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[Bauglir]

Surely a more sensible route would be to abandon this arbitrary nonsense about fruits and vegetables and simply stipulate that school lunches must provide X% of a Y calorie diet's required nutrients (just run through the whole list) without exceeding Z calories, averaged over the course of a week? If you want to be fancy, add on a maximum fat and cholesterol limit as well, and maybe sugar and starch, too. Let individual schools pick whatever they like within those limits, knowing full well that all of them are going to pick the same options because one or two manufacturers will provide preconstructed meals that meet these requirements.

Give me 50 bucks and a couple hours with the internet, I'll even fill in the goddamn variables, Congress. Maybe if you're polite about it I'll do the fancy version, but this is a bargain either way you look at it.

[Euld]

But that would be a sensible thing to do!  No no no no no this action requires significantly more red tape and pork barreling.  And we have to completely foul it up because the lobbyists paid us to foul it up!

[G-Flex]

Surely a more sensible route would be to abandon this arbitrary nonsense about fruits and vegetables and simply stipulate that school lunches must provide X% of a Y calorie diet's required nutrients (just run through the whole list) without exceeding Z calories, averaged over the course of a week? If you want to be fancy, add on a maximum fat and cholesterol limit as well, and maybe sugar and starch, too.

This would be sensible, if not for the fact that it would require a lot of micromanagement of nutritional content, especially since they're only serving the kids one meal per day. That's hard to do, would be pretty inflexible, and would take a fair bit of organizational overhead, not to mention people in the school department who are competent to do that sort of nutritional analysis, which they may or may not have money for.

[Durin Stronginthearm]

It isn't lighter than air. It's less dense than air. Density =/= weight.

You know very well that when we saw "lighter than air" we mean "less dense than air".

How can I know what someone means if they themselves don't?

That's pretty much always what anybody means when they say that, since no other interpretation even makes sense.

If that were true then no one would be wondering why the material doesn't float in air.

[G-Flex]

How can I know what someone means if they themselves don't?

... Except they generally do. When talking about materials, "lighter than <material>" virtually always means "less dense than <material>".

If that were true then no one would be wondering why the material doesn't float in air.

People are wondering why the material doesn't float in air because of the quotes saying it's less dense than air.

[Truean]

Pizza is a vegetable, really?

People need to stop getting this wrong. I mean, come on Truean, you're a lawyer, you should know better.

The contentious issue is not whether or not pizza is a vegetable. The contentious issue is whether or not pizza has enough vegetable on it to be considered to contain a serving of vegetables. There's a big difference between "pizza is a vegetable" and "there's enough tomato sauce on pizza for that tomato sauce to constitute a serving of vegetables". The media keep getting this wrong because "pizza is a vegetable" is more immediately hilarious, sensationalistic, and absurd. The amount of sauce required, I believe, is what's in question. Of course, the whole thing is still ridiculous, because if schools can't manage to put vegetables on the pizza, or serve an apple with it or something, then they should probably be serving something else anyway.

The best legal arguments cut straight to purpose, and unfortunately, those are the least used in court.

And no matter how you phrase it that link says it better. School cafeteria pizza barely qualifies as pizza. It has the same nutritional content as the tray its served on. The "tomato sauce" is only 33% actual tomato paste. The other ingredients are a chemistry course quiz. What's next Congress, are twizzlers and a grape soda a fruit salad?

This is yet another reason Scalia's "only the plain text" reading method fails horridly. The hypocrisy math:

Lots and lots of bribes "contributions" + congress + cardboard school lunch pizza = "free speech" mandating something that is unhealthy and not a fruit is a fruit, while actual protesters saying something get pepper sprayed and arrested on BS charges thrown out by a judge constantly.

All of this undocumented money flowing into congressional morons' pockets has made them consciously ignore all the grease on those "pizzas" and the total lack of health. Screw the nation's kids and their nutrition, even though the purpose of the school lunch program has been legislated to make Congress give a damn about them. Corporate money is clearly more important. Of course also you can never show how they got bribed come election time. This is one of the areas I actually agreed with John McCain on.

There was a thing called administrative law where you could call someone on their BS. Now there is no record of the massive bribery, because all the funds are undisclosed and unregulated. So you can't prove shit.

[GlyphGryph]

The whole concept of vegetables is fucked up in government bureaucracy, to be honest. Its a meaningless term, and thus stuff like this happening is unsurprising. I don't know who has been running things over in the nutrition department, but with the abortion that is the new food pyramid, the utter unwillingness to make recommendations on things that actually matter, and the ability to be so vague in their recommendations that stuff like this can slip by, they are screwing it up.

