March 07, 2005

• ...even if we do dislike them on some level. Who: arnold or kids? I dislike both. Getting rid of junk food in schools is a good idea, but the reason most schools have vending machines is because of the money it brings for the school. And considering how well funded schools are...
• one word kills the idiotenators proposal--Steroids
• The more I hear from Arnold, the less I dislike him. This is good...putting fruits, vegies and milk in vending machines in schools. His answer to the question about his steroid use was also good. Read the link. ;)
• Bush did coke in the 70s cos it was new and untested and not yet illegal snort shwooom whooosh durf hey I'm sober all of a sudden that was illegal I mean fast. I wonder if I'm going to have to pay those holocaust reparations or let my kids do it hmm.
• schwarzen+egger = dark/black plowman
• schwarzen+egger = dark/black plowman
• oops sorry
• This move has been proposed here, too. I know there are more recent links, but this one from October covers some of the debates that arose when the issue was brought to attention. Personally, I support the junk food vending machine ban. Feel free to bring your own crap to school or work, but don't expect these institutions to make access to your habits and addictions too easy.
• retank : are you suggesting we put steroids into school vending machines?
• If the vending machines are anything like they are in NZ, they work pretty badly as fundraisers. I organised a Coke machine for my workplace way back and it required the employees to spend over $250 a week on sodas before we'd get 5 cents back per can. Cans were $1 each and we had twenty-thirty employees. Not impossible and certainly achievable in a school, I suppose, but if the payoff is tooth decay and obesity then I'd prefer not to have them. Besides, vending machines that sell juice, water and healthy snacks like muesli (granola) bars or packaged apple slices could still work in the same way. In cases like this, I'd be happy to ignore the bad stuff about Arnold and support this platform. It should be about the issues, not the individual (she says, before making another joke about Bush's intellect).
• If our five year olds cannot drink Jolt in schools, the terrorists have already won.
• last year our school banned all sugar from the vending machines. we now enjoy gatorade (which is apparently sugarless) and pretzels, but no coke, candy, or chocolate. everyone hates it.
• Gatorade contains glucose, sucrose, and fructose.
• His response to steroid use is typical of what I hear repeatedly on a myriad of subjects from the older generation.(excuse me I`m 50) They say "Do as I say, not what I do(did)." In other words, I had my fun and games, but I don`t want you to have yours. They raised the drinking age, now they want to raise the age for obtaining a drivers license, and on and on. I would hate to be growing up in this paranoid, self righteous enviroment. Arnold would never be where he is now without using and most certainly abusing steroids, and now he wants to fleece the flock. Junk food is better than no food, and kids have networks of providing each other want they want. And as a side note,, I`d like to point out that sugar is a major commodity in our economy, in damn near everything you eat and drink(think beer), and soon to be powering you in your mode of transportation.
• Thank you, retank, for still continuing to argue the point of some other story, not the one posted about having healthier food choices in schools. Check out this link or this link for more details on how you can effectively communicate your confused message to others.
• Boo: Damn, you beat me to it. Is having vending machines in school that common? I know when I was in High School (just a couple years ago) we only had one vending machine for PowerAde by the gym. We weren't even allowed to use it during school hours, under threat of detention. It was strictly for after-school use. However, our lunchroom carried all sorts of fruit snacks, muffins, and locally produced pastry products. Not the healthy stuff, either, it was all pretty bad for you. More to the point, this is a good thing. Kids will still bring in candy and sweets, but the school isn't responsible for it anymore.
• it's pretty common. Some schools in Denver traded in most of their lunch lines for taco bell, kfc and pizza hut vendors, even.
• insert here: joke about schoolgirls' used panties sold in Japanese vending machines...
• Art vending machine.
