The Great Bake Sale Debate

As reported in a previous post, the New York City Department of Education (DOE) recently passed a regulation banning home baked goods from being sold in schools for fund raising purposes with the exception of one PTA run bake sale per month. Instead, parents and students are allowed to choose from 27 approved snack items which they can buy through Costco or the DOE – the same items which are regularly sold in school vending machines. These items include Doritos, Pop Tarts and Linden’s cookies.

The regulation has caused quite a stir among New York parents. On March 18^th, there was a “Bake-In” rally held at City Hall by NYC Green Schools calling for an appeal of the regulation. Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and Council Member Gail Brewer were in attendance along with parents and children fighting for the bake sale cause. This regulation has also sparked a bit of debate here at our office with varying opinions on whether the regulation is achieving its goal in reducing calories or merely encouraging students to indulge in junk food.

So, in the spirit of The New York Times “Room for Debate” column, we present you with several varying opinions on New York City’s bake-sale ban.

Home-Baked, Healthy Kids

By Sophy Bishop

New York’s children, along with the rest of the nation’s, are overweight – it’s a well known fact. I’m no scientist, but I’ve come to the conclusion that is it is junk food – mass produced, over-consumed, nutrient-poor crap – that has caused this epidemic. The issue is compounded by lack of exercise and minimal time spent at the table and with family, but at the heart of this problem, it is what children consume that is to blame.

Unfortunately, many children and their parents are never taught the elements of a proper diet. When the “authority” that is the DOE says Doritos are ok but home baked goods are not, it only enforces the scheme that junk food is what they should be eating. Seeing those labels day after day, they become commonplace, training minds and taste buds alike to prefer HFCS and artificial flavors. These preferences get carried beyond the school and out into a lifetime. They form a favor for fast meals, greasy meat byproducts and fried food and a distaste for fresh, green vegetables.

Home-baked goods trump junk food any day, whether they contain more or less calories than a pack of Pop Tarts. They surpass junk food because of what they represent – care, time, seasonality and home-cooking. There is no shiny advertising, no unpronounceable chemical and no major corporation influencing life-long decisions. Home-baked goods foster community, culture, a love for cooking and eventually, a healthier America.

Time For Real Food

By Dawn Brighid

With a fundamentally broken school food system (and food systems in general), I can see why banning the school bake sale feels like a little control over a bad situation. Childhood obesity is at an all time high, with no end in sight. Limiting a child’s food intake will solve the problem, right? Not so convinced and a bit confused by the bake sale ban, I asked some questions at the “bake in” rally at city hall.

The most problematic information I came away with was that often the “homemade” goods for sale weren’t actually homemade. The cakes and cookies are often bought cheaply from stores like Costco and Target. They are then marked up and sold back to the kids. Why? One parent told me the funds were often used to support after school activities – just the kind that help prevent obesity. But with no funds, no after school exercise. What a “Catch 22.”

We need more funds for schools. We need real food in the schools. We need education about food for kids and parents. Do I think that a bake sale ban will resolve the obesity problem? No. It seems like a quick fix to me. I think putting our time, energy and money into national programs like “Time for Lunch” is a better way to get to the core issues we need to fight the childhood obesity issues for the long run.

Acceptable (Marginally)

By Chris Hunt

As a longtime proponent of freedom, homemade cookies and public policies that don’t unduly pad the coffers of the industro-snack sector, I found it tough to stomach the bake sale ban.  But as an advocate of efficient implementation of policies that effectively protect public health, I begrudgingly support the rule.  Mostly.

Here’s the deal: 43% of NYC schoolchildren are overweight or obese – this is a public health crisis that needs to be addressed immediately.  Obviously, there’s no quick-fix solution to the childhood obesity epidemic; the problem is related to food access, consumption patterns, physical activity, environmental factors, etc.  Nonetheless, an effective policy response must involve promoting healthful food choices and discouraging consumption of excess calories.  It’s difficult to argue that brownies and cupcakes and cookies and rice crispy treats are optimal food choices – or that such foods, when habitually consumed immoderately, constitute anything but excess calories.

Ideally, we’d teach kids to make better food choices, and they’d do so despite the abundance and accessibility of junk food at bake sales and elsewhere.  The government has attempted to implement this very strategy for decades – and failed miserably.  If we make the reasonable assumption that the DOE can’t dramatically alter students’ food-purchasing preferences overnight, then a prudent policy approach would involve reducing the amount of unhealthful food available in schools – which would require the city to either limit the frequency of bake sales, or ensure that only healthful foods are sold.

Unfortunately, bake sales are an important source of revenue, so schools are unwilling to cut back drastically, or reduce profits by restricting sales to fruits and vegetables.  (Strangely, the fact that schools lack sufficient funding to operate without supplemental bake-sale dollars has been largely ignored throughout the debate.)

The city’s solution: limit the frequency of no-treat-left-behind bake sales, and ban aggressively unhealthful foods from all the other bake sales.  The obvious problem: homemade foods are prohibited from the latter events – even if they’re more healthful than anything on the city’s list of approved junkLite foods.  And of course, it’s lamentable that the policy tacitly endorses prepackaged, processed snacks and drums up extra business for the makers of Doritos, Poptarts, et al.

Nevertheless, the current ban has merit from a public health perspective; sure, it’d be great if kids ate carrots – but given the obesity crisis, it’s better they eat somewhat-healthful snacks than exceptionally unhealthful snacks – homemade or otherwise.  Ideally though, the city would either exclude everything but fruit and veggies from the “healthy” bake sales, or else develop criteria for inclusion of healthful homemade foods.  Or give schools adequate funding so that bake sales wouldn’t be a financial imperative in the first place.