Vin Suprynowicz

America remains such a wealthy nation that even our problems must cause many of the world’s peoples to scratch their heads in wonder. Take childhood obesity.

It’s an unhealthy trend, though surely a major cause is lack of exercise. Parents don’t feel as safe sending their kids out for unsupervised play as grandma did, and kids who sit around using electronic devices aren’t going to be as fit as kids who ride bikes and climb trees.

While Washington hasn’t yet gotten around to dragooning kids into calisthenics squads, though, it does intend to take control of their diets.

“Federal regulators, fresh off a contentious nutritional overhaul of U.S. school meals that replaced fried chicken patties with chef salads,” — a two-year fight that required congressional intervention, including a compromise on categorizing pizza as a vegetable — “are now preparing the first standards for snacks, sodas and other foods sold outside of regularly scheduled lunch and breakfast,” Bloomberg News reported this week. “That means vending machines, concession stands,” and, yes, bake sales.

Should kids be discouraged from filling up on chips and monster soda pops? Of course. But this new piece of regulatory excess means “We have Washington deciding if you can hold a bake sale,” says Utah State Rep. Ken Ivory, a Republican. “They’ve overstepped their bounds.”

Danny Fisher, an author and 42-year-old mother raising five boys in Zanesville, Ohio, says too much emphasis is being placed on limiting food choices when the focus should be on increasing exercise.

“The idea of banning unhealthy food choices is paramount to Prohibition,” Ms. Fisher told Bloomberg in an interview by email, perhaps searching for the word “tantamount.” “We all know how well that worked.”

Ms. Fisher has a point. More and healthier menu choices sound great, but the Los Angeles Times reported last fall that schoolkids there are dumping in the trash entire exotic meals they don’t like, while teachers are making extra cash smuggling in candy and sodas to sell to their young charges, for all the world like prison guards sneaking contraband to their own inmates.

Seems to me there might once have been a role here for parents, here, as well.

Instead, the “Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010” (note how every law imposing Draconian new central-state restrictions now has to contain the word “free”), which led to regulations last month for lunches and breakfasts, also outlines requirements for the Agriculture Department to reset nutrition standards for items sold during the school day, known as “competitive foods.”

The agency claims jurisdiction since it oversees the federal school-lunch program, which provides low-cost and free lunches in public and non-profit private schools — sort of like saying that because you gave the homeless guy five dollars, you can now attempt to prevent him from buying beer or smokes.

Based on guidelines in the law, changes to the competitive foods rules may affect fund-raising activities by school clubs or sports teams that resell purchased goods, including candy bars and other sweets, Bloomberg reports.

Industry lobbying over the lunch standards led Congress to block an earlier USDA proposal that would have set limits on French fries and starchy vegetables, and increased the amount of tomato sauce required in pizza. The new rules for “competitive foods” will create controversy as well, since schools rely on such products for fundraisers, admits Margo Wootan, nutrition policy director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an outfit which has never met a radical nanny-state proposal it didn’t love.

But the new rules for “competitive foods” are necessary to ensure schools don’t undermine parents’ efforts to provide better nutrition at home, Wootan argues. (Am I wrong, or could this logic be used to demand the bulldozing of all donut shops that kids might pass on the way to school?)

“It’s a shame that schools have to raise money, but there’s no reason to turn to fundraisers that undermine health,” Wootan said. “There’s no need to sell a candy bar when you could sell calendars or light bulbs or fruit baskets.”

So get out there and peddle those 100-watt incandescent light bulbs, kids! Oh, wait …

Note the language, here. The concern is over “competitive foods” — where school lunches were once considered supplements to home nutrition, now anything that breaks the government’s 24/7 control over childhood behaviors is suspect, branded unwelcome “competition.” Is it unreasonable to expect interventions in parents’ menu choices won’t be far behind?

(“Oh, Vin, it’s not an ideal world. We see parents who don’t FEED their kids.” So the answer is to encourage more of this behavior by rewarding it whenever found? Those parents all went to your mandatory schools with their mandatory nutrition classes, right? Are you ready to admit the whole nanny-state model has failed?)

The Agriculture Department as we now know it was invented to prop up U.S. farm prices when they fell after European fields were put back into production after the Great War of 1914-1918. Americans aren’t starving, obviously. The USDA, which now employs more “extension agents” in some counties than there are farmers, should have been eliminated decades ago. Instead, the do-gooders invent new tasks for this vastly expensive farm welfare agency. Now the nation’s most superfluous bureaucrats are going to take over our kids’ diet and fitness, based on the excuse that they’ve spent the past half-century propping up farm incomes by handing out “food pyramid” charts that over-represented the need for dairy, while force-feeding America’s youth below-cost breaded veal cutlets and pasteurized processed orange “cheese food product”!

Some schools generate as much as $125,000 a year from selling these “competitive foods,” according to an August, 2005 report by the Government Accountability Office.

The “misplaced overregulation” may squelch income used by schools already facing the $3.2 billion cost of adopting the new, supposedly lunch and breakfast requirements, according to Anne Bryant, executive director of the National School Boards Association.

Rebecca Ford, a senior special education teacher at Tooele High School in northwest Utah, told Bloomberg she hopes the bake sales her students help prepare each week won’t be considered too frequent to be allowed. Her students have autism, Down syndrome and other disabilities. The money is used for educational trips as well as to help students buy tennis shoes their parents can’t afford, she said.

“It teaches them money skills,” Ms. Ford explains. “We tried different healthy items, but it wasn’t the same at all. They just sat around and got old. I’m not quite sure what we’ll do.”

Oh, don’t worry. Washington will think of something.