The Non-Compliant Twice Baked Potato

I made a delicious anniversary dinner for my wife. The USDA would not have approved, at least judging by the new dietary standards for school lunches. My first sin was the double baked potato. Kids diets they’ve deemed are too potato rich and are making them, and all of us by extension, morbidly obese.

Under the new lunch rules French fries, Tater Tots and chips are frowned upon. The inclusion of these items on school lunch menus is strictly limited. So too with bread and pasta. A couple of servings a week are okay, but only if they are made from whole grain wheat. Worse my double baked potatoes are loaded with fat – bacon fat, sour cream and whole milk.

The next item on my anniversary plate was the lobster tail. The regulators might be okay with lobster of and by itself (though it’s not likely to found in public school cafeteria), but the melted butter in which I generously bathed it would cause them nightmares.

Meanwhile during the day, feet upon their desks, they daydream of dietary reeducation camps.

In principle they would be okay with the salad, but, and in their eyes these things are huge, I didn’t dress it with low-cal, low-fat Ranch dressing. Instead I whipped together a small dressing of mayonnaise, sour cream, olive oil and blue cheese.

It seems that with all the raw vegetables and salads they want served in the schools, the only enhancement to them should be an insipid low-cal, low-fat Ranch dressing. It should also be noted my salad was built around nutritionally vilified Iceberg lettuce. (Iceberg lettuce holds up well in the refrigerator crisper.)

A Regulatory Crusade

The school lunch dietary standards have been a crusade for First Lady Michelle Obama. In defending them she recently told a group of school nutrition officials: “Transforming the health of an entire generation is no small task.  But we have to be willing to fight the hard fight now” [Full Text]

In Milwaukee, the schools will be serving free meals, breakfast and lunch, to all students beginning next year. You have to wonder if brown bag lunches will not be allowed. The picture with the story showed a salad with croutons and a slice or two of hard boiled eggs in in a plasticized box. In the background there was a peach and a carton of 1% milk. Hidden off camera was, I’m sure, a squeeze packet of low-cal, low-fat Ranch dressing. [Full Text] 

So the food guidelines they’ve drawn up are big on fresh fruits and vegetables, short on carbs and dietary fat, and in general force schools to serve lunches that kids would rather pass on. Increasingly elsewhere, school districts and school food service managers are passing on the federal school lunch subsidies rather than follow menu guidelines. They are losing customers and buying expensive food only to throw it away. Their food budgets have been blown to hell. [Full Text]

So maybe it’s a good idea to consider the tomato sauce on slice of pizza as a serving of vegetables again.

In all of this mischief, the underlining assumption is American parents know nothing of wholesomely feeding their children. The way to fix this of course is with federal dietary mandates regarding school lunches and increasingly breakfasts too. Scratching below that assumption is laid a deeper assumption that the institution of family is failed.

Creating the Central Bureau of Group-Think Conformity

That deeper assumption is driving Common Core, nationwide school achievement standards set by the U. S. Department of Education. The national standards are spearheaded by Bill Gates, the association of state departments of education and the Obama administration.

In explaining his support for the standards, Gates told the Washington Post: “The country as a whole has a huge problem that low-income kids get less good education than suburban kids get, and that is a huge challenge. ... Education can get better. Some people may not believe that. Education can change. We can do better.” [Full Text]

Critics of the assessment standards claim, for example, it leaves American seventh-graders two years behind the benchmarks set by other countries. Glen Beck believes the policy is nothing short of unbridled evil. [Video] But one thing is clear. While the Gates’ standard might be fine for some schools, through them the U.S. Department of Education is imposing a one size fits all curricula on our nation’s schools when in fact the majority of school districts are doing just fine. Somehow all of that is justified by the economy of scale, I suppose.

The Legacy of Devalued Marriage

But the problem isn’t with failing schools; failing schools are mostly a symptom of broken families.

There is much evidence for failed families. On the whole, culturally we’ve devalued marriage and have tried to bandage the resulting wounds with various social welfare programs. There is as much evidence these bandages haven’t worked too well. Too many federal social welfare programs, agencies and reforms have failed and instead only accelerated the declined. The 1965 Moynihan Report sort of outlined the path we were on and we’ve reached its destination. That story is told by Charles Murray in his study, published this year, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 – 2010. These are the book ends of failed social policy.

The new solution is a de facto centralized ministry of group-think conformity.

To criticize that is hopelessly politically incorrect, racist and to be silenced. Instead, we are asked to quietly accept federally mandated dietary standards and Common Core, standards that are necessarily set to a lowest common denominator. It is a low bar set for public schools that increasingly serve as proxy parents, but impose a very high price of regulatory compliance both on our school districts and the individual families they serve.

A Twice Baked Potato

Having said that, here’s how to make a USDA disapproved double baked potato. Should you serve this up with a lobster tail for your wife in celebration of a thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, she will probably not kick you out of the house for a while – maybe not for another year. She said we haven’t had lobster for quite some time. Not since our last anniversary I replied.

For this non-compliant double baked potato you will need:

3 medium russet potatoes

3 slices of bacon diced

½ medium onion diced

2 Tbsp. sour cream

1 tsp dried chives

Seasoning salt to taste

1 splash of milk

2 Tbsp. grated parmesan cheese

2 sprinklings of paprika  

 

Bake the potatoes in a 350^o for an hour and 15 minutes. While these bake brown the bacon and when it begins to crisp add the unions. Continue to sauté the onions for about two minutes until they soften then remove from the burner. Prepare the lobster tails for baking by cutting the membrane and fins from the underside of the tail then wrap in foil. Toss the salad of your choice.

When the cooked and while still hot, cut off the tops of the potatoes, scoop out shells, and mash with bacon, onions, sour cream, milk and chives. Stuff the potato skin shells, mounding above the shells. Top the stuffed potatoes first with parmesan cheese and then sprinkle with paprika. Bake with the lobster in a 350^o oven for thirty minutes and then serve.