “Let them eat crap” program is now being slammed with other massive regulations.
The school in question is a few towns over from the Anger Central main office and this story is yet another example of a government that is to large, and totally unaccountable. Here are the details of the latest stupidity from Fox News:
Nathan Greenberg believes he runs a school district, but government bureaucrats look at his Londonderry, N.H., operation and see …. a food processing plant? That’s the strange dilemma the 5,000-student district finds itself in after deciding at the end of the last school year to pull the high school out of the unpopular National School Lunch Program.
While the district’s elementary and middle schools remain in the program, which sets portion and nutrition guidelines for students, provides low cost staples and subsidizes meals of low-income pupils, it proved immensely unpopular at the high school.
I’m not at all surprised the teens hate it. The “food” is basically garbage. We’ve been seeing reports for a few years now since this federally mandated disaster went into effect. Kids simply would not eat it.
“We saw the [federally-mandated] food going right into the garbage,” said Greenberg. “We had some of the healthiest trash cans in the state of New Hampshire.”
Healthy and very expensive garbage to boot. In response, the school district pulled the older students out of the program and started serving them things they actually wanted. Guess what happened?
The high school now has a new snack room, a coffee bar and a frozen-yogurt machine, and a salad bar is set to open next month. Participation in the school lunch program rose from 29 percent to 33 percent, according to officials.
Greenberg’s goal was not to provide a less healthy menu, but to provide more choices and ensure the food was actually consumed. “We knew full well that in doing so, we would have to pick up the tab for the [high school] kids who got free and reduced-price lunches,” Greenberg said. “We were okay with that.
And as we all know, no good deed goes unpunished in the Obama regime.
But the problem arose when U.S. Department of Agriculture officials, and the state agency that shares oversight of the program, realized that nearly all of the district’s food is taken in, stored and prepared at the facility at the high school.
Well, that makes sense. They want to serve up the freshest available meals to the students, not the warmed over sawdust covered manure mandated by Queen Michelle Obama.
That means food destined for the one middle and four elementary schools, which is subsidized by taxpayers, could be co-mingled with food that is not. It also means the high school – but not the other schools in the district – would forgo foods the USDA provides at low prices, including cheese, diced chicken and peaches.
And here we see the ever so delicate and fine hand of the bureaucrats come into play.
To ensure that all food was properly accounted for, the district could either build a separate facility for food preparation at the other schools or adopt the type of strict accounting system used at industrial food processing facilities, where every item is monitored coming in and going out. It would also have to submit to rigorous and regular federal inspections, according to Greenberg.
“Say we are making meat loaf,” Greenberg said. “Someone drops a pound of ground beef on the floor. Normally, we would simply throw that away. But now, we would have to log it, and document whether it came out of the high school’s supplies or the elementary school’s. “We would have to do that with everything, coming in and going out,” he added. “They are treating us like we are Tyson Chicken.”
The excuses provided by the federal agency have to be read to be believed.
“In this unique situation, the state distributing agency, which is responsible for oversight and monitoring of the use and storage of USDA foods it receives, reached out to USDA for guidance as the state works to ensure that these taxpayer-funded resources are used properly within the school district’s school lunch program,” she said.
“USDA is not imposing any additional regulations or special requirements on the state of New Hampshire or the Londonderry High School, as a result of the high school’s decision to exit the National School Lunch Program. There is no USDA regulation that requires non-participating schools to be classified as processing facilities.”
This has set off New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte.
Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., blasted the government agency for imposing “burdensome” costs on the local school district, and on Thursday fired off a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, urging the agency to grant Londonderry a waiver from the regulations.
Yeah, good luck with that. Then we have Representative, (Not mine unfortunately), Frank Guinta tee’ing off.
“Unfortunately for New Hampshire, the USDA is providing a great example for the rest of the country of what’s wrong in Washington,” Guinta said. “Federal bureaucrats write rules that don’t work and punish us when we produce alternatives. In this case, it’s clear they care less about nutrition than they do about control.”
The New Hampshire State Motto is “Live Free or Die!” We also have a state constitution that enshrines the Right of Revolution. Back in the Olden Days, when we had Meldrim Thomson, Jr. as our governor, we wouldn’t put up with this malarkey. The food would be served, the children would be fed and things would get done. If the feds came in to throw their weight around, he would throw them right back out.
Now we have a Democrat as a governor who thinks that central control is just peachy. (She’s also in her last term) It’s time for the district to call a traditional town meeting and ask for the support of the residents to tell the Feds to go pound sand. Let’s see them send in their stormtroopers then!
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
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