Thursday, June 15, 2006

California: Big food fight on Bay Area's school menus

Nobody seems to be asking what is the evidence for the effectiveness of these dietary interventions. Since virtually all the evidence on the long-term benefit of dietary and lifestyle changes suggests that there is no benefit, that is rather surprising. Decibels seem to swamp science. And the salad freaks overlook that the Eskimos lived perfectly healthy lives for thousands of years on a diet that consisted of little more than meat, fat and fish. In fact, because it is such a good energy food, they were big eaters of fat -- obtained from the blubber of marine mammals. Lucky they had no California food faddists around to harass them. And one day it might become quite an embarrassment in sunny California that fatty food protects you against skin cancer

It's war at the Santa Clara Unified School District. But parents aren't fighting over the curriculum, or over bilingual education or even over school closures. They're brawling over cupcakes -- and chocolate bars, and hamburgers and candy. School food has become a national obsession. And no place is the fixation more evident than in the Bay Area, where activists are determined to put an end to obesity and teach kids how to eat right. They're filling school yards with edible gardens, applying for grants to put salad bars in cafeterias, teaching students and parents how to cook healthful meals and replacing cookies with strawberries at school dances.

It seems simple. It's not. All agree that schools need to clean up their nutritional act, but there is bitter dissent over how it should be done and how far it should go. Some think the state, schools and corporate food companies aren't doing enough to keep fatty and sugary foods off campuses. Others believe schools are going too far -- adopting policies that are too draconian and turning teachers and administrators into the food police. And then there are the school boosters, who acknowledge the need for more nutritious meals on campus, but fear that junk food bans will cost their districts hundreds of thousands of dollars in fundraising money. "It's gotten pretty heated," said Roger Barnes, Santa Clara schools' business administrator, on the debate the district has been having since January over banning junk food 24 hours a day, seven days a week. "It's about changing the way people think and changing the culture. But that's not easy."

In recent years, California has passed some of the most stringent school food laws in the country. The state, concerned that it has the second highest rate of overweight children in the nation, passed legislation introduced by Sen. Martha Escutia, D-Whittier (Los Angeles County), that would heighten nutritional standards at schools. The law, which goes into effect July 1, 2007, says vending machine snacks sold on campus during school hours, and a half hour before and after, must meet certain requirements: No more than 35 percent of their calories can come from fat, no more than 10 percent can come from saturated fat, and no more than 35 percent of their weight can be sugar. Entrees prepared in school cafeterias must have no more than four grams of fat per 100 calories with a 400-calorie cap.

But Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor, one of the food industry's loudest critics and author of "What to Eat,'' says the junk food manufacturers are probably already looking for ways to circumvent the requirements. "I don't like this kind of criteria," she said, adding that although the new rules will rid schools of candy bars, they will also knock out most salad dressings. "It's a slippery slope, and there are always exceptions. Why not just get rid of highly processed foods and use the Marion Nestle method -- only serve foods with no more than five ingredients on the label."

As summer approaches, parents and school districts are grappling with strategies for the start of the upcoming school year in the fall -- a sort of dress rehearsal for when the new law kicks in. What's happening in Santa Clara exemplifies the struggles taking place all over Northern California. Parents and administrators in the South Bay city, not satisfied that the 2007 food requirements are strong enough, propose to completely ban junk food, even celebratory cupcakes, home-baked cookies and birthday cakes, on campus and during all after-school events. The plan, however, sent a whole other faction of parents and teachers into an apoplectic fit. "We get an awful lot of money from the snack business," said Angie Scott, a parent and athletic director at Wilcox High School. "Nutritious food is important, but it's expensive. And if we can't continue to fundraise, we're going to lose our athletic programs. And exercise should be the biggest component of keeping our children healthy." Scott fears that with an around-the-clock ban, concession sales at sporting events in the district would plummet. Gone would be the hamburgers, hot dogs, French fries and sodas that have become synonymous with high school football games. "The majority of the customers buying this stuff after hours are adults anyway," Scott argues.....

