Food for thought

How did it come to pass that the President's spouse gets to decide how much school children get to eat at lunch? From Mark Steyn;

This year some guy working in some office someplace some ways down the chain from the chef de cabinet decided to reduce the permitted lunchtime calorie intake of American middle-schoolers from 785 calories to 700 calories. ....a bureaucrat in Washington can breezily impose a uniform calorific intake on the school cafeterias of Honolulu and Buffalo.

The first lady was on hand for the launch of the new federally mandated lunch limits. The stench of failure and risibility has not yet attached to this initiative as it has to so many other Obama-era bureaucratic excesses. But, through September, returning schoolchildren complained about their new, insufficient lunches. Teachers and parents who took up their cause did so in statist terms, beseeching the commissars to raise the mandated calorie limits. Very few did so on first-principle grounds — which is to say the argument that a system in which a centralized bureaucracy attempts to impose a uniform menu on a nation of 300 million people is nuts, and cannot survive. In theory, education is the responsibility of local school districts in sovereign states. Yet somehow a bureaucrat in the Department of Agriculture wound up with a monopoly on what your kids eat.

....Didn't Oliver Twist have something to say about this?
"Please, sir, I want some more."

Dickensian London: "Do I understand that he asked for more, after he had eaten the supper allotted by the dietary?"

Obamafied America: "Do I understand that he asked for more, after he had eaten the luncheon allotted by the National Dietary Commissar?"