Lady M’s Salad-Bar-A-Rama: umm, umm, umm!

Grist (an environmental magazine whose motto is “Gloom and doom with a sense of humor®” – although you may  miss the humor part unless you read the “comments” section)  reports:

First Lady Michelle Obama is expected to announce on Monday a major new initiative that would place up to 5,000 salad bars in public schools nationwide, despite uncertainties over how local health inspectors might treat those salad bars and USDA nutrition-tracking rules that could prove a major impediment.

Lady M and Commissar Leon want you to fight obesity

Butt surprisingly, most kids don’t eat salad. Not for lunch. Or dinner. They don’t like it. The only thing they’ll eat off a salad bar are raisins, baby carrots, fried chow mein noodles and bacon bits. Although I guess that technically meets the nutrition requirement of a balanced fruit-vegetable-protein-carbohydrate meal. Which is apparently a real concern of the federal government:

But schools also are deterred by USDA regulations that require students to pass by a cash register or “point of sale” station after they have been to the salad bar to ensure that they have served themselves the correct portions of fruits and vegetables required under the federal lunch program.

Those darned federal school lunch program regulations! That’s going to require a whole new squad of food police in every school cafeteria, and we haven’t even factored that into the budget yet. We’re thinking of bribing the little children into making the right food choices by giving them a toy with every Happy Salad Meal that meets our federal lunch program guidelines:

Part of our trade agreement with India

  Indian craftsmen making Lady M’s Happy Salad Meal toys

(Lady M) has embraced more fruit and vegetable consumption as a major plank in her efforts to improve American diets and combat weight-related illnesses, especially among children. Kass, who directs the First Lady’s nutrition efforts, was seen as central to bringing the various salad-bar interests together and developing a unified effort under the White House banner.

Who would have thought there was such a thing as “various salad-bar interests?”

I’m not sure who all those “various salad-bar interests” are. Aside from the food service contractors who enjoy HUGE contracts with the federal government to supply food for school lunches. Their fat contracts will now be embiggened by the addition of tons of fresh fruits and vegetables. And the SEIU of course.

Do you have any idea how many more food service workers it takes to chop up all those green peppers, broccoli, cauliflower and radishes that the kids won’t eat? And then clean up the mess at the end of the lunch hour and throw away all the uneaten fruit and veggies?

And do you know how much it will cost government-paid food contractors to buy all that produce from certified SEIU-friendly fresh food distributors? Who will buy the produce from other certified SEIU-friendly fresh food handlers and processors? Who will get all that produce from comprehensive-immigration reform friendly “organic” farmers?

The answer is: $4.5 billion. For starters. Think of it as part of our economic stimulus plan. That’s why we need more money. It’s for the children. And their fat behinds.

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin is passing out cookies at schools in Pennsylvania. Cookies! How subversive can you get?

 Is this even going to be a contest?

I thought the Dems were supposed to be the populists around here. I can tell you right now, they’re never going to win the hearts and minds of the American people with fat-free tofu and alfalfa sprouts. Oh, and another thing: sending “fat report cards” home to mom and dad telling them that their children are obese: probably not an endearing feature of the new wOrld order either.

The Dems better hope that Ann Coulter gets her way about repealing the 26th Amendment and raising the voting age to 30. Because if you offer anyone under 30 a choice between chocolate chip cookies and tofu stocked salad bars, I think I know how that vote’s going to go.

Oh, and by the way, bad news for Lady M’s Salad-bar-a-rama: after all her hard work and sacrificing, America’s consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables: down this year. I wonder if it has anything to do with Bush’s recession?