A version of this editorial appeared in the March 2012 print edition of Carolina Journal.
The story, initially broken by Carolina Journal, of a Hoke County preschool rejecting a 4-year-old’s homemade lunch caused a nationwide furor for a host of reasons.
For starters, government officials questioning parents’ competence evokes a nanny state, as do adult authority figures telling young children the food they brought from home is — for whatever reason — not good enough. Then, federal, state, and local officials initially offered confusing and sometimes inconsistent accounts of what happened at West Hoke Elementary School in late January.
But this story also offers a lesson about the blind faith bureaucrats have in their ability to modify behavior. The problem is not only good intentions gone awry. It’s also the unflagging faith in the notion that “designing better choices,” as President Obama’s regulatory czar Cass Sunstein has put it, lets regulators “nudge” every person to make decisions that “improve their lives” — at least from the bureaucrat’s perspective.
Sunstein has called this philosophy “soft paternalism” or (get this) “libertarian paternalism” because it pushes rather than coerces people into making the “right” choices.
But as the Hoke preschool fiasco shows, assuming that bureaucrats not only know best, but also can guarantee how individuals will behave, can be sheer folly.
The lunches served at that school — and every facility that participates in the NC Pre-Kindergarten program (once known as More at Four) — must follow U.S. Department of Agriculture nutrition guidelines. Fair enough. Food provided by schools should be healthy.
But lunches that kids bring from home have to meet those guidelines, too. And the regulations those meals must satisfy are notoriously inflexible.
Take the lunch from the 4-year-old that was deemed inadequate: a turkey sandwich with cheese on whole wheat bread, a banana, apple juice, and a bag of chips. While that lunch appears to include items from each of the classic “four food groups” — dairy, protein, fruits/vegetables, and grain — it doesn’t meet the USDA rules.
The government says fluid milk must be served at every meal. Cheese isn’t an adequate substitute. Nor is yogurt or cottage cheese. If a child is lactose intolerant, her parents have to notify the school and ask for an exemption from the milk requirement.
To satisfy the USDA’s guidelines, and make sure the school checks all its bureaucratic boxes, school personnel must “supplement” any missing items from kids’ lunch bags. A teacher must place a carton or pour a glass of milk in front of each child who doesn’t have it. And if the child doesn’t drink the milk, it’s poured down the sink.
Moreover, schools have the option of charging parents for missing items.
Such a mandate may satisfy the bureaucrat’s desire to provide what he sees as the right choices. But it does not guarantee that those choices will be taken, or that parents — who have much more intimate knowledge of their children than any outsider — can, or should, agree with those options.