Information about the Aspen Ideas Festival is here. I am scheduled for a session, The American Wellness Paradox, currently scheduled from 11:00-11:50 a.m., at the East Lawn Tent. This will be a discussion with senior HHS policy advisor, Calley Means. Here’s the blurb on it: “Americans are spending more than ever on healthcare, supplements, wellness trends, and “clean eating,” yet rates of chronic disease and metabolic illness continue to climb. As skepticism fuels the rise of movements like MAHA, debates over what Americans should eat have become deeply cultural, political, and economic. Two influential voices with sharply different perspectives on nutrition and food science explore how food systems, farming practices, consumer culture, and the wellness industry collided to create one of the defining public health debates of our time.”
Weekend reading: The Cato Institute on cutting school food
Here is one of the most wrong-headed reports I’ve read in a long time. Cutting School Food Subsidies
The US Department of Agriculture runs a large array of farm and food subsidy programs. The school lunch and breakfast programs are two of the largest, which together with related school food programs will cost federal taxpayers an estimated $35 billion in 2025. Thirty million children, about 58 percent of students in public schools, receive school food benefits. The original goal of the school lunch and breakfast programs was to tackle hunger, but the main nutrition problem for children today is not inadequate calories but excessive consumption of unhealthy foods and obesity. Hence, subsidizing school food is an outdated use of federal dollars. Congress should repeal school food programs to reduce budget deficits and hand power back to the states. State and local governments should decide what sort of school food policies to adopt for their own residents.
Oh great.
I have a completely different take on this.
School meals are demonstrably healthier that a lot of food offered to kids these days. The biggest problem with school meals is that they don’t serve enough children. During the pandemic, when school meals were universal, kids and their families did better.
If the problem with school meals is too much unhealty food, the remedy is straightforward: make the meals healthier and give schools enough money to do that.
Fortunately, some states require universal school meals. They all should do that.
The Cato report should be understood for what it is: an attempt to cut budget for social programs.
