School Breakfast, the New Food Fight
2nd May 2012
Read it.
… the [New York] city’s Health Department recently suspended expansion of the Breakfast in the Classroom (BIC) program, which serves free breakfast in the classrooms of 381 of 1,750 public schools. The program is ostensibly meant to ensure that hungry kids start the day with something to eat.
But the school system already offers every kid, all 1.1 million of them, regardless of income, the opportunity to have free breakfast in the school cafeteria. BIC simply puts that breakfast on every kid’s desk.
Since when do schools, other than boarding schools, consider it part of their mission to provide breakfast? Shouldn’t kids be having breakfast with, oh, I don’t know, their families?
The Health Department reined in BIC after finding that roughly 20 percent of all kids might be eating two breakfasts: one before arriving at school and another at their desks, adding on average about 90 unneeded calories to their daily intake.
I guess some of them were. Who knew?