USDA, obesity and surveillance
Whether or not you think it’s great that Michelle Obama is encouraging children to exercise more and eat better, since it is free advice, think again. The USDA is funding programmes costing millions to “study” this “problem,” looking for ways the government can intrude into children’s lives under the guise of “protecting” them.
This weird and creepy story was reported on my primary news source, “Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld” on FNC. In the escalating War on Childhood Obesity, a San Antonio school has installed cameras in the cafeteria to record what children put on their trays and what they leave on them. I thought the problem was that they leave nothing but the tray.
The program is “very sophisticated,” according to Dr Roberto Trevino, director of the Texas-based Social & Health Research Center, which oversees it. Parents must give consent for now, the kids will not be photographed, only their bar-coded trays.
That’s reassuring! Nothing like Big Brother monitoring your children eating. As always, there is some psychotic mumbo-justification for this study. However, spending millions to learn that kids prefer fries to carrots is outrageous, even without the surveillance component.
As schools are claiming to be underfunded and cutting activities like arts and sports, they are wasting big money on eating studies across the country. And who pays for these? You — or more accurately, the USDA, who put the you in US.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is a cabinet-level department, with a newly-designed logo (Impressive, right?!”) and Tom Vilsack the current Secretary of Agriculture. If you didn’t know that, don’t worry. That won’t stop them from pissing away your money on unnecessary nonsense which is detrimental, more often than not.
The USDA’s mission is to provide leadership on food, agriculture, natural resources, and related issues based on sound public policy, the best available science, and efficient management. If that’s not a load of horseshit, I am not gt slade.
One-time presidential hopeful Vilsack
Secretary Vilsack’s priorities are “agricultural production, civil rights, conservation, energy, food safety, nutrition/hunger, rural development and trade.” Of course, the USDA produce nothing, just interfere with those who do. They pay farmers to grow certain crops and to not grow others. Or those claiming to be farmers. I imagine “civil rights” include keeping cabbages from getting better treatment than radishes.
The USDA is another instance of government micro-mismanaging an industry, with an arsenal including food stamps, farm subsidies and price supports, the latter bureaucratic jargon for “artificially inflating consumer prices.” As taxpayers, we fund the support system that forces us to pay more for commodities, like corn, milk and wheat.
I like to report how much money we could save by abolishing a superfluous department, but my eyes glazed over at the 132-page proposed USDA budget that will probably pass without anyone reading it. A straightforward source reports their annual budget at about $95 billion, with over 100,000 employees. That is money and humanity wasted on a department that would have outlived its usefulness had it ever been useful.
If you think I am making this up, I don’t blame you. Here is verification for your edification:
