This is probably not what Team Obama had in mind when it spoke of getting American youth involved in politics. WSAU in Weston, Wis., reports that yesterday students at D.C. Everest High School held a lunchtime boycott of Michelle Obama’s Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act’s menu and calorie restrictions.
Organizer Meghan Hellrood says the reaction to the story [which was picked up national and world media outlets] make her fellow students pay more attention to the school food issue…. “I think that more students are now aware of the whole issue, and are more excited now that it’s gotten so much attention, and they feel that, now that they’re definitely being watched, that this actually has an effect. They feel that there’s actually a purpose to it.”
The school, which like so many others across the nation, has faced a Hobson’s choice of adopting the “healthy” lunch alternatives or face a loss of federal funding, had begun rationing mayonnaise and barbecue sauce packets. Students, unhappy with the switch from pizza sticks with marinara sauce to chef’s salad with low-fat mozzarella and baby carrots, decided to make their voices heard.
Now, thanks to the publicity, Hellrood says her Facebook protest page is attracting a following from across the nation. She tells reporters:
Lots of students … actually want to be involved, and they’re asking me how to start up their own boycotts at their own schools, so I’m hoping that this is like a grass roots effort that could essentially go national, and more schools could pick it up so that more attention could be drawn to the issue.
There are terms in there — notably organizer and grass roots effort — that ordinarily would be music to the president’s ears, but as this mobilization effort is against, rather than for, his nanny state policies, he probably dislikes the sound of it.
Not that this is the first time the healthy lunch initiative has been rejected by the elementary- and high-schoolers it is meant to help. Students in Kentucky’s Harlan County Public Schools went on record last year as saying the food on the First Lady’s forced feedings “tastes like vomit,” while a thriving junk food black market has arisen in the nation’s largest school district in Los Angeles.
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