At schools nationwide, bake sales, chocolate milk, and decent-tasting food have been banished thanks to Michelle Obama’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. The latest casualties are special education and culinary programs at Georgia Marietta High School. According to Fox News:
Students at the school learned baking and business skills by manning a cart that sold coffee and muffins to teachers and students every morning last year, but the business recently got the boot due to rules imposed by Washington.
Muffins exceeded the 200-calorie limit placed on snacks sold on school grounds under the 2010 federal Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, which also limits sodium, sugar and calories in each food served at lunchtime. The cart was operated and stocked by the 16 special needs students, but since August, the coffee cart has been locked in a closet collecting dust.
Our students need those opportunities to interact with others because they are very shy and they don’t have a lot of opportunities to speak,” Christy Hunt, a special education teacher at the school told the Daily Journal. “It was really about our teacher curriculum and teaching our kids real-life skills in a real-life setting. It’s part of what we need to teach them, and that part of it in the school system has been taken away by the Healthy Kids Act.”
The acts puts school lunches on a strict 780 to 800 calorie diet, and snack can’t exceed 200 calories. But apparently there are no limits in the Obama White House, as Fox News continues:
While the healthy eating initiative has been pushed by the Obama administration, some snacks sold in the White House blow right past the 200-calorie limit, some have noted. A correspondent for CQ Roll Call tweeted out a picture of a vending machine at the White House that contained a 570-calorie honey bun.
Too bad government isn’t compelled to live under the same crushing mandates the rest of us do. Maybe then DC pols would think twice before micromanaging everyone else.