By Kyle Olson
EAGnews.org

KANSAS CITY – Over 6,500 school lunch nutritionists and cooks traveled to Kansas City last week to commiserate with fellow government school employees and learn to make such Michelle Obama-inspired creations as “sweet potato-breaded pollock” and “white bean hummus.”

The healthier Obama menu, mandated by a federal overhaul of the National School Lunch Program, was a focus of the School Nutrition Association convention.

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The Association, comprised of employees from thousands of school districts and funded with tax dollars from districts, also featured appearances by celebrity weatherman Al Roker and country singer Darius Rucker. What either of them know about healthy school lunches, we’re not sure. But we’re pretty sure they each charged a healthy sum for their participation.

Attendees of the conference are convinced that students will eventually accept their new healthy creations, despite overwhelming evidence around the country to the contrary.

After Tanya Dube, a school food service employee who traveled all the way from Alaska to attend, tasted the sweet potato-crusted Alaskan pollock, she thought it was “delicious.”

“I would love to serve that to the kids,” she told the Kansas City Star.

Leah Schmidt, the incoming president of the organization and Missouri school employee, says the new federal requirements have not been a problem for her students.

“If we didn’t tell them, they probably wouldn’t even know,” she told the newspaper.

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Students can’t tell the difference between cheeseburgers and hummus?

The fact is that the Michelle Obama-inspired lunch standards have been met with much skepticism and rejection. School districts are dropping out of the National School Lunch Program and giving up federal subsidies, just so they don’t have to feed the mandated food to students.

The Government Accountability Office recently published a report detailing numerous problems created by the new requirements, including increased wood waste, decreased sales (leading to financial losses) and increased administrative expenses.

Some districts are actually pushing more junk food sales to overcome their financial losses resulting from decreased sales of the “healthy” lunches.

Having a lunch ladies convention to sample new creations and listen to the musings of Al Roker won’t do much to alleviate any of the newly created problems.