Junk Foods Unwelcome in More School Lunchrooms

The small coastal town of Newburyport, Massachusetts has become the latest to place their school lunchrooms off-limits to junk food distributors.

The town's school board recently banned the in-school sale of food and drink products with unhealthy levels of fat, salt and sugars and even taken the controversial step of notifying parents that lunches packed at home for school kids must be in accord with the new board policy. In other words, Twinkies, candy or sugary soft drinks brought to Newburyport schools will be confiscated by school staff!

A bit extreme? To most Americans, the warrant of a school acting in loco parentis does have definite limits, and some may judge the Newburyport school board to have exceeded them by a considerable distance with this new dictate. Impinging on the rights of parents and their children to decide eating habits might reasonably be thought of as venturing too far indeed into the realm of Big Brother to ever sit comfortably within the hearts of citizens of one of the original thirteen colonies to rebel against British colonial tyranny.

And yet -- the troubling epidemic of childhood obesity and the steady rise in juvenile diabetes cases now blighting our nation have officials in many other school districts watching Newburyport's experiment with close interest -- and even some envy. Kids these days do obviously face nutritional perils that earlier generations largely escaped, as is readily demonstrated by national health statistics.

So at what point do public health concerns justify stringent actions which impinge on basic civil liberties? Do junk foods, for instance, pose a sufficient threat to our national (health) security that such an extreme measure as the confiscation of a mom's lunchtime love are called for? In most school districts parents are still comfortable with using common sense to keep junk food consumption by children at a prudent level -- if indeed any level of junk food consumption can be thought of as "prudent."

An increasing number of schools nation-wide have opted to instead fight the junk food enemy by flooding their lunchrooms and corridors with healthy food choices for their students. Many deploy vending machines stocked with healthy snack food and drink choices, thus aiding nutrition goals while also rewarding schools with the same revenue they have traditionally enjoyed.

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