By G.S. Croft
10/14/2014
Once again a SM friend (that’s ‘social media friend’, not the other thing, you perv) has provided a wonderful piece of BS for us to Buzzsaw apart. This ‘story’ from Chickasaw, OK is brought to the interwebz by ‘Fox and Friends’ (yes, we’re shocked… again) and claims that the meal in the picture represents the famine that Michelle Obama has wrought upon our poor starving children in our public schools. Naturally, it’s just another lie spread by the Murdoch propaganda machine. (Apparently, they moved their article from ‘On Air’ to ‘Entertainment’.)
Lunch meat, a couple of crackers, a slice of cheese and two pieces of cauliflower qualified as lunch in Chickasha Public Schools Monday.
Chickasha lunchStudent Kaytlin Shelton took a photo of the skimpy lunch and showed it to her parents.
“It makes me want to take that and take it to the Superintendent and tell him to eat it for lunch,” the girl tells Fox 25.
“I can go pay a dollar for a Lunchable and get more food in it,” her father, Vince Holton, says.
Shelton is pregnant and eating for two, complicating the problem.
Chickasha superintendent David Cash agrees the skimpy lunches need to be addressed.
“You’ve got in some cases little kids that they’re only two meals are breakfast and lunch at school and they’re getting you know a grand total of 1100 calories. That’s not enough,” Cash says.
The new lunch complies with lunch regulations championed by First Lady Michelle Obama and implemented by the USDA.
Here’s the simplest way to break it down: “Does the ‘meal’ in the picture ACTUALLY meet the USDA Guidelines for calories and nutrition in a school lunch?”
Here are a couple of points: 1) Michelle Obama does not regulate school lunches in any way. Anyone who thinks that she, rather than the USDA, is responsible for the composition of school lunches is utterly ignorant of how our regulatory structures work to begin with. She campaigned for the guidelines that were recommended by the experts, but she has no real power over the USDA.
2) Anyone with actual research skill and the ability to think critically can look up the USDA guidelines for caloric and nutritional content for school lunches and see for themselves that the ‘meal’ in the picture is the failure of the Chickasaw school lunch program, not Michelle Obama.
So what the heck. I went to http://www.calorieking.com/foods/ in order to compare the calories and nutritional content of the ‘lunch’ in the picture to the USDA guidelines.
Let’s look at that picture. We appear to have:
5 slices of ham Which is:
-228 calories
-12 grams of fat
-1826 mg sodium
-80 mg of cholesterol
-5.4 g carbohydrates
-23.2 g protein
-33.6 mg calcium
-401.8 mg potassium
4 wheat crackers (Keebler, 2 per pack):
-56 calories
-2.4 g fat
-112 mg sodium
-8.8 g carbohydrates
-0.8 g protein
1/4 cup cauliflower (2 florets):
-8 calories
-5 mg sodium
-1.5 g carbohydrates (1g fiber)
-5.8 g calcium
-51.1 mg potassium
2 slices of American cheese (being generous);
-188 calories
-13.9 g fat
-36 mg cholesterol
-549 mg sodium
-4.7 g carbohydrates
-11.2 g protein
-282.3 mg calcium
-206.2 mg potassium
In total, that gives us:
480 calories, of which:
18.3 g of fat
2492 mg sodium
35.2 g protein
116 mg cholesterol
20.4 g carbohydrates
According to the USDA school lunch guidelines , the average school lunch for grades 9-12 requires 750-850 calories. That’s right: the ‘meal’ in the picture is barely 60% of the USDA caloric requirements for a school lunch. Even if we were to be generous and add another slice of cheese and ham each, the calorie requirements would still not be met by a long shot. And no, I’m not even going to entertain the half teaspoon of what appears to be ranch dressing on the side. But it gets worse: The sodium recommendation for 9-12?
1420 mg per lunch. More than 1000 mg less than in the depicted ‘meal’.
To hold that picture up and declare that ‘The new lunch complies with lunch regulations championed by First Lady Michelle Obama and implemented by the USDA‘ isn’t just an outright lie, it’s a despicable one.
Basically, the Lie Machine holds up a picture to their audience, tells them something they want to hear, “This is what OBAMA did to our children’s lunches!”, and they buy it. They swallow it salt, fat, and lies because they WANT to believe it.
Sadly they, like my SM friend, are very easily fooled and most are far too intellectually lazy to do the modicum of research that would prove that the lunch in the picture utterly fails to meet the USDA standards for school lunches.
But they don’t care about that. They will outright lie in the face of the reality that the regulations forbid such a paltry and unhealthy portion for our children… a problem that Michelle Obama fought to remedy.
In their world, up is down, black is white, and Michelle Obama is ‘starving our children’ just because they saw a picture on the internets. Once again we find Fox ‘News’ irresponsibly feeding their audience a diet of 100% USDA certified BS.
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