And Good for You, too.

I originally went to EIAonline.com for the story about kids getting cheese sandwiches if they couldn't afford lunch, but this other story caught my eye.

EIA Intercepts: Twinkie Defense - you gotta read it.
Teachers testified before the state House Education Committee “seeking changes to a 2007 law restricting the sale of soda, fruit juices and high-calorie snack foods in schools. It turns out that the law, intended to combat an obesity epidemic among Oregon’s children, had the unintended consequence of pulling the plug on vending machines inside teacher lounges.”

Okay, first of all, in the schools around here, the fattest people are the teachers. Sure, there are a couple of kids, but straight percentages fall directly on the shoulders of the adults in the building.

Secondly, the schools are booting the vending machines but the cafeteria still sells crap by the ton. Here in the frozen north, it's sugar content and carbonation that kills kids, apparently. Soda is banned, but Gatorade, Powerade, Snapple are fine. So is Dasani. Oh yeah, you can still get milk ... though the most popular types are ... wait for it ... chocolatey-flavored milk and strawberry-flavored milk, both with added sugar. (You read that right. You can't even get real chocolate.)

So, sports drinks that are 9% - 11% sugar (actually, High Fructose Corn Syrup) are fine, but 10% HFCS soda is not. Snapple is okay at 13%. At least they don't have the evil carbonation - I guess carbon dioxide needs to be banned to save the climate, the planet AND the kids, eh?

We can all take comfort that snacks are healthy, right? The school cafeteria ladies can sell you small bags of Doritos at 60% markup (but at least they're not in vending machines!)

Well, how about the lunches? They'll sell you a piece of pizza for lunch or a mystery-fowl sandwich and tater-tots. The healthy stuff is on the side tray - pears swimming in corn syrup.

Come on. What about the water? That's fine. $1.50 bottle of water is okay, even though the town drinking water is purer than Dasani. (No lie -- the town is seriously thinking of going into the business of bottling and selling the town water, straight from tap to bottle to profit-making heaven.)

Bottom Line: Money and a false sense of Moral Superiority from telling the kids what's good for them.

[and a hat-tip to Darren.]