Food for thought: Kennedy’s ignorance will mean one thing: students will go hungry.
It’s not just that Kennedy stands opposed to life saving vaccines. His stupidity and arrogance will end up will literally take the food out of the mouths of children.
Donald Trump is already on his way to forming the least qualified, most dangerous cabinet in American history. Take RFK jr. (Please, take him.) You would think after the shellacking Trump got over his handling of COVID the last time he was in the Oval Office, he would take America’s health a little more seriously this time.
Nope.
It’s not just that Kennedy stands opposed to life saving vaccines. His stupidity and arrogance will end up will literally take the food out of the mouths of children. Consider his vow to get processed food removed from school lunches.
Sounds great, right? Who wouldn’t want their kids to have healthy meals full of fresh vegetables, free range poultry and grass-fed beef? Kennedy’s family fortune makes these things easy to come by. But in the real world, they are expensive. Plentiful as they may be in his diet, they are actually not so easy to find in the real world. Mandating them in schools? That’s just a formula for going hungry.
The National School Lunch Program operates in about 100,000 schools and subsidizes more than 4.6 billion lunches in a school year. They spent about $1.18 per meal. For many the subsidy is closer to 50 cents a meal. Try to buy bok choy for that!
Like Trump, Kennedy seems to think if he pronounces a thing, it becomes real. Sorry, that’s reserved for the actual almighty. Here in the real world, you have to do the work. Michelle Obama, for example, worked hard to improve school diets. Over the objection of Republicans, she managed to reduce the amount of sugar and salt served to our kids. It’s not that she ignored processed foods, on the contrary. But she understood the issue and cared about actually making things better. Kennedy clearly does not.
Even if mountains of fresh greens were miraculously delivered each day to American schools, what would happen? Kennedy has probably spent more time on an organic farm than in a public school, so he does not understand the staffing constraints. School cafeterias are chronically and critically understaffed. Combine that with the scheduling problems that mean some elementary school kids start lunch at 10:30am and some at 1:30 and you can start to see the problem. There is no time to cook. All the staff can manage, and it is a tribute to them that they do, is to get the processed foods heated and onto trays with factory like precision every day.
Kennedy’s ignorance will mean one thing: students will go hungry. While he insists on kale and acai on every plate, the rest of this new administration will be cutting expenditures. During the campaign Republicans went after Gov. Walz for making sure every kid had a meal at school. I know our memories are short, but that wasn’t so long ago. You can bet subsidizing lunch for low-income kids, a long-time target of the right, is not their idea of money well spent. So forget the kale. There won’t be anyone to prepare it.
This stupid appointment follows Trump’s puerile choice of Matt Gaetz to lead the Justice Department, his traitorous plan to put Tulsi Gabbard in charge of our most secret intelligence, and his attack on our defense capabilities represented by his choice of Fox talk show host Pete Hegseth.
The damage will be real and immediate. Mr. Trump, seems determined to have the shortest honeymoon in presidential history.