• I`m not here to argue with you BOO, I was participating in a thread which evidently you were`nt following. From the article, "At the men's bodybuilding finals the night before, Schwarzenegger had called on bodybuilding to get rid of steroids. He got one question on the topic Sunday from a sixth-grader. The girl asked the governor to explain why he's said he doesn't regret his own past steroid use. Schwarzenegger reiterated that at the time he took the drugs they were new to the market and weren't illegal. People shouldn't take steroids now - "A, they are harmful for the body, and B, they are illegal," he said. Then following the thread, Bush did coke in the 70s cos it was new and untested and not yet illegal snort shwooom whooosh durf hey I'm sober all of a sudden that was illegal I mean fast. I wonder if I'm going to have to pay those holocaust reparations or let my kids do it hmm. posted by ActuallySettle at 01:32AM UTC on March 07 last year our school banned all sugar from the vending machines. we now enjoy gatorade (which is apparently sugarless) and pretzels, but no coke, candy, or chocolate. everyone hates it. posted by Mfpb 2 21 at 03:45AM UTC on March 07 Your response is indicative of exactly what I was expressing.
• The best thing about eating healthy food is you get the stool of power.
• What are you expressing, retank? It's not like you should turn to ActuallySettle's comment for anything; he's more confused than you were. If you use his "shwooom whooosh durf" non-sequitur as support for whatever it is your expressing, perhaps you might be better off just clearly writing it out.
• Not to good with lateral thinking are you.
• Better than you are at expressing yourself, apparently. Look, I get that you don't like his use of steroids. Great. Does that invalidate his call to remove junk food from his state's schools? Shit, man. Could you play into his PR Machine any nore? You howling that he used steroids comes out petty, man. When he says steroid use was legal in the mid-70's, he's right. They were legal all the way up to 1991! Claiming that he did something illegal doesn't work because he really wasn't doing anything illegal. That's as far as most people will take the argument. Are you going to try to grandfather his actions into law passed some 15 years later? I get that you can't just bitterly oppose him for him being who he is, that you're grasping for some substantive act that you can hate him for, and there's plenty to not like. I even get that you don't wanna fight him on this ground, cause, shit, opposing a junk food ban in an a nation obese as America would just make you look bad. You wanna bring the fight to him, and that's good, real good. But your fight's got no balls, man. He pre-emptively took care of your fight in his press conference, packaging it away in a neat, tidy sound bite. Maybe you got a fight that's got style, or maybe you got a fight with substance, and I hope you do, cause this one is a non-starter all the way.
• I'm not confused. Stop pretending to be intelligent it annoys the living fuck out of all of us.
• ActuallySettle: Was it the crack about getting his own blog that hit too close to home?
• *crawls out of bed* Kittens? *crawls back to bed*
• Still got that cough, 'Nedra? Who wants to rerail this thread? I thought it was going along nicely, although it may have done its dash.
• Just a bit, thanks for asking, tracicle (^_^)
• I understand Arnold has reversed his position and is now requiring all schools have both steroids and kittens available in vending machines.
• One of the reasons that I'm against having vending machines in general, and soda machines in particular, is the fact that I don't believe schools should be a place where kids are marketted to ("branded"). Since schools, at least here, are already weak on their teaching of critical thinking and media literacy, I don't like the idea of treating students as another captive audience for whatever product is being pitched to them this week. I realize that they're not all naifs, but still. I also don't like that the money inevitably seems to bring collusion and the suppression of dissent, like the kid with the Coke shirt in the Pepsi photo...
• I'm working on a roid-ridden kitten that craps vending machines and stars in speed metal videos. He's the cutest thing evar.
• BOO: You are jumping up the ass of one person for (what you seem to think is) not staying on topic, and then in the next breath you say this about the original poster: It's not like you should turn to ActuallySettle's comment for anything; he's more confused than you were. Oh I get it. Boo decides what is in scope and what is not. STFU please. If you don't like what other people like to post, maybe you're the one who should get his own blog.
• From a purely practical standpoint, wouldn't it be difficult to stock vending machines solely with fresh fruits and veggies? They have a tendency to go bad, sometimes for no reason (ever have an orange go moldy on you and contaminate the whole bag only a day after you bought the suckers?). Somehow, I doubt a restocked-once-a-week vending machine that would be full of moldy, stinking fruit by the end of the week would inspire children toward new levels of healthy eating.
• I agree that fruit machines should be in all schools. I also think that fruit should go to school and be taught by machines. Furthermore, a school should be placed inside each piece of fruit, possibly be a machine of some kind.
