We decided to allow F one school lunch a week as a treat. After the first school lunch, we’ve put an all-out moratorium on it. You see, F doesn’t react well to high-fructose corn syrup. Her behaviour goes bonkers within a few hours, and it takes her a couple of days to recover, culminating in an ugly, whiny mess of being unable to deal with anyone or anything. F’s lunch on friday consisted of hot dogs (contain HFCS), Cheetos (HFCS), and fruit snacks (HFCS). The whole weekend was downright ugly. Naturally, I’m taking an interest in what they’re serving the kids at school, and what I’m seeing isn’t pretty.

I’ve asked the school district for ingredient statements on their menu, but haven’t heard anything yet.

On Tuesday, she turned 7, and we told her she could buy her lunch (so she wouldn’t pack one) and the rest of the family was going to surprise her with Chick-Fil-A as a treat.

At lunch, I looked around me at what all the other second-graders were eating. It was a sea of brown (although I’ll admit, there wasn’t a whole lot of color in our own lunch, but we eat a lot of fresh veggies at home).

Tuesday’s lunch menu at school was:

• Whole Wheat Pasta with Marinara Sauce & a “Bosco Stick”
• Grilled Cheese Sandwich
• Mini Corn Dogs
• Bagel with [flavored] cream cheese
• [Flavored] Yogurt with poppyseed muffin
• Peanut Butter & Jelly (actually, an Uncrustable)

Sides:

• Steamed Edamame
• Steamed Peas & Carrots
• Chilled Fruit Cocktail

Beverage options are:

• Milk (white, chocolate, strawberry)
• Juice (Orange, Grape, Apple, Fruit blend)

According to the school program, Every lunch “Full Meal” includes students’ choice of one entrée and self-serve offering bar including menued sides PLUS a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables with two drink choices.

Notice what the vegetables are: self-server offering bar. Federal guidelines mandate a certain amount of vegetables in the school lunch, but for the kids, it’s strictly optional. And they’re soggy, mushy, and have had the life cooked out of them. The number of trays containing fruit or vegetables could be counted on a single hand, and much of that ended up in the trash. Much of the pasta was devoid of sauce. The steam trays containing the vegetables were virtually untouched (and students eat in grade order, approximately 80-100 students per grade)

So, let’s break this down.

Whole wheat pasta. pretty benign stuff, but nutritionally pretty vapid. Lotta carbs, not a lot else. It may be whole wheat, but it’s still pasta.

Bosco Stick. What the heck is that? It’s some sort of breadstick with cheese in the middle. One stick contains 210 calories, a third of which are from fat.. Key indredients: Sugar and partially hydrogenated soybean and cottonseed oil, and vegetable glycerides. Yummy.

Grilled Cheese. ‘Nuff said. Hunk of bread surrounding pseudo-cheese and fried on the griddle.

Mini Corn Dogs. Hot dogs, ergo, HFCS.Wrapped in corn batter. An Iowa farmer’s dream.

Bagel w/ Cream Cheese. The cream cheese was strawberry flavored and contains sugar. Better than even chance that the bagel contains HFCS as well.

Yogurt w/ Poppyseed muffin. Again with the loads of sugar.

Peanut Butter & Jelly. The school can’t even be bothered to make the simplest of sandwiches, they have to use the prefabricated abomination that is the Uncrustable. 38 ingredients, including HFCS (in both the “bread” and the jelly), dextrose, and palm oil, not to mention a whole boatload of preservatives.

Edamame. Pure soy (although to its credit, pretty much unadulterated)

Fruit Cocktail. Let’s take fruit, and then pickle it in sugar water. Brilliant.

Flavored milk (chocolate or strawberry). 30 grams of sugar in a single serving, and the kids usually take two. By comparison, the same amount of Coke contains a mere 26g of sugar. In our school, it’s real sugar, but HFCS is common. 12g of those sugars are from the milk itself.

