Their stomach, their choice.
Via EAG News
Officials in Del Norte County don’t like that students prefer Silly Suzie’s food truck over Michelle Obama’s lunches, and they looking to run Suzie out of business.
A majority of board members in the Del Norte County Unified School District voted to ban mobile food trucks from operating near schools during school hours, though the move essentially targets only one business – Silly Suzie’s ice cream truck, The Triplicate reports.
The decision comes at the request of the local Community Food Council, which sent a letter to the county Board of Supervisors complaining that the business doesn’t jibe with the “healthy” regulations imposed on schools by the federal government through the National School Lunch Program.
In the letter, the Council wrote that “a mobile vending van is undermining the school and community efforts to encourage healthy eating.
“Every day the van parks on the far side of the high school parking lot and sells chips, candy, sodas and energy drinks. Students must cross an active parking lot and public street to reach it and the long line leaves students waiting in or near the street,” the letter read, according to The Triplicate.
Yet despite the Council’s admission that Silly Suzie’s operates legally, it believes that county officials should force the truck to move elsewhere because food it serves doesn’t comply with federal school food regulations championed by first lady Michelle Obama. Those federal food restrictions on calories, fat, sugar, sodium and other nutritional elements have convinced more than 1.2 million students to drop out of the National School Lunch Program since they were implemented in 2012. They’ve also created massive food waste because of a requirement that all students take a fruit or vegetable, whether they eat it or not.
The demand to take action against Silly Suzie’s is also complicated by the fact that Del Norte High School is an open campus, and students can simply walk to the gas station for junk food if Suzie’s goes away.
Teachers told trustees banning the food truck won’t keep students from avoiding Michelle Obama’s “healthy” lunches.