Of course the calorie limit is nationwide, and perfectly rational. Sure, an exception for athletes can be made but the rest of the kids should not be eating more than 800 calories for lunch! I don't get how this is controversial. If they still feel hungry after 800 calories, they need help! I'm serious here. One of the first signs of type 2 diabetes is polyphagia. They should go see a doctor rather than eat more food.
You seem to be missing the point. This isn't a matter of the appropriate caloric intake of the meal itself. More to the point, regulations and health standards on school lunches have made the food almost entirely unpalatable. The last order of french fries I ate from school were baked and contained neither trans fats or salt. They were slimy, chewy, and completely devoid of any nourishment. I wouldn't accept $1.50 to eat that poison, much less surrender a $1.50 of my own to eat it. These kids aren't getting enough to eat at school because their options are either ~800 calories of disgusting pseudo-food or nothing. 90% my school stopped buying lunch in the cafeteria, to combat this problem they banned off-campus lunch. So it continues...
There was a very bright naturalist from the 1800s that had this idea about natural selection...
Put simply, childhood obesity is only a collective problem if you subscribe to the belief that we should be responsible for one another's health and health care, which I do not. I do, however, believe that the government has a place in raising awareness, which is the key to any desired social change.
Ex. The percentage of people who smoke cigarettes is down, particularly among younger people. We didn't accomplish this by intentionally and unconstitutionally inflating the price of tobacco products. No, we spent 15 years telling children that "smoking is gross, and makes you smell bad, and makes you slow, and no one will like you, and you'll get in trouble, and you'll get addicted, and you'll eventually wither up and die!". There were PSAs everywhere, D.A.R.E. would come to your school and talk about the evils of tobacco for hours on end, they'd show you rotting lungs, people with holes in their throat, all varieties of cancer-ridden horror. You'd be a sick bastard to want to smoke after that trip.
Would this model really be so difficult to port over to the obesity crisis? Start writing the animated commercials, make the messages easy to digest: "Over-eating will make you unattractive and snobby, moralistic cool kids on skateboards won't want to be your friend if you try and share your sandwich". Boot up a coalition of under-worked, over-paid police officers to talk to young people about the dangers of obesity; make sure the name is something innocent, but only vaguely related to the function it serves like: "Leveraging the Aesthetic Rewards of Dieting" (L.A.R.D). Print the posters and plaster the hallways of every school in America: BIG is BAD! FAT is FAIL!
Naturally, this program will probably eat into countless hours of valuable science, math, art, and history studies...but that is a small price to pay to ensure that our children know the grave truth lurking beneath the milk of their Captain Crunch. What is our alternative, trusting the parents?
Or maybe the government can screw off and go back to doing what it does best, nothing.
