beef or that butter is now bad. so, at what point does the nanny state become so absurdly opposed to popular culture that you have to back up a long step and say, wait a second, do i really want you in my life on every front? we re not trying to get in your life on every front. we re not going into your refrigerator, not telling you what to buy. the wic food program is called the supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children. the goal of that program is to provides food and nutrients that are lacking in low-income women and children s diets. and so it s not like food stamps where it just gives family resources to buy whatever food they want. there s a list of foods that are part of the wic food package and those foods are designed to meet specific nutrient deficiencies that are common in low you mean this is not a nutrition deficiency? is that the point? turns out that the potato industry is doing just fine and plenty of
let me explain. school wlunlunches should have standards whatsoever. this isn t about the standards. it s about implementing them. can schools actually did it? you said 90% are doing it. that s right. they re finding out it s costing a lot more money than they have in their budgets to do this. you have some schools saving money because they re getting higher participation. no, you do not have higher participation. you actually do. you actually had over a million students drop out of the school lunch program last year which after decades of us actually having students increase in the program that s not true. let me finish. you had over a million drop off because they don t like the food and going down since 2007. this decrease in participation is of concern, and it s something that we ve been focused on. but it s been going down since 2007. why do you think it s happening? it s a mix of things. i think it s kids bringing their lunch from home because the food was
harry truman started the school lunch program because too many young people were being rejected from the military because of malnutrition. if there s a supporter bigger than the u.s. military for this program right now, i don t know who it is. we need to get healthy meals in their schools. i understand that. why on earth where you re giving $80 billion a year in food stamps and you have parents buying food for their children, and they re buying this is not food stamps. those are federal dollars guys, you are talking about we re talking about federal dollars we re talking about school lunches. federal dollars for food. right? that s what we re talking about. let s talk about the program from the standpoint. this is part of why the country is increasingly, i think, opposed to the federal government. these things are all implemented locally. they are local people hired in a local cafeteria run by a local with federal money but i m just saying, if somebody
delay because they want how do you enforce standards? what do you mean? if i live in massachusetts and my standards aren t as good as in georgia, you go to your school board and say, mr. school board and mrs. school board, we would like you to make changes here. the $11 billion we re spending on this program, we think schools should decide amongst themselves what they should serve. i think schools i think people at the local district, i think the national school board association who has asked for the waiver, school nutrition association group asked for the waiver on this, know more about the nutrition group. knows more than this is not a local program. this is the national school lunch program. exactly. states and localities kick in less than 10% of the money. these are federal dollars for a federal nutrition program. if we re going to spend all these billions of dollars they re saying, the schools are saying the money coming from the federal government is no
standards went into effect, less than 15% of schools were serving healthy school lunches. now under the new standards, 90% are, so the standards are working. why roll them back? we re talking about very small number of schools are having problems. most schools are that s not true. you re punishing 90% of the kids for a very small problem. genevieve, i have a question for you. the school lunch program serves 30 million kids most of whom are from needy families, most of whom this is their biggest meal of the day. we re spending more than $11 billion on this program. why wouldn t we want the most nutritious foods to be served to these kids? well, i think that we do, but i would of course ask why the obama administration who gives out a lot more money in food stamps to we re talking about the school lunch program. i understand. that s government sponsored and we let people do you believe no, i don t think there ought to be regulations on that.