White Milk. I didn’t see a single kid with this. Otherwise, pretty healthy stuff.

Juice. A serving of this contains 28 grams of sugars, virtually all of it fructose, with no fiber to buffer it (except perhaps in the orange juice)

So, we have a menu loaded with sugars and not-so-complex carbohydrates. The second-graders arrive at 11:30. By 11:45, they’re being herded outside, where they have 10 minutes to run off all that sugar. They technically have the option to stay and finish their meal, but there’s intense pressure from both their peers and from the lunchroom staff for them to get out and play. Net result is that the amount of waste is mind-boggling.

In 15 minutes, these kids will practically inhale well over 100 grams of sugars and starches. They will then have 10 minutes to run it off before it’s even had a chance to hit their system, followed by over three hours in the classroom, punctuated by 15 minutes of recess in the middle. And they wonder why kids get fat and inattentive. Even our school’s nurse cringes at the school’s lunches.

And this is a pretty typical day on the menu. The district swears they’re abiding by federal guidelines. The common thing on this menu is that it’s virtually all made from four of the top five USDA-subsidized crops: wheat, corn, soy, cotton (Tobacco is the 5th).

I think the USDA overseeing the school lunch program (and overall nutritional policy) is not only a massive conflict of interest, but a primary cause behind the obesity epidemic. You can’t have the people setting production policy and subsidies be the same ones overseeing policy related to its consumption. When ketchup (which contains a lot of HFCS) is considered a “vegetable”, there’s a problem.

If the school lunch program and nutrition policy were overseen by health officials (like DHHS or the Surgeon General), I think we’d be a lot better off.

Today, they posted a special on facebook: “Come by before we close, and will give you <free stuff>”. Since their <free stuff> is mind-blowingly good, I stopped by on the way home from work. The owner himself was a little baffled, and didn’t even know what the special was. He had to call his “social media person” (who didn’t answer the phone), and then resort to looking it up on Facebook. He tried to explain that their new social media person was “going a little crazy”.

Previously, they’d had a twitter special that involved DMing them a certain phrase when you got there, and they would DM you back a coupon code worth 10%. When I tried that, it took 5 days for me to get my coupon code. I’ve frequently received random DMs from them that indicate to me that something is amiss with their twitter auto-responder. Comments to their twitter account pointing this out went ignored. I’ve never had this business respond to anything I’ve posted to Twitter or Facebook about them.

The person handling their social marketing has neglected the crucial element of social media: the SOCIAL aspect. I get wanting to outsource it. But a good social media practitioner absolutely HAS to keep the business owner in the loop. The key aspect of social media is that it’s a conversation with your customers, not a one way communications blast. The owners/staff should know what’s being put out there with their name on it. They should be aware of the people that are conversing with them, who they are, and ideally, when they show up at the business.

If the present spill continues at full rate, until the end of August (which is doubtful), it will release about 100 million gallons of crude oil into the water. That is significant, but hardly merits the full-throated panic arising from the usual self-appointed elite of media, academics, environmentalists and politicians.

Let’s compare:

Ixtoc (1979) — early in the development of Mexico’s oil fields a similarly blown well dumped 140 million gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico, right into prime fishing grounds. It made a mess all along the Texas coast. Things recovered rather quickly and hardly anyone even remembers it. It should be noted here that it was natural ocean seeps that first alerted the Mexicans to the huge potential of that field.

Exxon-Valdez (1989) — released about 10 million gallons into a limited area of COLD water, again in a prime fishing area and the problems continued for years. Because it was in America, people remember it.

Kuwait (1991) — was an intentional spill by Saddam Hussein that released one billion gallons of crude into the Persian Gulf, which is about one-sixth the size of the Gulf of Mexico. Two years later UNESCO reported that there had been little long-term damage. Over half the spill evaporated, some was recovered, and the heavies clumped up along northeast Arabia, where there are some natural seeps in any case.

