This story about a local school’s doomed attempt to loosen the grip of fast food on its students has had my gander up for a few days… if you read this weblog for strictly professional interest, you might want to skip this posting. The sordid tale unravels (emphases are mine)…
Cindi Seddon, the Port Coquitlam school’s newly assigned principal, had made radical changes to the cafeteria menu — with solid support from staff and the school’s parent advisory council — to improve nutrition.
She ended the cafeteria’s practice of offering nothing but fast foods such as McDonald’s burgers and fries, KFC and Pizza Hut.
… But the changes were short-lived. Much to the surprise of the parents who supported the initiative, it was abruptly squelched by the school district.
Pitt River was told that district officials — not the principal or the parent advisory council — make the decisions about what will be served in cafeterias and they wanted a return to the fast-food menu.
… “I was shocked,” said Robyn Cambrey, chair of the school’s parent advisory council, which she said was strongly in favour of Seddon’s changes. “I thought parents had a say [in what children are served].”
… Nathan Hyam, a Vancouver chef who previously headed the culinary arts program at Riverside secondary school in Coquitlam, said parents would be astounded if they knew how schools promote junk foods and how much students consume.
“A popular breakfast for many kids is pop and a doughnut,” Hyam said. “Many kids easily drink more than half a dozen pop a day, in the large, 20-ounce cups.”
Hyam said he left Riverside last June after he was instructed by the administration to meet Pepsi representatives to learn how he could promote pop consumption to increase sales and school revenues.
In a June 26 e-mail to co-workers, he said he was quitting because of the low priority given to health and nutrition issues in the district. “I cannot support the sale of vast quantities of pop in this school and pretend that the resulting obesity, diabetes and osteoporosis will not impact the students in a negative way,” he wrote.
I’d like to take this opportunity to invoke an arterioscloretic curse on the following set of contemptible curs:
* The despicable companies who know that their product (I won’t say “food”) is harmful, and yet aggressively market it to children. Why not have cigarette ads on the Saturday morning cartoons?
* The school administrators who sign agreements that deny their students the choice of purchasing healthier alternatives.
* The government which starves schools of adequate funding, and then professes to be “shocked! shocked!” when these schools make deals with the devil so they can support their sports teams. (Though poisoning children with deep fat so they can reap the healthful benefits of athletics is a dubious policy.)
* Every short-sighted faux-libertarian moron who thinks that “public=bad, private=choice” in every instance and thereby supports these initiatives on principle. That the junk peddlers insist on exclusivity as a condition for their school-based franchises gives their game away. (As if having the opportunity to market greasy food to teens isn’t a gold mine in itself.) Informed consumer choice — ostensibly the bedrock of the glorious free market — is a fiction. Money talks.
I’ll stop there… it’s getting near lunchtime, and I could go for a couple slices of pizza.