• On topic: I think it's a good idea to limit, but not eliminate, kids' access to junk food in schools. The government is trying too hard to be Mom to everyone; I think it's time it backed off and let parents be parents again. Off topic: I read in Fast Food Nation that due to underfunding of schools, brand names like Pepsi, etc., are actually making textbooks. He gave a few more examples of brands involvement in schools, but I can't recall the particulars at the moment.
• minda 25 says: On topic: I think it's a good idea to limit, but not eliminate, kids' access to junk food in schools. The government is trying too hard to be Mom to everyone; I think it's time it backed off and let parents be parents again. the kids buying the candy bars and mountain dews for breakfast in my high school certainly weren't the kids who had parents who, well, parented. remove the junk food machines and the kids who get $5 and a kick out the door each morning will have no choice but to eat more healthily.
• Will you be able to get ketchup packets out of these vending machines?
• I think those steroids have gone to Arnie's head. I applaud the sentiment that there should be no junk food in schools, but like Brubaker said upthread, how will they make up the loss in revenue if they get rid of them? Raise taxes??
• What I find so amusing is that people assume we need machines to serve food.
• It sounds like Arnie's got one good idea. Also CA should raise property, corporate, and income taxes, or at least spend less on prisons, to pay for improving education in other ways too.
• I do think fruit in vending machines is iffy. Whatever happened to school commissaries? For those in a hurry have an Exact Change lane.
• There are other healthy alternatives than fruit - pretzels, trail mix, nuts, dried fruit, yoghurt covered raisins, etc. Those would all work fine in a vending machine.
• trail mix, nuts, dried fruit, yoghurt covered raisins, etc It's hard to teach a room rull of 10 year olds when someone farts every 90 seconds.
• That's probably why you're so poorly educated.
• Why not just dispense high school diplomas via machines? Then kids can fart all they want - call it "fart yourself smart".
• One smart feller ...
• That's probably why you're so poorly educated. I can't tell if this is a troll or a poor attempt at a joke. Please to advise!
• In the school where I work, they replaced the "junk" food machines with "healthy" ones. They now dispense things like BAKED Lays, Pretzles, Granola Bars, Cheeze-Its etc. No more soda either, just highly sugared juices from the same company. The kids don't buy as much anymore. At best they took away some of the high fat snacks and got rid of nutrient free soda. At worst, they replaced one high calorie snack with another (only with more fiber) and replace carbonated drinks with non-carbonated, vitamin fortified sugar water.
• Eh, it's a start, Captain. If I was to give my child money to buy snacks at school I'd like to think he or she was getting something at least somewhat healthier than a candy bar or Coke. As for those sugared-up juices, ugh, they taste disgusting.
• They'll still let them sell those liquor miniatures, though, right? I never could have got through school without those.
• If the vending machines are anything like they are in NZ, they work pretty badly as fundraisers. I organised a Coke machine for my workplace way back and it required the employees to spend over $250 a week on sodas before we'd get 5 cents back per can. At my old high school, I think the school either got a generous percentage of the sales, or everything over a certain amount per can of pop. We had both Pepsi and Coke, and I'm sure the program they have is going to be more generous for a school than a private company (maybe Coke and Pepsi can claim the school's cut as a tax write off? I don't know). My school even raised the price a few times while I was there, which was the principal's decision. I guess the revenue it brought in was pretty good too. Getting that stuff out of schools would be better than having it there, but they still provide a decent amount money just about any cash strapped public school won't be able to say no to. It's either letting Coke in, or going to the voters to raise property taxes, and good luck with that. And on the Arnold steroids thing: since he did them when they were legal and admits it, it's his business. If he has an enlarged heart, boobs, and shrunken testicles, well, that's between him and the California electorate.
• Yeah, the schools make quite a load off of the machines. They know it's bad for the kids, but when your state government puts your budget on the chopping block before just about anybody else's, you take your money where you can get it. Of course, a lot of districts piss a good deal that cash away, too. My wife's doing a story right now about a small Arkansas town that has eight fucking football coaches, and the head coach makes just shy of $90,000 a year, roughly double what a teacher with a master's degree makes there. All of it tax money, none of it from boosters.
