All Day School? Chris Christie Weighs in on Schools Serving Kids Dinner

Common sense might suggest that the porcine governor from Jersey shouldn’t be a model for school lunch nutrition…

But all the same, Chris Christie, a rumored White House aspirant, wants to weigh in on extending the school lunch program into a school dinner program, along with a longer school day.

“Life in 2014 is very much different from life 100 years ago and it demands something more for our students. It is time to lengthen both the school day and the school year in New Jersey,” Christie announced during his state of the state address.

Christie wants to establish an after-school dinner program, starting with six inner-city schools. The New Jersey Education Association showed support, but noted that about a third of New Jersey’s school districts have already “negotiated longer days and/or years.”

Talk about total indoctrination, total control.

But this lightning rod GOP figure isn’t the only one.

President Obama has proposed almost the same thing since 2009 – along with a universal daycare program to get more kids in government learning centers at an earlier age for longer and longer periods of indoctrination and greater exposure to an often less-than-appetizing school menu.

“Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas. Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom,” Obama quipped in September 2009.

Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan – who ran Chicago public schools – backed up Obama’ s argument for more calendar days of instruction and longer school hours:

“Those hours from 3 o’clock to 7 o’clock are times of high anxiety for parents,” Duncan said. “They want their children safe. Families are working one and two and three jobs now to make ends meet and to keep food on the table.”

Of course all this extra school time required loads of extra money to pay for it, but the proposed for increased federal credits to school districts and states already been an agenda item for some time. Still, it’s a tough sell during times of economic crises.

This agenda has obvious benefits for the State, whose metabolism is fueled by greater power and expanded mandates. There are also some pretty naked benefits for the many corporations which benefit from government contracts – including some pretty lucrative business in school lunch programs.

Daisy Luther of The Organic Prepper reported back in October about the latest trend in schools to ban students bringing their own brown-bagged lunches – unless they have a special recommendation from their doctor!

Why? Ostensibly it is to promote a “balanced and healthy diet” for the kids, of course.

But behind the veil, is more profit through a captive market – tens of millions of school children eat billions of dollars worth of school food every year.

Agricultural surplus – subsidized by the USDA-administered Farm Bill – is given to schools free of charge; contracting food suppliers, however, frequently make substantial profits by processing that food into derivative products, as with the case of chicken nuggets.

The New York Times explains the role of the food industry in kid lunches:

“The Agriculture Department pays about $1 billion a year for commodities like fresh apples and sweet potatoes, chickens and turkeys. Schools get the food free; some cook it on site, but more and more pay processors to turn these healthy ingredients into fried chicken nuggets, fruit pastries, pizza and the like. Some $445 million worth of commodities are sent for processing each year, a nearly 50 percent increase since 2006.”

“The Agriculture Department doesn’t track spending to process the food, but school authorities do. The Michigan Department of Education, for example, gets free raw chicken worth $11.40 a case and sends it for processing into nuggets at $33.45 a case. The schools in San Bernardino, Calif., spend $14.75 to make French fries out of $5.95 worth of potatoes.”

One example is Tyson chicken, the world’s largest meat processor, who specialize in chicken but also produce record quantities of beef, pork and other foods. It contracts with many school cafeterias, and features a website with menu options for schools contracting their services [price/profit information not available] including items like meatball subs, BBQ-flavored chicken sandwiches, chicken pasta salads, avocado ranch dips, “bacon queso nachos”, “breakfast burger quesadillas”, cheddar sausage biscuit, BBQ beef-melt, burger sliders, chicken salad, breakfast tacos and more.

The nutritional value of school lunches is often well in excess of daily limits for saturated fats, calories and other daily value goals. As the NY Times points out, this is little wonder, as even healthy food components are transformed into food products little different from fast food meals. The NY Times explains how cozy industry relationships with government institutions make this rampant:

“Why is this allowed to happen? Part of it is that school authorities don’t want the trouble of overseeing real kitchens. Part of it is that the management companies are saving money by not having to pay skilled kitchen workers.”

“In addition, the management companies have a cozy relationship with food processers, which routinely pay the companies rebates (typically around 14 percent) in return for contracts. The rebates have generally been kept secret from schools, which are charged the full price.”

In an age where sloppy joes are no longer in the hands of free-wheeling lunch ladies, the machinery of political agendas, school lunches and the food industry is organized and intent on having a say in what your children eat, what they are taught and how they spend more and more of their time.

The idea, of course, is that more time spent in school means improvements in academic performance. But the more well-read and educated youth of the past didn’t have longer school years; they had a more substantial curriculum. Take a look at the case for The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, penned by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, a former education department official, with loads of leaked documentation detailing the downfall of the education system in this country.

Schools have long offered cheap breakfast options as well. Do you really want the people who’ve already helped our kids to become inept at reading and incompetent in math, science, history and beyond to also put food on their plates for not one, not two, but three meals per day?