A Nation of Moochers (10 page)

We start them young and at the breakfast table. So many children now eat on the public dime, either at school or through food stamps, that dependence on government for food has become as much a rite of passage as puberty or acne. The habit of dependency is inculcated early.

In a move described as “locally unprecedented” by
The Philadelphia Inquirer,
that city’s school district announced that henceforth the number of children eating breakfast at school would be a factor in evaluating the job performance of principals.
¹
No longer would principals be judged solely on the basis of reading and math scores, disciplinary control, graduation rates, or even budget management—they now also must ensure that as many children as possible eat free breakfasts at school rather than at home.

Few forms of dependency have been pushed as aggressively or celebrated as enthusiastically as the free meal, especially in schools, where states and districts across the country have embarked on a free-food-for-all campaign.

In Pueblo, Colorado, for instance, the schools offer free breakfast to every child regardless of need or family income “so no one is embarrassed to be eating it.”
USA Today
celebrated the rise of the universal freebie in a story headlined: “Breakfast in Class: Fight Against Kids’ Hunger Starts at School.”
²
Noto bene:
According to the newspaper, the fight against hunger doesn’t start at home with mothers and fathers, or even with children who can pour their own bowls of cereal or butter their own toast … but at school. “Like it or not,” reported
USA Today,
“making sure children get fed has become central to schools’ mission.”

So zealous are the Pueblo schools to push the taxpayer-funded breakfasts that at Centennial High School Cocoa Puffs, Lucky Charms, doughnuts, burritos, and juice are served in classrooms, thus eliminating any possible inconvenience along with the stigma. The push is already on in schools across the country to emulate the eat-at-school programs, paid for by federal taxpayers. Not surprisingly, a 2001 pilot program at seventy-nine schools found that offering free breakfast to every child actually increased participation; serving it in class boosted participation to 65 percent. Explained
USA Today
: “Feeding free breakfast to students who can afford to pay avoids the stigma for students who can’t but don’t want everyone to know. Serving breakfast in class means kids don’t have to get there early to be fed.… Bus schedules, parents’ work schedules, and, for high school students,
the desire to sleep as late as possible make getting to school early for breakfast difficult.
”
³
(Emphasis added.)

In Case You Hadn’t Noticed, the Kids Are Fat

As urgent as the problem of letting teenagers sleep late may be, there are other more awkward issues with the crusade for free breakfasts: It is a dependency program in search of a problem. The push for more meals at schools comes at a time when it is increasingly obvious that the real problem with America’s youth is not, in fact, their lack of food. If America’s children were actually in the throes of famine or the landscape were littered with victims of deprivation, even an expensive program might be justified. In fact, however, there is scant evidence that young people are experiencing anything like an epidemic of hunger.

Indeed, the growing epidemic of childhood obesity poses a real problem for the Hunger Lobby: While the scrawny, undernourished child with large, pleading eyes is compelling, the child with multiple chins elicits a different reaction—generally not a desire to buy him a free meal. A generation of youngsters with generous posteriors requires a whole new terminology.

The Hunger Lobby’s response? A new euphemism: The kids may not be hungry or even undernourished; instead, they are “food insecure.”

“Food insecurity” is useful for advocates in that it is both alarming and nebulous. It is worrisome enough to inspire concern for deprived urchins, but elastic enough to cover children who are not by any reasonable measure either actually hungry or underfed—who might, in fact, be quite fat.

Lexuses and Free Breakfast

In Philadelphia, every student—all 165,000—is eligible for free, taxpayer-funded breakfasts, regardless of their income. For reasons that baffled and frustrated officials, only 54,000 students actually took advantage of the district’s generosity—thus the new pressure on principals to make sure that children do not eat at home with their parents.

Pennsylvania officials, in fact, were so eager to increase participation in the free breakfasts that they declared that if students ate in their first class period, it would be counted as “instructional time,” as long as a teacher was present.

Of course, Philadelphia is a high-poverty area, and advocates can claim that many of the children would otherwise go hungry if not fed by the public schools. But how to explain Mequon-Thiensville, Wisconsin?

The affluent Milwaukee suburb was named the winner of the “Wisconsin School Breakfast Challenge” by the state’s Department of Public Instruction for increasing in-school breakfast participation by 110 percent over the 2007–08 school year. “A value meal option was also marketed,” the state education department explained, “to attract more students to take a reimbursable meal.”
⁴

Mequon-Thiensville posted the largest one-year growth in in-school breakfast of any large district, despite the fact that the community had a median family income of more than $107,000 (more than twice the state and national averages). The mean value of a house in Mequon-Thiensville in 2010 was $471,353, but heaven forbid schoolchildren would partake of their morning meals at any of those homes.

Parents who routinely sign up their children for hockey, tennis, and cello lessons; provide them with smartphones, Internet access, and Xbox 360s; drive them to school in late-model Lexus SUVs; or give their 16-years-olds new cars to drive themselves—apparently cannot be expected to toss an Eggo into the toaster in the morning. On the contrary, they are actively discouraged from doing so as a matter of public policy.

The contest won by the Mequon-Thiensville schools was part of a much larger effort by the state education bureaucracy to increase school breakfasts throughout Wisconsin by 50 percent. By 2010, 1,690 schools served breakfast (still short of the 2,598 serving lunch) and state officials boasted that they served more than 125,000 school breakfasts each day—with 74 percent of the students eligible for free or reduced-price meals.

