Jarrett Barrios doesn't like getting Fluffed
The honorable senator from Cambridge, Somerville, etc., wishes to ban Marshmallow Fluff from Massachusetts schools. Can Necco wafers be far behind? But you can have my Sky Bar - when you pry it from my cold dead fingers!
On Mass. Revolution Now, Andy says there's no way to sugar coat a dumb idea like this:
... Now I am all for getting such ridiculously bad food out of the schools, and I agree with Barrios that it is questionable as to whether we can even classify something that is 50% sugar as food, but to create a special amendment to a bill to specifically single out Fluff is a little crazy in my opinion. ...
On mAss Backwards, Bruce reports he nearly swerved off the road when he heard Barrios on the radio calling himself a "libertarian."
Marshmallow Fluff page - be sure to click on the Fluff jingle player things in the lower left. Marshmallow Fluff, by the way, is local Fluff and local Fluff is fresh.
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Comments
He would never
There would never be a ban on NECCO Wafers or other products because the company employed so many Cantabridgians for decades. However, I hope he is never redistricted to include Lynn (aka Ocean Park), because that is home to Fluff.
In my opinion, Barrios has the right idea, just the wrong approach. Banning Fluff individually is just another silly law that works as a headline grab. What's next? No cranberry juice cocktail?
Writing a bill that actually set out nutritional guidelines for food in school that is more comprehensive than the federal standards is the right way to approach it. Unfortunately it's not as sexy.
agreed
"Writing a bill that actually set out nutritional guidelines for food in school that is more comprehensive than the federal standards is the right way to approach it."
Yep. I mean, giving kids chemical-laden sugar and telling them it's food is freakin gross and wrong. But schools also serve plenty of other stuff with little or no food value, like jam that's basically flavored corn syrup, heavily processed cheese, super-bleached spongy bread, etc. Given how gross school foods can be (and I've worked in a lot of schools...), it seems random and pointless to ban a few specific foods, when these might unfortunately be the most palatable foods -- and possibly not the most unhealthy. It's no surprise our country's diet sucks when we teach our kids that they need to eat fruit, then we only serve them plastic cups of embalmed fruit that contains more sugar than fruit and which has dyes and preservatives in it.
If they instead served kids natural foods prepared well, it might require some kids to adjust their palates a bit, but they'd end up preferring this to the processed stuff. One school where I worked, which serves kids with attentional issues who need small classrooms, serves only minimally processed foods and tries to make them as homemade as possible. They're able to do this on the same government budget and with Sysco ingredients in huge packages, and able to prepare the food in vats. Some of the kids come there having never eaten good bread, fresh fruits and vegetables, or seasonings other than sugar and salt, but almost all of the kids end up really liking the food, and a lot of them benefit from having less of the preservatives and dyes and so forth. Typical schools could do this too.
The Naked Chef, too
Flipping through the channels during an inning intermission on NESN, I happened on a TLC show that was originally filmed in the UK featuring Naked Chef Jamie Oliver working as a school chef trying to prepare healthy meals that the kids would actually eat, and that came within the school's allotted government budget. Funding of schools is a bit different in the UK than in Massachusetts, but the budget for lunches was non-negotiable just the same.
He had a lot of trouble early on not only preparing the food in time for lunch, but also making something that the kids would actually eat. It was tough. He also had the added difficulty of dealing with a lovable but irascible head lunch lady.
It was (1) interesting to see that student lunches in the UK weren't much different than in the US, leading me to believe it is an industrialized nation (and not just US) phenomenon, and (2) that it was actually difficult to find recipes that were inexpensive enough and still healthy.
Unfortunately, I didn't get to see the rest of the show because of a late-inning rally.
school lunches
I remember back in the early 1980s there was a lot of discussion about school lunches. The lunches served in the 70s in many American schools were essentially low-budget versions of a stereotypical 1950s American diet. Everything was bland and boiled to death. Lots of mystery meat, gravy thickened with cornstarch, vegetables that had been boiled to within an inch of their life.
Not surprisingly, a good deal of this food ended up in trash barrels. The people in charge of the school lunches said, "What can we feed these kids that they'll actually eat?" The solution was to offer stuff like pizza and hot dogs, in hopes of improving the food's "kid appeal". By and large they were successful at getting kids to eat what was offered but nutrition suffered greatly. Add in the budgetary problems that have prompted school districts to make "deals with the devil" and allow junk-food and soda vending machines in the schools and it's no wonder kids are eating all sorts of junk in school.