• I echo middleclasstool's first paragraph. If Schwarzenegger wants to fund schools to the point they don't have to rely on selling non-nutritious shit to the students - which means repudiating Prop. 13 - he can step up. But he isn't.
• Are they still putting Soft drink ads in schools? I remember in the late nineties Coke and Pepsi were paying big bucks to advertise their products at students. Most fruit juices(not all) are not really juices, but artificially flavored high fructose corn syrup, and if there is any real juice in them, it is apple juice which might as well be a corn syrup. Everyone has a different metabolism, so we can`t declare one specific diet as harmful to one of us as the other. The most important thing we can give the children is the freedom to decide what they want and not try to overlord them.
• Uhg, MCStool. My head is exploding right now.
• Most fruit juices(not all) are not really juices, retank, IIRC, only pure fruit juices can be called "fruit juice" legally. However, most drinks (such as Ribena) are called "juice drink", which can contain as little as 1% fruit juice, but can vary up to 55%. I always either buy fruit juice "from concentrate" (which means that the fruit juice was extracted, concentrated, then watered back down to a more normal level - nothing else is added, although some nutrients are lost) or "pure fruit juice". Everything else is adulterated.
• Schools in New Zealand claim to be having good results with similar bans.
• Did anyone see Supersize Me? Spurlock visited a typical school cafeteria and taped kids ordering nothing but french fries, and noted that the entrenched food service company Sodexho had expanded the offerings in the caf to pizza, candy bars, and a whole assortment of fried foods. It makes me glad that my whole shool had to brown bag... Even better, my husband's school (he teaches 6th grade) offers either a healthy food program (real salads, fresh fruit, no fried entrees) or a brown bag option where no candy or chips are allowed. And before I get the hailstorm, those are some of the most calm and focused kids I've ever seen.
• Sorry, forgot the main point. ABSOLUTELY no soda.
• My mom hardly bought soda, so I almost never had it as a kid. I brown-bagged lunch all through grade and high school- didn't get soda there either. Then I went away to school. I got 4 cavities from too much soda. I started drinking it in moderation, until I realized that the caffeine was making me feel like crap, so I recently stopped entirely. Moral of the story: Not having access to soda kept me from drinking it as long as that lasted, but I had to learn the lessons on my own to realize how important it is to eat and drink healthier stuff. I think it'd be interesting to make both healthy food and the usual crap available, then work on the health ed programs to talk about nutrition more, and use the sales of the different kinds of food to gauge effectiveness.
• arch1, I remember a school with a food program that sounded like your husband's school or possibly better being shown in the documentary too. If I remember correctly, it was an alternative school (maybe the one listed on this page found via links on the doc site) for students with disciplinary/academic issues and Spurlock's interviewees there suggested that the diet had made kids calmer and improved overall performance.
• Don't they have water fountains? Why have drink machines at all? Other than the money thing, of course. Just have lots of water fountains, maybe sell cartons of milk for $.50. That's all my junior school had, no food offered (no lunch room, only a converted gym) - the kids were all bused up to an hour, but if you forgot your lunch, then you just went hungrey. Unless a teacher found out, in which case they would probably offer you some of theirs.
• Define junk food. Even if you won't, the kids will. They will sneak it in as contraband. Sell it to each other. Dealers. Busts. Police force needed. Ah, now I see why "I'm all for power and authority" Arnold got this idea.
• Stick those kids into large schools! Regiment their lives! Don't trust them an inch! Treat them all alike! Make them all drink water! Force them to eat unfamiliar foods! Frisk them for subversive materials! Call in the cops to make sure they do as they are told! Check their persons and possessions for drugs! Confiscate all druge. even those a doctor has prescribed! Bully them! Make sure they don't have any drugs! Nor any dreams! But don't teach them anything! Except implicit and instant obedience! Don't even think about teaching them what it might be to think for themselves, or make decisions for themselves!
• Indeed.
• Um...why is water bad, beeswacky? We weren't forced to drink water, we could bring whatever we wanted or whatever our parents packed. But water was all the school provided, and it was free. Good tasting too, because it was was running and cold.
