You Might Be A Republican If... You Think First Graders Should Scrub Toilets If They Wants To Eat Lunch

My friend-- and favorite chef-- Michael Voltaggio, got his start cooking at the elegant, world-famous Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Though both Huntington, which sits in the middle of Appalachia, where Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia meet on the other side of the state, and White Sulphur Springs in Greenbrier County are in Nick Rahall's 3rd congressional district, the area is by no means progressive or Democratic, although it certainly used to be. Greenbrier County is now represented in the West Virginia House of Delegates by a reactionary Republican, Ray Canterbury, who astounded even other Republicans this week. And all he did was make a speech completely consistent with the most basic and fundamental Republican/conservative philosophy, namely that the rich earned their money and they shouldn't have to pay for the well-being of poor people and their children.

Like the U.S., India has passed laws to prevent children working in coal mines. But in India tens of thousands of children, in the 12-15 age group, still do, often in atrociously unsafe conditions. Delegate Canterbury wasn't advocating-- at least not in that speech-- to repeal child labor laws... but then again, he was advocating making first graders clean toilets if they don't want to starve. It all started with a bill to combat childhood hunger in West Virginia.

Some Republican lawmakers said the free-meals-in-schools program would send a bad message to kids about personal responsibility, while Democrats argued there's a moral imperative to feed hungry students.

Delegate Canterbury hasn't missed many meals

Delegate Ray Canterbury, R-Greenbrier, predicted the program could set up children for failure, "destroying their work ethic" and "showing them there's an easy way." Canterbury suggested that students "work for their lunches" by mowing lawns and taking out trash at schools.

Delegate Meshea Poore, D-Kanawha, said Republicans were trying to mislead people about the bill.

"I'm offended anybody in this body would dare say a child has to work for their meals," Poore said. "I can't believe someone would say a first-grader, a second-grader... a fifth-grader has to labor before they eat. This isn't an entitlement bill."

...The bill would make free breakfasts and lunches available to every student in public schools, pre-kindergarten through the 12th-grade. West Virginia would become the first state in the nation to enact such a program... The bill would establish nonprofit foundations that would raise money to help pay for the free meals. Now, only low-income children get free and discounted lunches and breakfasts at school.

"Kids can't learn if they're hungry," said House Majority Leader Brent Boggs, D-Braxton.

...Delegate Michael Folk, R-Berkeley, said churches and food pantries already have programs that feed poor people, and schools already provide free meals to students.

"There's already a safety net on the government level: It's called free and reduced lunch," Folk said. "It's not whether we think we should feed children; it's about whether we think the government should be the sole provider of food."

The bill passed 89-9. So only 9 Republicans had the courage of their reactionary, Darwinish/Dickensian convictions. I wonder why Republicans didn't ask that the first graders from poor families work for their textbooks too. Canterbury: "I think it would be a good idea if perhaps we had the kids work for their lunches: trash to be taken out, hallways to be swept, lawns to be mowed, make them earn it. If they miss a lunch or they miss a meal they might not, in that class that afternoon, learn to add, they may not learn to diagram a sentence, but they'll learn a more important lesson." I guess he had been inspired by Newt Gingrich's remarks about how poor children should clean school toilets and work as janitors if they want to be educated. I wonder how all this fits in with that Republican rebranding thing RNC Chairman Reince Priebus is supposed to be working on.

Jamie Oliver Victory Over L.A. School District Food Bureaucrats

A couple weeks ago we brought up Jamie Oliver's beef with the L.A. School system: namely they've been serving up (government sanctioned) garbage to the students and they were working hard to prevent him from practicing his activist reporting about it. Tuesday things took a turn for, what certainly appears to be, the better.

Jamie had made a big deal out of the extremely unhealthy flavored milk L.A. Unified serves and, on the Jimmy Kimmel show (above), School Superintendent John Deasy announced they had decided-- on their own (in-fact-they-were-planning-on-doing-it-before-they-ever-heard-of-the-damn-hippie), he emphasized-- to petition the Board of Ed to stop serving it. The two even seem to be grooving on each other, wouldn't you say?

