School Lunch Fun (Unless Your Parents Gave You McDonalds- Then You Have To Go Eat Outside By Yourself)

From today's New York Times Magazine: The School-Lunch Test.

I promise I won't turn this into one of my typical rants about stupid ideas. It's not stupid to want to encourage healthy eating habits among kids, and the story here is about a local Florida program, and I am a strong proponent of "local" solutions.

However, two gripes:

1- The article frames this as part of the "obesity crisis," but I'd question the role of school lunches in this crisis- Haven't most school lunches remained essentially the same over the past 50 years? I'm highly skeptical of any claim that kids are getting fatter because of anything that goes on at school- If you want to know why kids are fat, look at their eating and exercise habits outside of school. But anyway ...

2- Is it really necessary to ban ketchup? Or force kids eating fast food to eat outside the cafeteria? Teaching healthy eating habits and getting fresh food is one thing, but at what point does this all become a little too much of a social engineering experiment?