Oddly enough, one of the anecdotes recounted in Barack Obama's "The Audacity Of Hope" deals with a school breakfast program, specifically, one targeted at preschools and kindergartens. He talks about how a colleague was railing against the program because it would harm the "self-reliance" of the children; this was in the larger context of how sometimes knee-jerk adherence to an ideology can lead to ridiculous arguments.

I think the universal school breakfast program is right on target. There are millions of kids whose parents are struggling day to day, week to week. A school breakfast program combined with the school lunch program could mean the difference for those kids. They would at least get two good meals a day.

Pittsburgh Public Schools put in universal breakfast this very year.

Now, if only most of the breakfasts weren't just a fast trip to Type 2 diabetes, it would be even better.

November menu (read it and weep)

Universal breakfast would be great if the school breakfasts weren't usually sugary baked goods. I'm usually horrified by what the kids are eating when I have morning duty out at the tables. Pop-Tarts, muffins, pancakes with syrup, etc. Make it nutritious and I'm all for it...as is, no thank you.

Oh puhleese..any movement to breakfast for the kids at this juncture is a good one.

No, it may not meet your or my perfect nutritional requirements...but if you get what the whole the thing is about--about reaching out to the starving children who literally have NO sustenance in the AM...well, heck it's a start.

And it brings forth the issue of feeding kids,it brings to our awareness the need to attend to them.

The point is not perfection,it's the message--as with much of what we are doing today. Yes, ideal is good, but just bringing together a program like this is awesome.

And who knows--maybe it also has latent benefits, like uniting these kids so they can begin to feel some semeblance of NORMAL in their lives called routine...maybe right now that matters more.

Or better yet, let's raid the Treasury and throw all our remaining money at bankers and corporate executives.

Universal breakfast is a simple and brilliant idea. But that Philadelphia menu - lunch also - is total crap. Where have the people running that program been for the last twenty years? And Ms. C, wherever she's reporting from, is observing something similar. If this kind of thing is common, if not nearly universal, it demands some attention. And head rolling. Where are the expose's? I haven't seen anything.

Why go halfway? Free breakfast and lunch would be excellent.

Other nations do it and it only makes sense, as students must be in school anyway until they are 16. It wouldn't stop children from bringing their own lunch, but would remove the stigma of having to qualify for a free lunch.

This is slightly off the topic of school breakfast (which I'm for as long as it is nutritious), but I don't see a lot of discussion on solutions to the real problem in America: creating jobs.

I hope Obama does implement a massive public works program, something on the order of WWII expenditure.

But I'd like to see programs that encourages more entrepeneurs. Public works projects can, and will work I'm convinced, but for long-term American strength, we need more 'things' being made here.

Seems obvious I guess, but this will be the long term solution to poverty. I just don't see a lot of dialog around this.

Ah, life in Barack Obama's Socialist America.

You know, around the turn of the 20th century, most people would have jumped at the chance to earn $10K a year. And they wouldn't have whined that they didn't have health insurance, and wouldn't have tried to get approved for a subprime mortgage, and wouldn't have lived beyond their means by maxing out their credit cards.

Now, less than 1% of people "might" earn this same level of wages, and all the progressives and the Obama socialists wail and knash their teeth. Sometimes, we have to go one step back to go two steps forward. If we took all the suffering out of the world, their wouldn't be much to motivate people to better themselves, would there.

I'm a teacher in a poor urban school. Hunger (and lack of sleep) is a chief reason for inability to concentrate. But school food quality also needs to be overhauled. Kids who are malnourished but who get enough calories also have school difficulties. diet matters. I don't know why so many school systems don't realize this.

trebge: "..LUXURY! We would have counted ourselves lucky to live in a cardboard box. BOX? You had a BOX? We only had a scrap of newspaper, and that only on alternate days because we had to share with the next family over!..." etc etc

But back on topic: I think one of the main reasons that school breakfasts are so poor nutritionally, is that a typical american breakfast consists of (a) sugar (b) grease and (c) stuff to carry (a) and/or (b).

Sure, there _are_ other options, but they're definitely in the minority.

Perhaps we should look at what other countries do for breakfast...hmm...give the kids a sweet roll and a shot of espresso?

And watch them bounce off the walls.

hey...I think I just solved the energy crisis

Damn. Why didn't I think of that? Yes, universal school breakfasts makes enormous sense. Once you put in the machinery for some, the marginal cost for all is small. And income level is not, by any means, a perfect screen for giving kids a proper breakfast.

Well I wouldn't have eaten them. I never ate breakfast as a kid, in fact it made me sick to do so. I just couldn't bear to stick food in me for several hours until I woke up.

Also, bananas, oatmeal, and eggs make me gag. No I'm not allergic to them, but if I put some in my mouth the urge to spit them out becomes almost overwhelming. In fact, if I were stuck on a desert island with only those things I wonder how close to starving I would get before I tried them.

Interestingly there was big piece in the Des Moines Register about the difficulties they are having with kids not being able to pay for lunch. A few places have just stopped feeding the kids, but most schools are just er, eating several hundred thousand dollars were of costs and giving the kids a PBJ+Milk for lunch.

I got free lunches at an elementary school with enough poor students that it was not worthwhile to verify eligibility. It was a good thing for me. I didn't have to remember lunch money. But for a lot of the kids, it made things totally different - there was no STIGMA involved in getting a free lunch, because evrybody did.

How about year-round school !?!

I think we should do it. Teachers complain students take months to get back on track after a long summer. Parents would have to worry less about day care. Our kids would have less time to get into trouble.

