USDA school lunch portion control rules gone for good

The following column ran on BalanceofFood.com and runs here with complete permission.

The whiny video over the portion size of school lunches did the trick. The USDA has permanently dropped the calorie limits from the rules.

True, the rules were temporarily relaxed after a video surfaced following a cafeteria strike and GOP politicians complained about the cuts in portion size, particularly among carbohydrates and protein.

It’s like the old joke, “The food is lousy and the portions are too small.”

“The USDA made the permanent changes we have been seeking to the School Lunch Program,” Sen. John Hoeven (R-ND) said in a statement. “A one-size-fits-all approach to school lunch left students hungry and school districts frustrated with the additional expense, paperwork and nutritional research necessary to meet federal requirements.”

The changes, established in 2012, also dealt with limits on fat and sodium and increasing fruit and vegetable servings. Those changes didn’t inspire videos, so presumably they’ll stay.

Previous coverage:

School lunch reform happens quicker when conservatives whine

850 calories argument makes for good TV, but falls short on honesty

Mukwonago students strike because their lunches are ‘only’ 850 calories

The changes limited meals for high school students to 850 calories, a reasonable amount in a normal 2,000 calorie day. If the people complaining were those who don’t get enough to eat at home, that response would be completely reasonable against a “one-size-fits-all” attitude.

Then again, those kids aren’t running to make videos; kids with plenty of food have more energy to make videos.

The experts tell us that kids need as many as 10 times to like a new food. So the kids needed time to adjust all the way down to 850 calories. If you go back and look at how quickly these two videos made a wave, Nightline and The Daily Show had both weighed in by the end of September. And by December, the rules were temporarily relaxed.

We never did have the discussion about what the limits should be. 900 calories? 1000 calories? The easing of the rules was basically to say, “here are the rules, except when we want to break them.” To be fair, that was the standard before the USDA implemented the new rules.

A few kids complained in a school outside Milwaukee. A group of kids in Kansas with help from a teacher made a video. That was enough to take away changes that could have helped these children and millions of others. The Mukwonago, WI kids might have been sincere in expressing their concerns, but ultimately they were used as pawns to score cheap political points.

No school lunch program would ever replicate children going home to home-cooked nutritious meals at lunchtime. But in the reality universe that isn’t black and white TV, we have kids who are getting too much to eat side-by-side with kids who aren’t getting enough. And what both sides need are solutions.

photo capture: Kansas video

850 calories school lunch argument is right-wing political talking point

If you’ve paid attention to the coverage of videos from high school students, you would think that most kids are starving at school, thanks to Michelle Obama.

Unfortunately for them, when you break down the numbers, the kids aren’t getting a significant difference in calories. They may not like the new food, but that complaint would sound bad from a PR standpoint.

The 850 calories approach has a simple PR-friendly take. Too bad the facts don’t back up the hype.

For more on the right-wing attack on school lunch reform, check out this column from our sister blog, BalanceofFood.com.

Eric Cantor does ‘The Daily Show’ minus the lessons of John McCain

One of the surprises of the late stages of the 2008 presidential campaign was that John McCain was mysteriously absent from “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” McCain’s last appearance on the show was May 7, 2008, his only 2008 appearance. Even as of late 2010, McCain still holds the record for most appearances on the show, though McCain hasn’t been on for almost 2½ years.

Meghan McCain is the last family member to do an appearance on the show, on September 9 of this year.

“The Daily Show” would have liked to have had him on, but clearly the campaign felt the show no longer served its purposes.

When I saw that Eric Cantor was on the guest list this week, I did wonder whether this would be the start of another Republican comfortable to go on the show, given the possibility of a Republican majority in the House.

Cantor had advantages that most Republicans can’t claim: like Stewart, Cantor went to William & Mary, is the same age as Stewart, and is Jewish.

Despite the reputation, Stewart can be very respectful to people he disagrees with (for proof, see Stewart’s interview with Condoleezza Rice the following night).

Cantor had his chance, both in the on-air version and the extended interview on the Web, to bring to an atypical GOP audience what the Republicans would do if they get to be in charge.

Stewart enjoyed debating McCain because McCain — at that point — was the Republican who had the respect of Democrats and independents. You may not have agreed with McCain, but there was a smart dialogue.

Cantor could have been warm, charming, self-deprecating, and ready to play to the audience. Cantor could have even taken some hints from McCain. Despite McCain’s curmudgeon role, he does have some humorous moments.

But Cantor is no John McCain. He played to the audience once, only when Stewart mocked Cantor about bringing up 1980 as being long ago. Cantor asked the audience how many of them were born in 1980. There were a few applauders.

For those who think Stewart is liberal, look more carefully. Stewart has a balancing act that doesn’t so much have to do with ideology, but consistency. Stewart will debate Bill Kristol, because while he disagrees with Kristol, Stewart sees him as fairly consistent. And Stewart’s best tongue-lashing to date is still his visceral attack on Chris Matthews.