A steering committee in the district has prepared a compromise proposal, which is expected to be unveiled at a school board meeting Thursday. The vote is scheduled for the June 8 meeting. The new plan would allow four school celebrations a year with cakes and candies. It also encourages concessionaires to offer 50 percent healthful snacks, such as salads, fruit, water and juice, and asks that 50 percent of fundraising sales be nonfood items, such as T-shirts, mugs and wrapping paper. In addition, the proposal says that by the start of school in August, vending machines at Santa Clara schools will only sell healthful foods. [Whatever they are]

At Bret Harte Elementary in the San Francisco Unified School District, faculty got rid of the vending machines last year. This year they eliminated the soda machine in the teachers lounge, because Principal Vidrale Franklin thought it was a bad influence on the kids. She discourages parents from bringing in baked goods for celebrations, but Franklin says it would be too controversial to outright ban cakes and cookies. Instead they gently encourage parents to use the school's recipes for desserts like a fruitcake made with yogurt.

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New Report: Foster Care System Disregards Fathers

When a mother and father are divorced or separated, and a child welfare agency removes the children from the mother's home for abuse or neglect, an offer of placement to the father, barring unfitness, should be automatic. Yet according to a new report by the Urban Institute, few fathers are able to reunite with their children, who are instead pushed into the foster care system.

The new report, What About the Dads? Child Welfare Agencies' Efforts to Identify, Locate, and Involve Nonresident Fathers, examines the foster care systems of Massachusetts and three other states. The report contains a shocking finding: when fathers inform child welfare officials that they would like their children to live with them, the agencies seek to place the children with their fathers in only 8% of cases.

All fit parents have a fundamental right to raise their own children without state interference. Moreover, fathers can offer their children a sense of permanence, security and emotional support that a foster family (or a succession of foster care placements) cannot provide. Fathers are also a much better source of long-term resources and sponsorship. Many foster children are pushed out of their homes and into a tenuous existence when they turn 18 and the foster parents no longer receive state subsidies.

Research shows that fathers matter. The rates of the four major youth pathologies--juvenile crime, teen pregnancy, teen drug abuse, and school dropouts--are tightly correlated with fatherlessness. For example, one long-term study of teen pregnancy published in Child Development found that a father's impact is so large that income, race, the mother's characteristics and a host of other normally powerful factors all mattered little. What mattered was dad.

It is true that the fathers of children seized by child welfare agencies tend to be younger, less stable and less fit than the average father. They are more likely to have drug or alcohol problems, and more likely to be involved in the criminal justice system. Yet behind child welfare agencies' disregard for fathers lie two largely unfounded beliefs-that fathers are often a safety risk to their children, and that most dads have little interest in their children.

Our societal image of family violence centers on abusive men. However, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' new report Child Maltreatment 2004, when one parent is acting without the involvement of the other parent, mothers are almost three times as likely to kill their children as fathers are, and are more than twice as likely to abuse them.

Many absent fathers are not a part of their children's lives because mothers have driven them out by denying visitation, moving far away or employing spurious abuse charges. Some fathers only find out that their children have been put in foster care when they are hit for child support to repay the state's costs. Many had no way of knowing that their children were in peril. Others were brushed aside by authorities when they asserted that their children were being abused. For example, in one highly-publicized case, seven year-old Kaili Warrington-Sims was starved down to 29 pounds and imprisoned in a bedroom by her mother and her mother's live-in boyfriend before being rescued by her father, Daniel Sims. The couple had spirited the girl around New York state and then to Florida to deny Sims access. Sims struggled through a maze of bureaucratic indifference and hostility to get to his daughter. He arrived just in time--the girl would have only lived a few more weeks in her condition.

What About the Dads? makes it clear that many child welfare workers treat fathers as an afterthought. The report found that even when a caseworker had been in contact with a child's father, the caseworker was still five times less likely to know basic information about the father than about the mother. And 20% of the fathers whose identity and location were known by the child welfare agencies from the opening of the case were never even contacted. These policies are seriously misguided. When a mother is deemed unfit to care for her children, dad shouldn't be just one option out of many. He should be first in line.

Source



Mother's "work" doesn't warrant paycheck

$134,121 a year: that's what a 2006 stay-at-home mom would earn if her work were fully paid at market rates. The claim comes from a study by the Massachusetts-based Salary.com, which specializes in "salary surveys." Although the figure is being touted as appreciation of stay-at-home mothers, it is actually both an insult and an absurdity. Stay at home mothers deserve better.

Alarm bells should already be sounding on the absurdity point. How can the monetary value of a vaguely defined and complex category, like an average stay-at-home mother's job, be assessed so exactly to the last dollar? Does it seem reasonable that a stay at home mother should receive over three times the median American household income: $43,318? Why was the statistic released so shortly before Mother's Day?