This would be sensible, if not for the fact that it would require a lot of micromanagement of nutritional content, especially since they're only serving the kids one meal per day. That's hard to do, would be pretty inflexible, and would take a fair bit of organizational overhead, not to mention people in the school department who are competent to do that sort of nutritional analysis, which they may or may not have money for.

Eh, they only have to do it once, and they could probably use someone else's numbers to be honest. In fact, for the price that was paid to push this through, you could probably come up with dozens and dozens of recommended plans schools could pick and choose from. The bigger problem is that cafeteria food in high school is shit, and shit prepared vegetables are more disgusting than shit prepared pizza. To the point that on the rare occasion my high school did offer vegetables, I'd find myself being unable to choke them down, despite loving like 90% of vegetables unconditionally.

I was always like "oh god give me a raw fucking squash it would be better than this, how the FUCK do you fuck this up this badly?"

[shadenight123]

ehy nobody ever ate the jelly vegetable soup?! it's an italian prerogative!
it's vegetable soup, frozen solid and then melted, repeat a couple of years needed for someone to actually finish all the supply of it, and you have it!
it's so good because it's in pieces! and it's jelly like!
and it also has some sort of pasta in it! which may vary from a light yellow tint to a brown-orange one!

i felt so very, very a prisoner during my years at middle school.
not even a prisoner would have touched that stuff.

[Bauglir]

This would be sensible, if not for the fact that it would require a lot of micromanagement of nutritional content, especially since they're only serving the kids one meal per day. That's hard to do, would be pretty inflexible, and would take a fair bit of organizational overhead, not to mention people in the school department who are competent to do that sort of nutritional analysis, which they may or may not have money for.

Eh, they only have to do it once, and they could probably use someone else's numbers to be honest. In fact, for the price that was paid to push this through, you could probably come up with dozens and dozens of recommended plans schools could pick and choose from.

This is basically my thinking. I'm not saying it should be calibrated for every student individually, which would be insanely complex. Just taking a look at a list of nutrients and saying something like, "Okay, your meals need to supply a minimum of 30% of the daily value of each of these for a 2000 calorie diet. For your convenience, here's how much of each is that 30%. The meals cannot have more than 1000 calories." And then some similar standards for whatever else you want to monitor (fat, sugar, cholesterol, whatever). This is all information food manufacturers have to put on labels anyway, so the only additional step you're adding here is a brief application process for each meal that consists of checking off a bunch of boxes, and you discard the meaningless cruft that is the food pyramid and the ideas about nutrition that it leads to.

Doesn't do a whole lot about the quality of the food, though.

[JoshuaFH]

This would be sensible, if not for the fact that it would require a lot of micromanagement of nutritional content, especially since they're only serving the kids one meal per day. That's hard to do, would be pretty inflexible, and would take a fair bit of organizational overhead, not to mention people in the school department who are competent to do that sort of nutritional analysis, which they may or may not have money for.

Eh, they only have to do it once, and they could probably use someone else's numbers to be honest. In fact, for the price that was paid to push this through, you could probably come up with dozens and dozens of recommended plans schools could pick and choose from.

This is basically my thinking. I'm not saying it should be calibrated for every student individually, which would be insanely complex. Just taking a look at a list of nutrients and saying something like, "Okay, your meals need to supply a minimum of 30% of the daily value of each of these for a 2000 calorie diet. For your convenience, here's how much of each is that 30%. The meals cannot have more than 1000 calories." And then some similar standards for whatever else you want to monitor (fat, sugar, cholesterol, whatever). This is all information food manufacturers have to put on labels anyway, so the only additional step you're adding here is a brief application process for each meal that consists of checking off a bunch of boxes, and you discard the meaningless cruft that is the food pyramid and the ideas about nutrition that it leads to.

Doesn't do a whole lot about the quality of the food, though.

I can't to wait to watch my future children go to school, and receive their daily nutritional gruel tube.

[Nadaka]

It can't be worse than the gray styrofoamy green beans, damp toast, burnt soup and orange grease loaf that I was fed at school when I was young.

[Urist Imiknorris]

Don't forget the spinach, if it could be called that.

[Bauglir]

Better than daily fried starch pile, let me tell you.

[The Merchant Of Menace]

Better than starving to death because your family can't afford to feed you as well.

[kaijyuu]

On a less bleak note about school food...

When I was in elementary school, they had these packets of jelly you were supposed to put on your bread rolls. I liked it well enough... except that it was so stiff it failed to spread in any way whatsoever. You got these chunks of "jelly" with bits of bread stuck to it as you attempted to move it around. Some cafeteria people noticed my plight one day and asked what the problem was.

The next week, we got a different type of jelly packets. And they actually worked.


So there's hope; it's not some conspiracy to try to feed you the cheapest stuff possible