Cantor brought nothing to the table during the interview, and Stewart ripped him for it. Cantor kept saying how it was all about jobs, but never offered one way the GOP would help increase jobs. The standard submission has been cut taxes, but that hasn’t worked for the last 30 years.

But even if you believe that it works, Cantor didn’t say it during the interview. While the extended conversation went on further, any Daily Show guest has to be smart enough to get key points in the first 6 minutes. What goes out over the air makes much more of an impact that anything said on the Web version.

Cantor talked in phrases that sound good but don’t mean anything. Few things upset Stewart more than to hear someone speak that way. While Cantor really should have prepared by watching McCain’s old interviews, the Stewart-Matthews battle should have been the first video to watch.

One reason why Republicans struggle on shows such as this, the Colbert Report, Letterman, etc. is that they are used to being treated like kid gloves on news shows, broadcast and cable. They get to say what they want, get passive questions, and no one challenges them on what they say.

Stewart actually asks guests to back up what they are saying, especially when he smells hypocrisy in the air.

Cantor noted that the GOP heard the message from 2006, how they weren’t doing what the people wanted. Cantor leaves out the various scandals: Jack Abramoff, Mark Foley, Duke Cunningham in that explanation.

Cantor doesn’t even see this in terms of anybody outside the base. His thought process is that the base was upset. The GOP lost control in 2006 because those outside the base had enough.

But this election for the GOP isn’t about them. Cantor and his fellow GOP members in the power structure know that rallying the base is what the GOP needs to do.

So perhaps Cantor isn’t upset that his performance on the Daily Show didn’t go well, that there were no ideas where Stewart’s audience could relate.

John McCain understood that he needed to get his ideas to an audience that wasn’t used to them. McCain knew humor was needed to relate to this potential audience of voters. And for a long time, McCain was very successful with this formula.

Yes, McCain forgot all about this once he ran in 2008, but by then, McCain was a different man and a different politician. Cantor says the GOP has learned from the past, but what was clear Tuesday night in a New York City studio is that Cantor still doesn’t get it. Even though Cantor and Stewart has a striking amount in common, they live in two different worlds, but amazingly enough in the same country.

The true legacy of Ted “series of tubes” Stevens (R-AK)

“No.” “It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.”

You could argue that the legacy of Ted Stevens is his work to get Alaska to be a state or his 40 years in the Senate. And this may be the theme of the on-air obituaries you may see in the initial period following the news that the former senator died in a plane crash at the age of 86.

After the dust clears, Stevens’ offbeat legacy reads as long as the years he served in the Senate. Think about this: Stevens was the longest-serving Republican in the U.S. Senate.

And his lengthy stay in Congress’ upper house, combined with the archaic rules of Congress, where seniority means more than competence.

Stevens’ opinion on the “series of tubes” mattered because he chaired the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation at that point, and the Republicans were in charge of the Senate.

We don’t directly vote for chairs of committee — House and Senate — but the party in power picks people based on how long they have lasted, regardless of their knowledge of the subject. If nothing else, Stevens helped illustrate what is wrong with that concept.

And though the on-air tributes to Stevens point out — correctly — that he was exonerated on multiple indictments over the funding for home remodeling, the cause was more to the tune of overzealousness by prosecutors than whether Stevens did anything wrong. And it was the Obama Administration who stepped up and admitted that.

There were the airport at nowhere controversy when Stevens added $3.5 million into a Senate bill to help finance an airport to serve a remote Alaskan island with about 100 residents.

And there was the fact that a plane crash in 1978 that killed Stevens’ first wife, Ann, and left him in bad shape and this plane crash had in common: both financed by private corporations.

Stevens was a complicated person. He was pro-choice for the most part, and believed in stem cell research.

Let’s consider all that Stevens provided, good and bad, in his memory. And despite his crack about the Internet being a “series of tubes,” even in his unfinest hour, Ted Stevens was still smarter and knew more about politics and the world than Sarah Palin.

From the archives: Will Alaska voters vote for the convicted Ted Stevens on November 4?

Jon Stewart shows us how to correct pundits

We saw three times where Republican pundits adamantly denied that Bush was president during 9/11 in an eerie parallel to Peter denying Jesus three times in the night.

And each time the interviewer didn’t correct the mistake. Only George Stephanopoulos offered somewhat of an apology, but not on the air.

Once again, Jon Stewart — a non-journalist — gets to show journalists how to do their job. When Stewart had on Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, the discussion went to the shoe bomber, Richard Reid. In drawing a contrast between the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber, and offering up Miranda rights, Gingrich said Reid was an American citizen.

Reid was a British citizen.

On the standard cable news channels and the MSM outlets, this false statement would not have been countered. But Stewart, a professional comedian, came back in the following segment and pointed out that Gingrich’s statement was false. Stewart did this on camera, something the folks at Fox “News” Channel, John King, and Stephanopoulos would not do on the Bush-9/11 connection. And Gingrich’s misstatement was more obscure than the “Bush wasn’t president on 9/11” lie.

Jon Stewart may not be a journalist. But he understands what journalists should do better than some of them who earn a living as a journalist.