Mike Adams wrote a great piece on how the public is kept nutritionally uneducated. Unfortunately, the best place to start with this is the youngest members of society through the school lunch program. In this era of government bailouts and concern over wasteful spending, an opportunity presents itself to take a hard look at the National School Lunch Program. It was started in 1946 as a public safety measure, and it certainly turned out to be a disaster.

Under the program, the USDA gives public schools cash for every meal served – $2.57 for a free lunch, $2.17 for a reduced-price lunch and 24 cents for a paid lunch.

In 2007, the program cost around $9 billion. This figure is acknowledged as inadequate to cover food costs. What people don`t realize is that very little of this money even goes toward food. Why, because the schools have to use it to pay for everything from the custodial services to heating the cafeteria.

On top of these reimbursements, the schools are entitled to receive commodity foods that are valued at a little over 20 cents per meal. The list includes such highly nutritious foods as high fat, low grade meats and cheeses, processed foods like chicken nuggets, and pizza.

Since many schools do not have kitchens, many of these delectable morsels are ready to be thawed, heated or simply unwrapped. Also, as an additional treat, the schools get “bonuses” from the USDA, which essentially throw good money after bad for leftovers from the big food producers.

When the schools allow fast-food snacks that contain the same ingredients found in fast foods and the resulting meals routinely fail to meet nutritional standards, only a handful of people in our nutritionally illiterate society protest. Our government, caring little about this, justifies it by saying that they are “helping” to feed millions of American schoolchildren, with a great many of them from low-income households. And here we thought the “weapons of mass destruction” were in Iraq.