Two of the main bills consuming the limited time of the “Lame Duck” Congress have directly contradictory intents. (Surprised?)
The First Lady’s initiative to make sure school lunches are “Healthy” funds a pilot program to encourage schools to buy “locally grown fruits and vegetables” from local farmers. Some have pointed out already that for most of the school year in most of the country, there is no such thing… Where would a school cafeteria in Wisconsin buy fresh locally grown strawberries in February?
The other bill is designed to improve food “safety” – requiring new record keeping and Federal registration that will largely put small local farmers out of business – to be replaced by the large agribusiness entities that dominate the multinational “industrial farm” business – the folks from Cargill, Tyson’s, ADM, Monstanto, United Fruit, DelMonte, ConAgra, Hormel, Nestle’s, Swift, IBP (Tyson’s Fresh Meats), Dole, Kelloggs, FritoLay… who already control production of most of the food sold on the shelf space at most “big box” grocery stores.
Poking around on the USDA Web Site, part of the School Lunch program is the USDA buys up food commodities and provides them to schools. Here is just one example – canned meat products for 2009 (.pdf)
In the entire country, the USDA bought canned meat from only 3 suppliers..
Hormel – a relatively small amount of chili
Lakeside Foods in Wisconsin – 17 million pounds of canned pork
Pinnacle Foods in Iowa – 13 million pounds of beef stew
In the big scheme of things, that’s not much food, but it keeps a lot of government people in jobs.
One thing that most people don’t know about the school lunch program is that it is partially funded by the Department of Defense. Several years ago, the USDA started an initiative to get school districts to buy from local farmers, but the farms first had to register as defense contractors in order to be on the approved list. This, of course, limited interest to those farms that had enough staff to fill out and file the paperwork requisite to become a defense contractor. Needless to say, this initiative hasn’t worked the way its supporters believed it would, and has received no press since its inception. My guess is that this aspect of Moochelle Obama’s bill will provide a few sound bytes in Iowa and Nebraska, but otherwise will also fail.