GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Please sign and forward this Petition Against A-812 to support our Bake-In Rally. If you could leave a commentary after your signature it would be appreciated.

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/no2a812/

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Thank you!
Jean Lee (Bake-In organizing committee member, The Children’s Workshop School parent)

A regulation was recently passed to ban home baked goods for sale at schools. The DOE prefers for students to sell chips, and sweets instead. In two schools in the East Village they have already started making changes by adopting the tradition of meatless Monday, since they discovered that the beef being served to the students is treated with ammonia.

I agree with schools taking action towards the regulation that has banned home baked goods to be for sale, because whoever made that decision wasn’t really thinking about the students health benefits from this. By removing the sale of baked goods they are potentially increasing the risk of obesity because all those chips, and sweets that they want students to sell are full of calories, and trans fat, which is only going to make students gain weight, and become sick, eventually. I support the idea of meatless Mondays, because just to think that what our children are putting into their mouth is being treated with something you could use as well to clean your house is sickening. Many students don’t even eat school lunches because they taste nasty, I wonder why?

The foods students eat daily for lunch, and often for breakfast in schools, are responsible for a growing epidemic of health problems, according to critics. Many concerned people are working to reduce school junk food by reforming school cafeterias and improving the contents of vending machines. The statistics are sobering, close to 20% of today’s kids are overweight and 15% are classified as obese. Banning home baked goods pushes kids to eat processed food and undercuts parental efforts to teach nutrition at home by outlawing homemade goodies like organic popcorn balls and vegan cookies, which are arguably are healthier than anything housed in a vending machine. By restricting bake sale offerings to goods limited in calories and wrapped in packaging that lists nutritional information, schools will help children reduce their intake of unhealthy snacks, officials say.

A better plan would be to offer parents recipes for healthier snacks to sell. Parents and teachers, said it’s more important to look at what goes into the food. The mini-empanadas had the most ingredients, at 19, including spinach, tofu, cilantro, lime juice, and black beans. Compare that with the Pop-Tart, with 27 ingredients, including riboflavin, polydextrose and high-fructose corn syrup.

New York isn’t the first school district to take on child weight problems, but with 1,500 public schools, it is the biggest and among the most influential in the country, and it appears to have gone further than others with the latest regulations David Cantor, the education department’s spokesman, said the city was simply in line with a nationwide effort to combat childhood obesity, which First Lady Michelle Obama has made one of her priorities. “We restrict sales of homemade food because we cannot monitor its nutritional value,” Cantor said, adding that “homemade is not synonymous with healthful.”

Although, why are we suddenly picking on bake sales as opposed to looking at the things that are available every single day?. Rejecting the notion that whole-grain Pop Tarts foster good health. In the end, it’s still a Pop-Tart.