Zealous education officials even held workshops at Ramada Inns to “show attendees new ways to attract students to their breakfast programs.”

“Serving breakfast in the classroom during first or second hour has proven to be extremely successful,” explained one presenter. “Many schools use this model without it affecting instructional time much at all.” The key word here is “much,” but note also the expansion into midmorning. “A mid-morning breakfast might be especially beneficial for those students who are just not hungry when they first wake up in the morning and skip breakfast before coming to school,” said one official. “Having access to a breakfast meal a bit later provides them with the morning sustenance they need to learn in school.”
⁵

Despite all the talk about children’s nutrition, however, the workshops also focused on what really mattered: getting the cash. They included “sessions on topics such as grant writing 101, low-budget marketing strategies,” and, of course, “information about maximizing reimbursement rates.”

This suggests that the sudden doubling of breakfasts-in-school was clearly not a response to a sudden spike in childhood malnutrition; it was expanding the program for the sake of expanding the program and accessing the extra dollars attached to the school meals.

Like so many other government programs of its kind, the school lunch program can trace at least some of its history to the Depression era, when the Roosevelt administration put the government in the business of regulating agricultural prices in part by having it buy up huge volumes of surplus commodities and then redistributing the food. Over time, the Department of Agriculture began transferring much of the extra foodstuffs to public schools, a move popular with farming interests and their allies in Congress. One benefit of the food-for-schools programs was that farm interests could be confident that the surplus would not (a) be resold in the marketplace, or (b) replace the sales of other produce. In other words, school lunches were at least in part a form of corporate welfare for farmers, which helps to explain why the lunches were often so lousy.
⁶

To this day, most commodities bought by the government and made available to schools are purchased with an eye toward regulating food markets and subsidizing farm incomes, not benefiting the waistlines of children. In 2003, for example, the feds spent a billion dollars on commodities that were eventually served up by lunch ladies. As White House chef Sam Kass noted: “Two thirds of that bought meat and dairy, with little more than one quarter going to vegetables that were mostly frozen.”
⁷

The developments seem to fulfill the aspirations of the legendary liberal warhorse Hubert Humphrey, who pushed for federal funding to provide every student in the country a free daily lunch. David Stockman, who was President Reagan’s budget chief, noted that since the government already provided free meals to poor children, the only apparent benefit was to give more affluent families “the privilege of buying school lunches on an annual purchase plan every April 15.”
⁸
But even Humphrey could hardly have envisioned the scope of the expansion of the feed-me state.

As William Voegeli notes in
Never Enough,
professional liberalism’s “indifference to whether or not programs are effective or whether they help people who really need it” means that the default position of the welfare state is to always throw a bigger net. How big should the welfare state be? What would be enough? Writes Voegeli: “The answer to this question is … well, that there is no answer to this question. Liberals could tackle this problem at the macro-level, describing the boundaries beyond which the welfare state need not and should not expand. They never do.”
⁹

This principle is illustrated by the expansion of breakfast into midmorning on the grounds that mere breakfast is no longer sufficient and that there is never enough taxpayers can do for hungry little ones. And indeed, the push for breakfast had no sooner gone
en fuego
than the campaign to provide free
dinners
began in earnest as well. In December 2010, the lame duck Democratic Congress approved a $4.5 billion “child nutrition bill” that not only expanded the number of children eligible for subsidized lunches, but also funded a program to provide another 20 million
after-school
meals.
¹⁰
In Pueblo, Colorado, educrats have gone even further. Schools have begun sending bags of food home with children on Fridays “to get them through the weekend.” Can food for summer vacation be far behind?
¹¹

The expansion of childhood food dependency is defended and indeed insisted upon in the name of “the children,” who, advocates insist, would inevitably go hungry were it not for government aid. Wisconsin’s education chief declared: “A hungry child can’t learn. It is encouraging to see that our school breakfast programs are helping end hunger in the classroom, so students can concentrate on their classes.”
¹²

Unctuous rhetoric of this sort obscures a tectonic shift in personal responsibility. We can confidently stipulate that proper nutrition is a good thing and that we can agree on the desirability of feeding children wholesome meals. The real question is: Who is responsible for feeding them? Mothers and fathers? Or the taxpayers? Families, or Other People?

Increasingly, the answer is Other People.

This is not to suggest that there are not genuine problems among some dysfunctional families, but the problem is not widespread enough to justify the universalization of either free lunches or free breakfasts. Malnutrition is defined as “reduced health due to a chronic shortage of calories and nutriment.” But there is very little evidence of poverty-induced malnutrition in the United States. Hunger is defined by the USDA as “the uneasy or painful sensation caused by lack of food,” but it appears that nearly all “hunger” is “short-term and episodic rather than continuous.” On a typical day, according to the government, fewer than half of one percent of Americans will experience hunger because of a lack of money.
¹³
*

In fact, multiple studies confirm that, on average, low-income children are quite well fed and there is little evidence of “undernutrition.”
^†
Junk food is, of course, consumed at all income levels. But there is little evidence that poor children have been left out of benefiting from the nutritional advances of the last century. One measure: growth rates, height, and weight of children. Low-income 18- and 19-year-olds today are both taller and heavier than the average of the same age in the general American population in the late 1950s. Notes Rector, “Poor boys living today are one inch taller and some 10 pounds heavier than GIs of similar age during World War II, and nearly two inches taller and 20 pounds heavier than American doughboys back in World War I.”
¹⁴