The two spills in warm water turned out to have caused very little long-term damage, in part because the lighter components — which can do most of the damage to birds and such — evaporated in the sunny, warm-water environment. There was little evaporation in Alaska.

Even if the Gulf spill ends up ten times larger than Alaska it won’t cause anything like ten times the damage. It’ll be much more like a smaller Ixtoc spill; unpleasant, but far from devastating.

TOTH: Bart Hall for the info

Today, Penny preached at Resurrection and showed a clip from The Blind Side. Andrea and I had been meaning to see the movie for a while. Since the kids actually went to bed quietly and early, we figured we’d RedBox it and have a nice movie night at home.

One problem though – when your pastor preaches to a couple thousand people and include a clip, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re going to have a hard time finding said movie anywhere near the church. As a backup plan, I fired up google and searched for a torrent version of it. Within about 30 seconds, it was downloading. I then went to Redbox.com, searched for the movie (got lucky and the local box actually had one!), reserved it online, hopped into the car, drove over to the price chopper and picked up the movie. (in retrospect, it would have been faster to take my bike, but it was warm and VERY humid) . I took less than thirty seconds at the kiosk, and drove home. As I sat down in front of my computer, the download had just completed.

Total time elapsed: 17 minutes. In that time, 700MB had downloaded, and hadn’t even uploaded a complete single block (so don’t worry, MPAA, I didn’t actually share any of it). Since I had the DVD, I watched that instead, and had to confront issues such as cleaning the last renter’s fingerprints off the disc and sitting through commercials on the DVD that I paid to rent. I’ll go on faith that the file I downloaded contained the video, and it was kinda nice having a backup plan in case the disc was unusable. Either way, the content owners did get paid.

The process of reserving and picking up a movie on redbox is insanely easy and quick. And downloading a torrent was even easier. If you’re in the business of physical entertainment media, I hope that you’re trying to figure out your exit from that strategy. Browsing and renting at Blockbuster is a painful and expensive process, and that’s why their days are numbered. Redbox has a good thing going, but looking five to ten years down the line, they should be seeing a world of digitally distributed content, not physical media. Netflix has the right idea, but their streaming catalog could use much improvement.

How can content producers leverage the ease and efficiency of peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent? The distributed distribution model is incredibly efficient as several companies have discovered where software distribution is concerned. They need to stop fearing peer-to-peer digital distribution and instead leverage its power.

When the Vatican recently announced that being a polluter is now deemed a cardinal sin, I got to thinking about the Holy Mother Church of Global WarmingClimate Change (and its self-appointed pontiff, His Holiness Albert the Gore), the full reality of it hit me:

Carbon credits are nothing more than 21st-century indulgences.

Much like the indulgences the Catholic Church dispensed long ago, they don’t actually change anything. When His Holiness’ mansioncompound in Tennessee consumes the kind of energy in a month that most of us mere mortals do in an entire year (and spews out a commensurate amount of CO₂), the amount of CO₂ that’s actually in the atmosphere purportedly cranking upfiddling with the global thermostat hasn’t actually changed, regardless of how many creditsindulgences he’s purchased. In this particular case, the pontiff himself is committing the mortal sin, but it’s all good, since he’s paying himself indulgences through the magic of investment trusts.

And much like the indulgences of Rome, the indulgences of Environmentalism go into erecting edifices and monuments to the Holy Mother Church. Now if only we could do something about the sheer quantities of hot air coming out of the myriad pulpits of the Church of Global Climate Change, we’d be making some progress.

Sheesh. Even Dell gives me the option of assuaging my guilt every time I order a computer from them. I can buy not only carbon offsets for my shiny new computer, I even have the option of paying Dell a few bucks to plant a tree for me. Must be nice to pass off their facility landscaping costs directly onto the customers, in the name of cardinal guilt. That’s sheer genius right there.

Flame away. Just make sure you offset your emissions. I’ll be off shredding a tree.