NORTH SMITHFIELD, R.I. – First Lady Michelle Obama’s healthy school lunch menu is finally getting some love from a group of young eaters.

Some 3,000 pigs at My Blue Heaven Farm in Rhode Island have been dining on students’ lunch leftovers from two nearby school systems, according to WoonsocketCall.com.

The pigs are enjoying “half-eaten tuna sandwiches and other food scraps students discard during their lunch periods” as part of a new recycling program established by the town of Cumberland, the news site reports.

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The recycling program has been so successful that officials are planning to expand it in the fall.

The school food that’s being “repurposed” as pig feed is described as “nutritious,” and it certainly is.

The federal government’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 places strict limits on the amount of calories, sugar, sodium and fat that goes into school lunches. Since those ingredients are what give food much of its taste, students all across the nation are refusing to eat their bland, government-mandated meals, leaving schools to dispose massive quantities of leftover food.

Presumably, that is what’s happening in the two Rhode Island districts – North Smithfield and Burrillville – that are sending their scraps to My Blue Heaven Farm. Both districts are participants in the National School Lunch Program, which is implementing the hated federal lunch rules.

It’s not much of a stretch to conclude that the food recycling program is a direct result of Washington D.C.’s effort to control what students are eating in schools. Schools are being forced to prepare unpopular meals, students are refusing to eat them, and the scraps are ending up in pig troughs.

Just something to keep in mind the next time you pay your taxes – and the next time you hear a politician whine that America’s schools are underfunded and being cut to the bone.

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