EconomistMom.com

Well, everyone’s waiting in great anticipation of the President’s Wednesday night address to Congress and the American people, hoping to get more clarity on how the President plans to actually change how health care works, hopefully for the better.  The Concord Coalition today released this statement written by Coalition co-chairs (and former U.S. senators) Warren Rudman and Bob Kerrey.

But the Senate is still struggling to come up with a single, bipartisan plan (despite Senator Baucus’ attempts to make it look as if one is very close), and the House Democrats are still in disarray–with the Progressives insisting that it’s the public way or the highway, and the Blue Dogs today making it clearer that they want just the opposite.

We can still hope for “real change” in terms of getting bipartisanship, political compromise and cooperation, mutual sacrifice, tough choices for the greater and longer-term good–all that good stuff that the President has been great at talking about.  And the opportunities for “real change” might actually be there for the taking.  But hope and opportunity are not sufficient, because to actually accomplish “real change” we still have to choose to change.

And with today’s first day of school, there was this story in the Washington Post about school lunches.  You see, the President wants to improve the quality of school lunches, which could easily be interpreted as part of his broader agenda for health care reform, contributing to the “preventive” care part of the strategy.  The Post’s Jennifer LaRue Huget explains (emphasis added):

President Obama has asked for $1 billion more for child nutrition programs, including the school lunch program, in his 2010 budget proposal. Among the changes school-nutrition advocates hope Congress will consider: increasing the per-meal reimbursement the government gives schools, banning trans fats from school menus and encouraging schools to include more locally grown foods in the lunches they provide.

The subsidized meals are built in part around surplus edibles that the federal government buys from farmers to keep prices steady; these foods include far more meat and dairy products than vegetables or whole grains. The subsidized meals must meet certain nutrition standards, but processed and fatty foods such as chicken nuggets and french fries remain staples in many school-lunch programs.

Why? Part of the problem is money. According to the SNA [School Nutrition Association], the federal government reimburses schools $2.68 for each lunch served, while those meals cost about $2.92 to produce. Cooper says that two-thirds of this expense goes toward salaries and overhead. She challenges anyone to take the remaining dollar or so to the grocery store and come out with a well-balanced, nutritious and tasty meal. It’s no surprise, she says, that many schools simply resort to “highly processed, cheap food.”

There are glimmers of hope. The SNA points out that 37 percent of school programs consistently offer locally grown fruits and vegetables, 99 percent offer fat-free or low-fat milk, 96.3 percent offer whole-grain items and more than 91 percent offer salad bars or prepackaged salads. Nearly 64 percent offer vegetarian meals. (All of which is not to say that kids are necessarily eating those foods or that chicken nuggets have lost their place on lunch trays.)…

You see, just like how health reform is going, changing what our kids actually eat at school isn’t that easy either.  You can tell them that the healthy food is better for them and hope that the message sinks in, and you can give them the opportunity to choose the healthier options alongside the not-so-healthy options.  But if you’re not willing to force them to eat the healthy food–i.e., limit or “ration” their choices so that there isn’t as much of a “choice”–you’re not going to be assured that “real change” in their diets will happen.

So today, my son Johnny bought lunch at his Fairfax County public school cafeteria for the first time this school year.  Today’s menu offered a choice (for main dish) among chicken tenders (with brown rice, which is supposed to make it healthier I guess), cheese quesadilla, peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and something called a “yogurt biteable” (gosh, I hope they’re all “biteable”…).  Johnny chose the chicken tenders, because he always chooses the breaded chicken option as long as it’s an option–same as he’s done for years.

And the photo above is an intentional “reenactment” done at dinnertime tonight with McDonald’s chicken nuggets.  But Johnny actually ate them (for dinner).  (Yes, I know, bad mother!… I asked Johnny’s dad to buy them for him after his baseball practice, for the sake of a better blog entry!… It is a good thing my family tends to make up for our not-so-good diets with lots of physical activity and pretty great genes.)

Let’s hope President Obama will do better to help our nation choose to do the right (or at least better) thing.