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By Carmine Santa Maria
Brooklyn Daily
I’m madder than Wimpy on a Tuesday when he has to pay up for all those hamburgers he scammed during the previous week over the fact that our First Lady is making our kids skinnier than a pair of jeans in Bushwick.
Look, you all know the ol’Screecher has been known to put a little bit too much in his mouth at every sitting at the dinner table while I watch my Betamax tapes of “Bowling for Dollars” on the Zenith in the living room. But just because I spend my time speeding around on my trusty steed Tornado instead of walking on my own two feet (I’m sending that out to you, commentator John Wasserman, if that really is your name) doesn’t mean that I think our national policy should be to starve our kids so that they end up being skin and bones and brains.
But apparently that is exactly what Michelle Obama wants.
Now, ever since the Bensonhurst West End Community Council (BWECC!) honored those fabulous lunchroom ladies who feed our kids in the schools about 25 years ago, I’ve been lauded by these American heros — most of them moms or grandmothers who treat each child as if he or she was their own — who have figured out a way to get kids to eat.
And that’s no easy task, as any mother who’s ever tried to get her kid to swallow those darned Brussels sprouts knows.
So I’m guessing the First Lady didn’t personally feed her kids, or she would know the first duty and the hardest task of the mom is to get food into her child. This was a lesson my blessed mother got right. I remember her walking down five flights of steps with an egg in hand to Izzy’s luncheonette on Grand and Mott streets — just so I’d get some protein in my malted. Now that’s a saint! And don’t think that she didn’t take me to doctor after doctor for tonics to increase my appetite because I was such a finicky eater, and that’s why I’m so fat today — apparently those tonics were very slow acting.
So to see students protesting their hunger on channels 7 and 2 because the smaller portions of nourishing foods causing kids to be lifeless, weak and dopey, I reached the very logical conclusion that Michelle’s plan, which she espouses nationwide, is just plain dopey. What’s wrong with these know-it-alls? First the mayor battles the size of soft drinks, and now the federal government, thanks to the First Lady, is causing food riots in our schools.
One of the lunch ladies clued me in a couple of weeks when she told me the kids were reenacting “Oliver” during every lunch period, demanding more food!
It’s no wonder McDonald’s is making a bundle feeding these starving kids, by Jiminy!
Now, I’m not saying Michelle isn’t a good mom. I mean, I read in some of these free-mails that come straight to my computer screen that in-between her food policing, she takes her kids on vacations to Spain, India, and the Bahamas, and brings along a whole entourage.
Getting back to our high schools, the students continually argue that they don’t want this or that, and finally, and in desperation, they are advised to just take it and dump it to avoid making a fracas. However, in the elementary schools, the little ones just tear up and cry!
The latest federal school lunch guidelines cap lunches at an average 850 calories a day. Now let me break that down for you: a slice of plain cheese pizza is about 150 calories. That means I can only eat six slices, plus but all the diet soda I want. But what if I don’t eat the crusts (which I never do)? Am I entitled to two more slices? How about another for dinner? That will be only about 1,800 calories. Can any person sustain himself on that amount? Let me remind you that I’m talking about an average size slice of pizza, not the 33 percent federal food regulation sizes.
So as the president of my new group Pleasingly Plump People, I advise all youse moms out there to do what a lot of other moms across this great country are already doing: having their kids brown-bag their lunches so they don’t starve!
Screech at you next week!
Read Carmine every Saturday on BrooklynDaily.com. E-mail him at DiegoVega@aol.com!