Those Healthy School Lunches

The cynic in me gloats over this report in the LA Times, hat tip Kevin Drum, on how poorly the newly healthy lunch menus has been greeted in the LA schools.

I wonder if USDA will pull the award: "This year, L.A. Unified, which serves 650,000 meals daily, has received awards for improving its school lunches, including one last week from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and another from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine."


To be fair, some of the innovations are working well; as I've always said, it's hard if not impossible to do things right the first time.  One of the key faults is that the food which was acceptable in their tests turned unacceptable when prepared by the regular kitchens.  As Megan McArdle would say: scalability, and repeatability could when you're basing decisions on pilot tests.

[Update: McArdle picks up the story and discusses reasons why pilot tests aren't necessarily predictive.]

Outwalking Death

This MSNBC article reports research which says if you can walk faster than 2 mph, you're probably in good enough shape to keep Death at bay.  The good news is I can easily walk faster than that.  The bad news, which the article doesn't cover, is that the Big Al (as in Alzheimers) walks faster than Death.

Henry Blodget and My Mother

Mr. Blodget has a thought experiment called Millionaire's Island, in which he gathers the 1 percent of Americans who have the biggest incomes and gives them an island to live on.  He has a lot of fun with it, sometimes in ways which my mother would approve.  She thought farmers were the most important people in the society, because without them people would go naked and starve.  Blodget says the same: without the 99 percent the 1 percent would go naked and starve.

CRS on Farm Bill Future

Here's the Congressional Research Service's latest take on the farm bill, proposals for change floated in connection with the super committee, and what happens next.

[Update: the CRS says the total farm programs cost $15.7 billion: 5.7 for commodity programs, 7.8 for risk management and crop insurance, 1.7 for disaster. ]

Twelfth Night, Martha Washington, and French Bread

In days of yore Martha Washington would have her Great Cake prepared for Twelfth Night, also her wedding anniversary.  You start by separating the yolks and whites of 40 eggs!

By chance I read about the Great Cake in the Post, then read Dirk Beauregarde's long piece on French bakers--boulangeries, which devotes space to the French custom of having the galette des rois on Twelfth Night (I think it means the "cake of the king") or at least in January. 

Riches at NCUA and FCA

A list of the highest paid Federal employees shows mostly doctors at the top.  But the National Credit Union Administration and the Farm Credit Administration are able to pay their admin heads $260,000.  Many Americans think that meets the definition of riches.

The Importance of Slack

I walk past Reston's Dogwood pool every day.  The Reston Association has a proposal to redo the pool and its surroundings which is going through the hearings process.  As part of that they've had a crew string white tape through the nearby trees, I guess to outline the area where trees will be cleared.  What the crew does is tie the tape around one sapling (2-3" at shoulder height) then run the tape to another sapling and tie again, repeating the process around the area.  Unfortunately, every time they run the tape they make it taut between each sapling. When they're through everything looks fine and neat.  As time passes though, and the wind blows, and the saplings start to move, and they move in different directions, the result is the tape is first stressed and then it snaps.  So a month later there are just a few segments of intact tape, but most are broken.  Another month passes and RA sends the crew out again to remark the site.

Sometimes in life it's important to leave some slack.

Nostalgia Day at Farm Service Agency

Just attended Star Bryant's retirement party, 41 years of service and still looking good.  Good to see some former co-workers, though the number is dwindling every year.

Target Price and Planted Acres

I hadn't heard of this possibility, but the winter canola people are opposed (from today's Farm Policy):

"Yesterday’s update noted that, “The Plains winter canola delegation made the trip to DC to voice their concerns and opposition to a new updated target price program under which deficiency payments would be ‘recoupled’ to production on planted acres up to the total aggregate crop base acres of a farm, effectively reversing the planting flexibility that has been in place since the 1996 farm bill. The target price program was reportedly a component of the legislation that the agriculture committees had intended to submit to the Super Committee as agriculture’s $23 billion contribution to deficit reduction before those efforts failed on November 23rd.

Fraud Recoveries, Bravo Obama

I could be cynical about this, but I'll take the story in the Post at face value, that is the Obama administration is doing well at identifying fraud:

Fraud recoveries are up considerably in recent years, the administration officials said, jumping by 167 percent since 2008. Justice has recovered $15 billion in total fraud since 2009, of which $8.4 billion was tied to health care fraud