I serve on the citizen advisory board overseeing programs for low-income residents in my county. We're fighting to keep the County Board from cutting these programs as they try to deal with a budget shortfall of $500 million (and growing), since demand is skyrocketing.

A lot of these programs are partially funded with federal grants. I sure hope the feds do come through with assistance to state and local governments. It's very bad out there, and getting worse.

trebge @ 11:11,

If we took all the suffering out of the world, their wouldn't be much to motivate people to better themselves, would there.

School breakfasts seem a great idea. I agree, though, and in the face of tsk-tsking (and as a non-parent to boot) that loading kids full of sweet gook in the morning is probably not a good idea. What's wrong with real bread and stuff? Do Americans not eat staple foods anymore?

A more troubling prospect seldom addressed in these prognostications is the rise in crime due to increased poverty. Depserate people take desperate measures to get the funds needed for food, liquor, cigarettes and drugs. Home invasions, breaking into cars, robberies, shoplifting, check kiting, theft at work, selling drugs and a host of other crimes certainly increase in times of heightened unemployment. Yet you rarely see this looming situation dwelled on in a very public way. Why is that?

Make the school breakfast an Ag program and you'll get Red State support. It is politically feasible.

Isn't this where, theoretically, Republicans jump up the charitable contributions? Oh wait. That's theory.

I suggest teaching basic personal economics to children early on. Teach them math in a way that relates to their environment. Don't just teach them how to count money, teach them how what to do with it, how to save it and how to make it. If kids can learn a foreign language at young ages, they can certainly understand money.

I also suggest that schools have gardens where science can be taught from the seed forward, and when harvested the kids can then be taught the value of the food, and how to cook it.

Poor folks begin the road to poverty before they can even walk, in the womb to be precise. Mothers feed themselves poorly during pregnancy thus producing babies who are malnourished or undernourished. And the cycle continues. The child is then fed foods that are cheap yet filling but void for any real nutrition. Go into any grocery store in a poor area, view the selections, and watch what poor people put in the cart. It's all junk. We vaccinate kids; why not give them vitamins, at the very least?

Both my grandmothers were farm women, and both were excellent seamstresses. The dresses I loved most as a child were the ones hand-made for me by my grandmothers. And the quilts, and all the other lovely things done by them with love. They also taught me how sew, crochet and knit. And how to grow things. My grandmother knew the value of composting even then and taught me how to go into the forest and dig for what she termed "wood's mold", to which we added to the garden.

Teach kids how to survive and thrive even in the most dire circumstances. In other words, bring back Home Economics! I'll never remember what the hell to do with a quadratic equation, but like Scarlett O'Hara, I can turn a drape into a gown in seconds.

The idea that there will be 1.5-2 million kids in families making half the poverty level is horrifying.

Maybe to you, Komrade.

A lot the members of the moral hazard crowd don't understand the pain of unemployment. My step-son was recently out of work for several months. His electricity was cut off. He couldn't make his house payments. They lost health insurance and the granddaughter went on to SCHIP. Thankfully he found a job just in time to save his house. My granddaughter was on free lunches and they had to scrap by to find money for breakfast. She spent weekends at our house or at the house of the other grandparents.

At first my step-son was too proud to take help from his parents, but that went away after a few weeks, especially after the unemployment insurance ended. Thank God he found a job and is slowly crawling out of the ditch.

I am afraid that the smug and self assured here and elsewhere are going to encounter similar problems first or second hand over the months and years to come. The Komrade snarks wont be nearly as funny when that happens.

Sufferin'! It's good for ya! Hungry kids are motivated kids! If it weren't for all these darn "child labor" laws these kids would be able to feed themselves and we wouldn't even have to worry about educating them. They could just drop out of school at the age of twelve or maybe sooner and just go to work in the factory. Heck, we wouldn't have to bail out big three auto makers either because if they had access to cheap child labor then they could compete with foreigners who are stealing all of America's jobs! Socialism is evil, evil, bad, bad, evil and we should dismantle the Department of Education altogether anyway!

Wow! Schools as soup kitchen is a great idea for a number of reasons, besides the nutrition. Like you said, kids are more likely to come to school and learn.

I suggest an after school snack/tutorial. Right now it is hard to get kids to tutorial, but if you offered a snack/half-meal it would be an inducement.

Another reason of universal is that you overcome any local resistance from small businesses who think the might lose sales.

A very good post, Hilzoy. But unemployment is really much bleaker, probably about 5% worse than we think now. That is, if we want to take into account the degree to which government reporting of unemployment statistics conceals reality.

It is very difficult to find reliable data, but try shadowstats.com for a start:
Un/employment reporting, from the series
"GOVERNMENT ECONOMIC REPORTS: THINGS YOU'VE
SUSPECTED BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK!"
http://www.shadowstats.com/article/54

While they are establishing a universal school nutrition program, they should also require that trained staff work in the kitchen's at our schools. More often than not, they are glorified microwave operators who throw bags of reprocessed food into large microwave ovens.

At least one person in each school should have some degree of professional training with the ability to train others. I think the extra tax dollars spent would yield a significant return in the quality of food served in our schools.

It always amazes me that we consistently have agricultural surpluses while our school menus are practically devoid of fresh fruits and vegetables.

If you want to be creative, have every high school home econ. class spend some time working with kitchen staff, who would be required to have some meaningful qualifications in the culinary arts.

"Bad food" was the first to hit the nail on the head... we had to prevent our daughter from getting school breakfast because a) she'd eat at home (e.g. organic oatmeal & organic milk) and b) the school breakfast was sugar piled on top of sugar (e.g. french toast sticks). So we'd feed her a healthy breakfast, and she'd top it off with a dessert at school.