Such obvious questions were not asked by "400+ newspapers, TV, and radio stations from the U.S. to Australia." Instead, Salary.com gleefully reported, "The survey was the #1 emailed story on Yahoo! on Monday, May 2" -- the same day it was released. Salary.com's press release cleared up one issue. The site had conducted a survey, not a study, as the majority of the media reported. A study is a scholarly or scientific investigation that uses controls to prevent bias and error. A statistical survey collects data by interviewing or asking questions of individuals. A survey is less rigorous but, depending on its methodology, it can produce valuable results.

What was the methodology? Salary.com surveyed about 400 women online; the respondents consisted of both working mothers and stay at home mothers. Presuming an equal breakdown between the two, about 200 stay at home mothers were surveyed out of an estimated population of 5.6 million stay at home mothers. (U.S. Census Bureau, 2003); that is .00357 percent. There is no indication of whether respondents were randomly chosen or filtered in some manner. Online surveys are notoriously unreliable because follow-up verification rarely occurs and lying is a temptation. For example, a question like "Do you hit your children?" may produce a high rate of false answers, especially with no check on accuracy. Salary.com's questions are not available. Nevertheless, since they were used to break down the hours of stay at home mothers' labor, some questions must have been akin to "how often do you clean house?" Again, significant inaccuracy may have occurred.

Pushing aside such factors, how did Salary.com convert raw data on stay at home mothers' hours into the figure $134,121? (Working mothers who could not afford to stay at home, as much as they might long to do so, had their 'mom' time valued at only $85,878. The quality of time spent was not a factor, only quantity.) To convert time into money, Salary.com took a great leap. It classified the top ten tasks reported by respondents and calculated the respective hourly wages for 'equivalent' jobs in the marketplace; the jobs included day-care teacher, chef, CEO, psychologist and computer operator. For example, if a stay at home mother acted as the family-CEO for 4.2 hours a week, then the hourly marketplace rate for a corporate-world CEO was credited to her annual 'earnings'. Then, the worth of all ten jobs were added together to produce a total salary.

Two inflationary factors were employed. First, some extremely well-paid jobs were included. Second, because stay at home mothers are deemed to be constantly on-call, 51.6 hours of overtime with overtime 'pay' were added to every 40-hour work week. These inflationary factors ignore basic realities of the job market. For example, the 'equivalent' salaried positions do not generally receive overtime; that's a characteristic of jobs paid on an hourly basis. Moreover, CEOs and psychologists are compensated, in large part, for their extensive education and other qualifications.

More fundamentally, however, the survey is based on fundamentally false assumptions and it leaves out essential information. One false assumption: Stay at home mothers provide services to themselves and to their families, not to a marketplace of customers. Just as you do not 'deserve' a salary for cooking your own breakfast, neither does a parent who prepares a meal. What you do for personal benefit is different in kind from the labor you auction in the marketplace.

Two items of missing information: What of men? Fathers are repairmen, carpenters, plumbers, yard workers, accountants and occasional CEOs. Yet there is no mention of the 'salary' men should receive; perhaps such mention would destroy the sensationalism of the woman's $134,121 a year. Where is the off-setting calculation of economic benefits that stay at home mothers receive in the form of housing, food, or transportation?

The survey's conclusions are absurd, and the act of throwing absurdity at stay at home mothers as though it were the gift of revealed wisdom is a patronizing insult. Doing it on the cusp of Mother's Day so that Salary.com's paid-services receive mega-media attention is a self-serving insult. But the main offense is that Salary.com doesn't 'get it.' Women who stay home are lucky enough to be able to choose personal benefits over economic ones; stay at home mothers have refused to value their time in dollar signs. When Salary.com refers to sitting up with a sick child as 'over time', it commercializes and cheapens that act of love for both stay at home and working moms. It is similar to placing a dollar value on intimate marital relations because, after all, those 'services' are available elsewhere for a fee.

When you define the value of family meals in terms of cold cash, then you've lost the importance of what's really going on. When you convert acts of love into acts for profit, you've lost at life itself. Stay at home mothers and working moms should print out the faux-paycheck that Salary.com offers at its website Mom's Salary Wizard just for the pleasure of tearing it up.

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