Elimination of the flavored milks in the schools has been a grinding point for Oliver as he took time to present a very graphic illustration on how much sugar is consumed within the school district’s lunch program. In one of his previous shows, Oliver actually filled an entire buss full of sugar to share how much sugar kids consume.

Last night’s announcement has had sweeping results in Los Angeles. Fans of Oliver have applauded the decision as parents are looking to see what else might be done to actually improve the quality of lunch served to the children.

We need Jamie to focus his efforts on the DFA next because I suspect we'll be seeing even more of this, apparently under either a mainstream conservative like Obama or under any reactionary Republican.

Amidst all the destructive activities taking place in our world today that deserve attention, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has decided instead to make it a personal mission to destroy the businesses and livelihoods of those trying to help people through natural medicine.

On Thursday, April 14, 2011, dozens of agents from the FDA, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted an unprovoked, full-scale raid on Hood River, Ore.-based Maxam Nutraceutics, a company that produces and sells nutritional supplements primarily for autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and Alzheimer's disease.

The thugs stole hundreds of thousands of dollars in products, machinery, office supplies, files... whatever they could get their paws on.

Simple, Common Sense Approaches To Cure Big Problems Are Always Dismissed By Those Who Make A Living By Wallowing In Them

One of the most popular initiatives coming out of the White House-- though not one immune from deranged attacks by fringe elements like Sarah Palin-- is Michelle Obama's push for healthier meal options in public schools. Popular in some circles, anyway. A lot of people do not want to know about healthier options. Look how long it took to persuade people that every time they took a drag on a cigarette they were shortening their lives. Some still don't care.

Jamie Oliver has run into a brick wall, not just in backwater West Virginia, but in sophisticated, progressive, health conscious Los Angeles.

The second season of Oliver's reality show Food Revolution features him badmouthing L.A. school lunches-- and the school district is now fighting back with some new cuisine.

But for the purposes of Oliver's show, the city revoked the permits the ABC program needs to film in schools.

"They will not let me into any school, which means it's war," Oliver says.

So at his own test kitchen, the British crusader invites a group of L.A. students and parents to bring in food from their school cafeterias.

"That's stewed fruit in sugar syrup, good old chocolate milk. What's that, a waffle?" he asks. Other items include doughnuts with frosting, pizza and fries.

Then Oliver demonstrates how much sugar is added to the flavored milk in L.A. schools every week by filling up a school bus with 57 tons of white sand.

"Yeah, I'm trying to make it dramatic, because I want people to care," Oliver says in the episode. Oliver was first praised in his native England for helping revamp school lunch menus, and last year on TV, he crusaded in Huntington, W.Va.

The morning after the episode aired, L.A. school's executive chef David Binkle fired back.
"The food that we serve is healthy and nutritious and very good quality," Binkle says.

Binkle told reporters his menus have less sodium and fat than federal requirements. But 75 percent of the milk L.A. students drink is chocolate- and strawberry-flavored.

...At nearby Bravo Medical Magnet High School, the lunch crowd is hardly enthusiastic about the new meatloaf patties on the menu.

"That's pretty nasty. I wouldn't even feed that to my dog," says Mark Anthony Torres, 14. Torres says he would rather eat chips and candy than the greasy cafeteria food. But he's all for organic foods and a salad bar.

"I do agree there should be a food revolution. Even though they say the food's healthy here, I know it's not. This is microwaved food," Torres says.

Do you think it would help if people realized eating healthy food would save us-- the collective us like in U.S.-- a trillion dollars. That's a lot more than the crooks in the House are trying to save ($38.5 billion) but throwing the poor and elderly into the streets. Food activist and renowned author Mark Bittman took to the pages on his old home, the NY Times last week to explain how to slash the hell out of the federal deficit.

For the first time in history, lifestyle diseases like diabetes, heart disease, some cancers and others kill more people than communicable ones. Treating these diseases-- and futile attempts to “cure” them-- costs a fortune, more than one-seventh of our GDP.

But they’re preventable, and you prevent them the same way you cause them: lifestyle. A sane diet, along with exercise, meditation and intangibles like love prevent and even reverse disease. A sane diet alone would save us hundreds of billions of dollars and maybe more.

