Junking Fat Foods in Schools

December 10, 2007
Editorial The New York Times
Junking Fat Foods in Schools

As America’s youth have grown fatter and the number with adult diabetes continues to rise, there is one obvious way to help. Public schools should stop selling students so much unhealthy food. A worthy but imperfect amendment now pending in Congress would help curb junk foods sold in too many of the nation’s schools.

Senators Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, and Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, have won wide support from both industry and consumer groups for their amendment. The problem is, they are trying to attach it to the $286 billion farm bill due to hit the Senate floor this week.

So far, the farm bill is about as good for the American consumer as most of the confections in school vending machines. The White House opposes the bill because of the huge subsidies, which is to say corporate welfare, it provides to agribusiness. As we recently wrote about food stamps, something is very wrong when good initiatives must ride along on this regrettable package of special-interest subsidies.

The amendment’s broad support offers clues about its strengths and a few of its weaknesses. The American Medical Association and the Center for Science in the Public Interest are on board. Public-health watchdogs want the amendment because it would impose healthful rules on schools across the country, like limiting the drinks available in elementary schools to bottled water, juice or low-calorie milk. Foods outside the school lunch program would be required to have less fat and sugar and fewer calories.

The people who make Mars bars, Frito-Lay chips and Coca-Cola also back the amendment. That’s because it would not remove all junk food. It would allow diet drinks in high schools and require states like California, which currently bans them, to relent. Local districts would be allowed to impose tougher restrictions on the foods in their schools but states would not. The bill would also give industry a long time, until 2011, to adapt.

The Harkin-Murkowski amendment is not perfect, but it would be a major step toward weaning the nation’s students from the chips, sodas and sweets that are doing them so much damage right now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/10/opinion/10mon2.html?ref=todayspaper