• Pauline Liu: Food police should take lesson from Prohibition

  • The debate about public school lunches is simmering.
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  • The debate about public school lunches is simmering.
    A YouTube video by Kansas teens and the lunch strikes orchestrated by students in New Jersey and Wisconsin are but a memory now.
    After all the media hoopla, the federal Healthy Hunger-free Kids Act at the center of the controversy remains intact. So does the 850-calorie cap on lunches, which took effect with the start of the school year.
    Teenagers, especially athletes who burn up more than 3,000 calories a day, complain the shrunken meals continue to leave them hungering for more.
    As Congress prepares to consider a repeal of the law, here's some food for thought. The Obama administration needs to take a page out of history and realize prohibition doesn't work. First lady Michelle Obama's misguided initiative to fight childhood obesity is a form of Prohibition.
    With one-third of American kids overweight or obese, the government decided it needed to act.
    Assisted by the Department of Agriculture, Mrs. Obama has put 32 million children on a healthier diet of less sodium, more whole grains and more fruits and vegetables.
    Likewise in 1920, when the government introduced Prohibition, politicians railed against the evils of alcohol. They cited that alcoholism causes health problems among the working class.
    Sound familiar? Prohibition failed in the United States and other countries because organized crime took over the distribution of alcohol.
    According to historians, New York's most notorious mobster, Jack "Legs" Diamond, distributed his bootlegged beer to customers in Kingston through a rubber hose that ran through the city's sewer system.
    With this latest case of Prohibition, it won't be gangsters, but rather the kids themselves who may lead to the program's undoing. It's no secret that tons of fruits, vegetables and whole wheat bread are being wasted, tossed into the garbage by rebellious kids who refuse to be force-fed.
    When they get home, where there are no food police to tell them what to eat, these ravenous kids can make up their caloric shortfall by eating whatever they please.
    In response to the furor about the law, spokespeople for the U.S. Department of Agriculture have talked of "adding more flexibility" to the current program by providing some schools with after-school snack and dinner programs.
    The idea is so new officials have not specified how to pay for it. It seems students would be better served with more nutritional education than by a law that forces schools to dish up restricted diets.
    If the Healthy Hunger-free Kids Act eventually were to be repealed, I for one believe the administration would be getting its just desserts.
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