• Um...why is water bad, beeswacky? What W.C. Fields said. :-)
• jb, who said water was bad? Or for that matter, good? The point I was trying to make was that eliminating choice for youngsters may be undesirable if you wish to end up with a kid who's able to govern her/himself without having to be institutionalized or overseen by some authority for the rest of her/his life. Back when, incidentlaly, I was in elementary school, as doctor's children/grandchildren my siblings and I had orders from our parents never to drink from school or public water fountains because of polio (this was in pre-Salk days, of course) and because other diseases, such as ringworm, had been discovered to be transmitted by poorly designed water fountains then in common use. These water fountains, in turn, were an improvement over the dipper and well-water in classroom bucket system that my grandparents and one parent encountered in their schooldays, which undoubtedly contained various bacilli and microorganisms. Standards of good and bad may change, even with respect to drinking water.
• bees - I understand your point, which probably is most applicable to teenagers. But when talking about junior school age children, they aren't really old enough to be making decisions about what's healthy to eat and what isn't - That's something you learn growing up (and probably master sometime in your 20s or 30s). My six year old neice would eat nothing but pancakes and vegetables if you let her, never any protein. And, of course, chocolate before anything else. It isn't being a nanny state to suggest that children should be treated differently from adults, including not having the same consumer choices. If parents send their kids to school with soda, that's their choice, but there's no reason for the school to encourage it, or to have a situation where a kid sent perhaps with money to buy milk or juice can spent it on soda instead. Teenagers are a different situation - they are on the cusp of maturity - they certainly think they know what's best for them, and there it probably is part of the learning process to let them learn from their own mistakes, hopefully not serious ones. I had to pack my own lunch at that age, and often went hungry when I got up too late or was too disorganised to. That would have been cruel to an 8 year-old, but as a fifteen year-old, I needed to learn to take responsibility.
• I see your point, too, of course, jb, but am not sure I can agree with many of the scenarios being played out in some schools these days. I do question school policies, and think everyone should eye them closely, whether or not they have kids. Re your neice: Try putting some grated cheese or egg or peanut butter into those pancakes if you're worried about protein deficiency. Or chocolate-covered peanuts. Don't despair. But trust me, she'll outgrow this limited range of tastes in time. Some complete non-meat protein sources: Dairy product and potato Legume plus grain Egg Nuts Junior school is an unfamiliar term to me. Twice attended schools called junior high which I believe is a term now extinct -- it consisted of grades seven and eight. Woz OK if ye hadn't skipped any earlier grades, I guess. But if ye had, then ye had to watch out lest ye be trampled.
• Public school was designed to produce good workers. It's meant to teach three things: 1. The teacher is the boss. Obey the boss. 2. Everything is controlled by the clock, right down to the second. Don't dare be late. 3. Get used to doing monotonous, repetitive work until the clock says you can stop.
• Exactly! Excellent preparation for life.
• bees: Junior High is alive and well in Nouvelle Ecosse: grades 7-9, cola optional. (...and you left out tofu hotdogs, tofu 'chicken' nuggets, etc. and just plain tofu!)
• I like this comic about education vs. indoctrination.
• "Uhg, MCStool. My head is exploding right now. posted by maryh at 07:21AM UTC on March 08 " Isn't a McStool what the body eliminates after eating at McDonalds?
• Yeah, I was gonna let that go by without comment, but for the record, it's Tool, not Stool. No harm done, maryh. You're far from the first to make that mistake.
• I have a friend who used to go by the handle goatripster. He's a big trance fan, so it was meant to be read as Goa Tripster. I think he stopped using it when everyone was reading it as Goat Ripster, though.
• Perhaps in your country, rocket88. In my country, the prime mover in the history of our education system had quite different ideas. Of course, that has been rolled back somewhat with a succession of pro-business, anti-citizen governments intent on making the school system conform more closely to your description.
• Ach, I'm such a Tofurkey! Tofu = soybean = legume, thus ran my train of thought, o my ped-an-tick friend.
• Thanks, rogerd, for the link to Beeby. Some of his early ideas (class-size reduction, inclusion of pre-school in the state educ. system) seem to have only in recent decades received more attention in the US.