This isn’t just me talking. In a recent issue of the magazine Circulation, the American Heart Association editorial board stated flatly that costs in the U.S. from cardiovascular disease-- the leading cause of death here and in much of the rest of the world-- will triple by 2030, to more than $800 billion annually. Throw in about $276 billion of what they call “real indirect costs,” like productivity, and you have over a trillion. Enough over, in fact, to make $38 billion in budget cuts seem like a rounding error.

Similarly, Type 2 diabetes is projected to cost us $500 billion a year come 2020, when half of all Americans will have diabetes or pre-diabetes. Need I remind you that Type 2 diabetes is virtually entirely preventable? Ten billion dollars invested now might save a couple of hundred billion annually 10 years from now. And: hypertension, many cancers, diverticulitis and more are treated by a health care (better termed “disease care”) system that costs us about $2.3 trillion annually now-- before costs double and triple.

It’s worth noting that the Federal budget will absorb its usual 60 percent of that cost. We can save some of that money, though, if an alliance of insurers, government, individuals-- maybe even Big Food, if it’s pushed hard enough-- moves us towards better eating.

The many numbers all point in the same direction. Look at heart disease: The INTERHEART study of 30,000 men and women in 52 countries showed that at least 90 percent of heart disease is lifestyle related; a European study of more than 23,000 Germans showed that people with healthier lifestyles had an 81 percent lower risk.

And those estimates might be on the low side. Dean Ornish, the San Francisco-based doctor who probably knows more about diet and heart disease than anyone, says, “My colleagues and I have found that more intensive diets than those studies used can reverse the progression of even severe coronary heart disease.”

In his latest book, The Spectrum, Ornish recommends that people at risk eat stricter diets (more plants, higher fiber, lower saturated fats and so on) than those who are generally healthy, but it’s not all or nothing-- the more you change your diet and lifestyle, the healthier you are. “What matters most,” he says, “is your overall way of eating and living. If you indulge yourself one day, eat healthier the next.” I’ve been preaching similarly for years. But the trillion-dollar question is, “How do we get people to eat that way?”

I don’t have an easy answer; no one does. But it for sure will take an investment: it’s a situation in which you must spend money to make or save money. (Yes, taxes will go up, but whose taxes?) Some number of billions of dollars-- something in the rounding error area-- should be spent on research to figure out exactly how to turn this ship around. (The NIH, which pegs obesity-related costs at about $150 billion, just announced a new billion-dollar investment. Good, but not enough.)

Corny as it is to say so, if we can put a man on the moon we can create an environment in which an apple is a better and more accessible choice than a Pop-Tart. Some other billions of dollars must go to public health. Again: we built sewage systems; we built water supplies; we showed that we could get people to eat anything we marketed. Now all we have to do is build a food distribution system that favors real food, and market that.

Experts without vested interests in the status quo come to much the same conclusion: Only a massive public health effort can save both our health and our budget.

Can we afford it? Sure. Dr. David Ludwig, a Harvard-affiliated pediatrician and the author of Ending the Food Fight, says, “The magnitude of the deficit is small when you consider costs of nutrition-related disease; the $4 trillion that the Republicans want cut over a decade is about the same as the projected costs of diabetes over that same period.”

In last week’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Ludwig made a number of concrete suggestions, like restructuring subsidies, regulating the marketing of food to children and adequately funding school lunch programs.

His most novel ideas use existing and future technologies to help the food industry retain profits while producing less junky products: devising a method of preserving polyunsaturated fats, for example (dangerous trans-fats are widely used simply because they are stable) or making bread with real whole grains instead of refined ones. (His research demonstrates that people who eat ultra-processed grains rather than whole grains for breakfast go on to consume 600 to 700 calories more than other people each day.) “I’m not arguing that the food industry should be philanthropic,” he says. “Its purpose is to make money. But the goal of the government should be to encourage industry to make money by producing more rather than less healthful foods.”

The best way to combat diet-related diseases is to change what we eat. And if our thinking is along the lines of diet improved = deficit reduced, so much the better. If a better diet were to result only in a 10 percent decrease in heart disease (way lower than Ludwig believes possible), that’s $100 billion project savings per year by 2030.

This isn’t just fiscal responsibility, but social responsibility as well. And the alternative is not only fiscal catastrophe but millions of premature deaths.