http://www.slowfoodusa.org/index.php/slow_food/blog_post/whats_for_lunch_cheetos_with_cheese/

Americans, seriously?  You're really living up to the stereotype.

That's stomach-turning.

please... there's not even any chili on that.

Or bacon.

Or mayo!

OK, that is typical american white trash cuisine, mixing some packaged junk food with some processed other junk food (cheezwhiz) and calling it "cooking".

The shocking part is that the school cafeteria is selling that crap as a full balanced meal.

But when Jamie Oliver says the same thing, CC hates it:

http://www.crazyontap.com/topic.php?TopicId=69792

This is necessary education in what lunch on the job will be if they don't take it in from home.I ate 3 or 4 potato cakes (deep fried battered potato slices) for lunch every day for a few years at one location as they were fast, cheap and satisfying and could be burned off by running around St Kilda Lake.

I foresee an opportunity to spread this system via the internet and disintermediate the whole fried fat industry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala

"when Jamie Oliver says the same thing, CC hates"

You are a retard. Schools shouldn't use federal money to produce shit food they push on the kids, nor should coke and doritos be sold out of machines there.

Oliver's problem is he wants to enforce what the PARENTS can give the children to eat. That is complete Nazi bullshit and Oliver can go fuck himself.

From the thread you linked to:

"This guy couldn't stop at changing the school lunches, which is fine. Instead he wants to regulate what parents are allowed to feed their children privately." -CC


CHANGING THE SCHOOL LUNCHES = FINE
REGULATING WHAT PARENTS FEED THEIR CHILDREN = NAZI BULLSHIT

"CHALLENGING AND EDUCATING WHAT PARENTS FEED THEIR CHILDREN = NAZI BULLSHIT?"

really?

It's not the really schools' or the parents' fault what sort of cheap, readily available food is available.

Cheetos covered with hot cheez whiz sold as a lunch is not something that is readily available. The school came up with that all on their own.

Also not all that cheap.

"Cheetos covered with hot cheez whiz sold as a lunch is not something that is readily available. The school came up with that all on their own."

by the same reasoning, a kid could just buy 3x french fries for the same price. or 2x cheese pizza and just eat the cheese and peperoni.

bullshitter, cc. we all know what you are.

"CHALLENGING AND EDUCATING WHAT PARENTS FEED THEIR CHILDREN = NAZI BULLSHIT?"

really now?

Corn and dairy are subsidised:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy

Not to mention being behind a trade wall a mile high.

Good god. So is tobacco.

That hints at gloriously perverted policy.

domestic crops behind a trade wall == domestic food securities.

nothing wrong with that from where i am sitting.

tobacco, notsomuch.

There are no tobacco subsidies in the US. Read the article you cited. It says that program is in Malawi, in Africa.

If not, then recently rescinded. The article shows tobacco subsidies for 2004 and 2005 if you take a moment to look.

You can start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#United_States

:)

Sort of explains how you guys can subsidise unhealthy food production to the extent that you need to dump excess product (pork, maize, dairy) via trade /aid / welfare / fast food outlets.

All right, I will bet you a million dollars tobacco crops are not subsidized in the US. I know this for a fact. Did you notice that their link of a citation leads to a 404? Not everything from wikipedia is reliable, and now there is a problem where other sources are using wikipedia as a source itself, creating an ongoing problem.

There was a tobacco quota system in the US until recently. This meant that you were not allowed to grow tobacco without owning or buying quota shares from another farmer. The USDA administered this, but no government money went to pay anyone for anything.

This program allowed many small family farmers and the like to make some cash each year growing tobacco. It wasn't possibly for huge corporations to just grow whatever they wanted themselves, they had to buy from small producers because of the quotas.

That program was ended and there were transitional payments to farmers to help them transition to the growing of other crops. Now, the tobacco companies just grow it themselves in giant fields since there are no quota restrictions. Still, no subsidies.

There are subsidies for the purchase of crop insurance though, which insures against crop failure due to weather or plagues of locusts and such. This insurance subsidies are available for a wide variety of crops including tobacco. But that is not a subsidy for tobacco growing, just for insuring it against loss due to natural disasters.

> But that is not a subsidy for tobacco growing, just for insuring it against loss due to natural disasters.

Erm, subsidizing the cost of tobacco growing, and insurance is a production cost, is of course subsidizing tobacco growing.

Whatever, I may have been lead astray by an error on the web but that's  a distraction - the main issue of this thread is how subsidies distort agricultural production towards producing surpluses of unhealthy food.

During WW2, food rationing actually improved the overall population's health in the UK.

Tobacco growing in the EU is heavily subsidized.

Along with everything else. There's no arguing with the power of the peasant vote.