Came back from a long weekend in the country to an alarming New York Times headline, "Well-Intentioned Food Police May Create Havoc with Children's Diets." In the essay, Harriet Brown makes the provocative--but ultimately unconvincing--argument that schools are banning peanuts and sweets in a misguided reaction to the obesity epidemic.

Sure, she says, some kids can have deathly allergic reactions to peanuts but kids have berry allergies too, and the "food police" isn't trying to ban strawberries!

Evidently, the author doesn't know any parents whose kids have nut allergies because if she did, she'd know that berry allergies aren't usually life-threatening as nut allergies can be. She'd also know that it's not the fat-hating food police pushing for the bans on nuts--but parents deathly worried that their kids will have a horrible allergic reaction, and school nurses, who rightly fear that a terrible accident could occur on their watch.

As for her argument that limiting junk food in schools is part of a fear of fat and will just make kids want the forbidden, it seems to me that she is ignoring the fact that most parents today grew up with far fewer sweets in the schools.

Why is it that preschools and elementary schools today feel the need to mark every holiday (and non-holiday) with brownies, cookies, and other sugary treats for the kids? I have a five-year-old preschooler and a 10-year-old. It is astounding to me how often these kids are given cookies and candies in class. It's Shabbat? Treats for everyone. A class play? More treats. My 10-year-old daughter even gets a treat from her piano teacher at the end of every lesson.

I'm not worried about my kids getting fat--but I am concerned about them conflating fun and rewards with sugary junk. Aren't there other ways to give kids encouragement or congratulate them for a job well done?

But back to the New York Times story. It seems the writer came to her conclusions after her kid's school sent home a notice saying the school would only give kids one slice of pizza at lunch, not two. Exactly why, or what motivated, this particular school to take this action is unclear; how many other schools have done this, the writer doesn't say. (My guess is very, very few.) That, however, doesn't stop her from drawing all kinds of conclusions from an incident, which probably is a red herring.

Harriet, I think you missed the boat on this one.
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