The NYC Board of Ed — which of course really means Mayor Bloomberg nowadays — has effectively banned bake sales. In the name of — say it with me — fighting obesity.
The problem I have with this is that the bake sales became necessary because of funding cuts; vending machines and bake sales and whatnot didn’t become common until the Reagan-era tax cuts and resulting slashing of school financing. So if you aren’t going to restore funding for sports programs and uniforms and clubs and activities, AND you take away their ability to make money to cover the costs that the city’s not providing, then you’ve just hamstrung your sports programs. Which might not be the most effective way to “fight obesity,” given that physical activity is generally considered an important part of that, if you’re actually serious about “fighting obesity” and not just putting on a show of being tough.
It’s also yet another way to shift the focus from the structural and systemic issues to the individual, putting the sole responsibility on the individual to fix the problem rather than on the system to fix the things that make it more difficult for individuals to fix things for themselves.
Now, Bloomberg actually has some ideas which *do* address systemic problems, such as the grocery gap, and I would even argue that his ban of trans fats and his requirement that chain restaurants post calorie counts of items also address a systemic issue, which is lack of information about what’s in the food or how many calories are actually in a “serving,” without which you can’t really make informed choices about your food. But all this ban is going to do is exacerbate the original problem, which is the underfunding of schools. Until you’re ready to fix that by raising taxes on your rich friends, don’t take away the workaround.
Oh geez.
My kids’ schools (and their daycares before they went to school) banned home-baked goodies for classroom parties. I can no longer bake cupcakes, but I can go to Wal-mart and buy cupcakes to bring in. These are considered to be less mysterious in some way. I have never figured out this logic. The “a la carte” menu at school sells just gems as Nestle Quik milk and Little Debbie Honeybuns
The fundraisers we have been involved with have all been horribly unhealthy. We’ve had to sell pizza dough, cookie dough, M&Ms, candy bars, popcorn, etc. I hate doing this. For all our efforts, the school only gets about 1/2 the money and the rest goes to the distributor. Our school finally came up with a “stress free” fundraiser. They asked all the parents to cut a check for $20/kid and then they promised not to bother them with any fundraisers all year.
Of course, this is not always economically feasible for all parents, but at our school enough parents participated that it funded the PTA activities for the year.
this post is a really impressively succinct takedown of everything wrong with this. seriously, the righteousness-to-word-count ratio is awesomely high. thanks zuzu.
People say a lot of things are the last prejudice thinking people indulge in, and none of those claims are true; but fat shaming has to be the most gleefully embraced prejudice.
Eh, but schoolkids totally don’t need safe, supervised ways to get exercise. Running from violent crime should be good enough for anyone.