It is estimated that 530,000 tons of food and 45 million gallons or milk are wasted in the school coffee shops of our nation annually: 31% of the vegetables and 25% or the milk bought.
Taxpayers establish $ 1.7 billion in the front to buy and cook this wasted food, and more in the rear to walk to the landfills.
Culing our federal school lunch regulations.
Lider a network or 57 charter schools that serve 22,000 students. In a school that we are building in the Bronx, we are creating a kitchen with restaurant quality so that we can cook high quality food from scratch.
However, the many inanid and wasteful requirements of Washington make this goal impossible.
For example, we must serve fruits and vegetables to students who refuse to eat them.
Even if it is the last day of class and a child has thrown his apple for 179 days in a row, we have to give him another.
But the biggest problem with the federal rules of school lunch is its amazing complexity.
The regulations work 47,920 words, almost seven times that of the Constitution and the 27 combined amendments.
I would like to hire a chef who can make affordable and healthy meals such as roasted chicken, feastless potatoes and abundant soups, someone who keeps low costs throwing leftover vegetables to a stew and using what is in season or sale.
But regulations prohibit such improvisation.
They require that we use standardized recipes, proven to ensure that they meet federal requirements and follow them religiously.
The rules are so complicated that any chef who hired would also need a law title.
They are five different categories or vegetables: dark green; Red/orange; Beans, peas and lentils; Starch and others. We must use minimum amounts of each of these five subgroups every week.
And not equal amounts, yes. That would be too easy.
We must serve ¾ cups per week or red/orange vegetables, but only ½ cup of dark green.
Unless Dark green vegetables are Leafy Greens, in which case you need a complete cup.
And I do not make the mistake of thinking that bean shoots, Brussels outbreaks, green beans and green peppers count as dark green vegetables. For some reason they do not, although Mesclun, Romaine and Boundscress yes.
And assume that our chefs because sacrificing a vegetarian alternative to the meat requirement. No problem!
They just need to make sure it meets 2,563 Words’ Worth of requirements, including gems like This: “Each 100 Grams of the Product (ON A 13% MOISTURE BASE) MustC contain protein in amounts which is equivalent to that 95 Grams of protein with or protein with protein of protein of protein of protein of protein of protein of protein of protein of protein of protein With Protein with Protein with Protein with Protein with Protein with Protein with Protein with Protein with Protein with Protein with Prizein of protein or protein within the protein pralein with protein protein with protein with protein pralein prize with protein or protein prizes?
All these rules are so complex that only a large corporation can master them.
The bureaucrats also impose unnecessary burns in schools, which forced us to register not only how many lunches we served every day, but also. That students eat.
The program loop Simply reimburse the schools based on the number of students eligible for a free and reduced price lunch, and simply use the assistance records to discover how many lost lunches due to the absence.
On the other hand, the federal government requires that the states maintain a group of bureaucrats to make us follow their rules, and then used their own Bureaucrats to monitor state bureaucrats.
Up and down, from DC to the local school cuisine, the program forces the fixed resources that will be spent in compliance that could go to buy good ingredients and pay good chefs.
The problem here are the burning rules of the government, but the very idea that school lunch must be federally regulated.
The Congress approved the School Lunch Law in 1946, the military found the duration of World War II that recruits that had grown during depression were not suitable for service due to childhood malnutrition.
Things have changed since then. Nutrition is still important, but it is not a national security problem.
The federal government has a lot of work that can only do: fight against terrorism, the regulation of the stock market, the approval of pharmaceutical products and more.
Discovering how to feed our children nutritional meals is something that can and should be left to local communities, or better yet, to the schools themselves.
But once a federal program has been established, the people who direct it find it impossible to imagine that their jobs should not exist.
I don’t blame them. It is human nature.
But that is why it is so refreshing to see a new president attract strangers from the private sector to analyze where the government can be reduced.
The school lunch desk is a good place to start.
Eva Moskowitz is the founder and executive director of Success Academy Charter Schools.
