A School Lunch Assult on Existential Exuberance

I’m serving up a big plate tonight, a German peasant plate of bratwurst, kraut and potato pan cakes, and of all that is wrong with a school lunch.

It seems that all Detroit kids are to get the free school hot lunch, breakfast too and some sort of late afternoon snack. The brown bag lunch isn’t optional as best as I can tell. It’s a program under the “Healthy-hunger Free Kids Act.” The idea is to relieve poor kids from the stigma of taking free lunches by having all kids take the school hot lunch. Now here’s the thing. This pilot program applies to schools and school districts where 40% of the kids qualify for a free lunch, where no one knows who is getting a free lunch or who is paying, and where with 40% of the kids qualifying it wouldn’t seem the free lunch thing would be much of a stigma.

The other thing is school hot lunches are always institutional, maybe better than G.I. rations – meals ready to eat, but still dismal. And within there lies a frontal assault on existential exuberance.

My hearty meal of apple bratwurst, potato pan cakes, apple sauce and kraut tempered with apple juice, caraway and bacon didn’t cost more than a buck. And if you are a Milwaukee sort of German guy, it’s oh so good. It’s a meal of heritage dancing with joy.

That dancing with joy, that’s existential exuberance. We sing. We dance. We engage in sports, make love, cook and eat. In all of these things we celebrate and embrace our physical existence. In these things our souls express the existential joy of being – the simple joy of being a physical creature.  Just look at the spontaneous exuberant dance by two brothers celebrating existence. (View Here)

Now to be sure we are intellectual beings, spiritual beings and social beings also. But before that we are physical and sensual. So we dance and sing and cook.

My meal is a meal the schools can’t serve up. It’s a meal of my joy and is not for everyone nor should it be. Nevertheless, I have the right to be the lord of my menu, be it breakfast, lunch or dinner. A brown bag lunch – a sandwich, some fruit and a sweet – can be a beautiful thing.

I recall having lunch with friends in high school where there was a casual ongoing competition over who was eating best that day. I recall the sliced lobster tail, dabbed with mayonnaise and stuffed into a nice hunk of French bread and the complaints of my table mates.

“Look at that. That’s not fair. Paulus has lobster.”

Detroit schools empowered by a federal pilot program saying that a lobster sandwich can’t be.

The Detroit lunch program isn’t about children’s hunger and stigma of poverty, it is about urban childhood obesity walking hand in hand with malnourishment. It’s a federal dietary program. In short the Feds are saying we will see to it that you eat “right.” At the same time it’s an unintentional soft assault on culinary heritage and existential exuberance. So one day should we all dutifully line up for our “meals ready to eat?” Should we no longer be trusted to cook for and feed ourselves and our families?

If that be so, my days of potato pan cakes heaped with hot homemade apple sauce are numbered. Our government can never imagine such a thing.

F.A. Hayek on The Rule of Law

When I began this blog I thought I would happily prattle on about joys of cooking and food, offering, if you will, a light hearted unfolding guide to home cooking. Yet, in that time span, it seems our economy is on an accelerating path to disintegration. I cannot fiddle while Rome burns.

If we are to find the path back to sanity there are certain principles that we must vigilantly promote as a guide: the primacy of the household economy and the Roman Catholic principle of subsidiarity are two.

The priciple of subsidiarity holds:

"Socialization also presents dangers. Excessive intervention by the state can threaten personal freedom and initiative. The teaching of the Church has elaborated the principle of subsidiarity, according to which "a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co- ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.""

There are others for sure. To this short list I must add “rule of law.” Collectively we have forgotten its meaning.

So here is F.A. Hayek’s take on it. This is excerpted from a longer essay outlining the origins and history of the concept. (Full Text)

“Here, I suggest, we have nearly all the elements which together produce the complex doctrine which the nineteenth century took for granted under the name of the Rule of Law. The main point is that, in the use of its coercive powers, the discretion of the authorities should be so strictly bound by laws laid down beforehand that the individual can foresee with fair certainty how these powers will be used in particular instances; and that the laws themselves are truly general and create no privileges for class or person because they are made in view of their long-run effects and therefore in necessary ignorance of who will be the particular individuals who will be benefited or harmed by them. That the law should be an instrument to be used by the individuals for their ends and not an instrument used upon the people by the legislators is the ultimate meaning of the Rule of Law.

Since this Rule of Law is a rule for the legislator, a rule about what the law ought to be, it can, of course, never be a rule of the positive law of any land. The legislator can never effectively limit his own powers. The rule is rather a meta-legal principle which can operate only through its action on public opinion. So long as it is generally believed in, it will keep legislation within the bounds of the Rule of Law. Once it ceases to be accepted or understood by public opinion, soon the law itself will be in conflict with the Rule of Law.”

I need to repeat “the main point is that, in the use of its coercive powers, the discretion of the authorities should be so strictly bound by laws laid down beforehand that the individual can foresee with fair certainty how these powers will be used in particular instances…”

If this principle were applied to our federal administrative agencies much of the Federal Register would need be stricken. In July alone the federal government unleashed 379 new rules, with estimated new regulatory costs of over $9.5 billion.