Over at Reason.com, Balyen Linnekin wrote a column last week where he shared his perspectives on the
ten important federal food-policy issues the presidential candidates should be discussing but have ignored until now.
Yesterday, he put up another post:
my goal for this week's follow-up column would be to go beyond my own ideas by presenting one idea each from 10 leading food scholars, attorneys, authors, advocates, and others about important food-policy issues they'd like to see discussed in the presidential campaign and implemented in the future.
Here were my thoughts, which Balyen included in his post (I'm number 6).
The government-funded school lunch program is a bureaucratic nightmare that attempts to do too much: prop up agricultural prices, provide calories to poor under-nourished children, slim the waistlines of the obese, and it forces schools to follow complex rules subject to annual audit. The government subsidizes the price of foods sold from selected distributors and it re-reimburses schools for certain types of students. Why not take these same funds and provide block-grants to schools and let local school boards make their own decisions outside the complex government formula system? We allow charter schools. Why not charter lunchrooms?
Number 7 was also on school lunches. Check out the other 8 ideas.