Iowa Food Fight

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds has turned down a federal program that provides food support for children in low-income families, with a $40/month Electronic Benefit Transfer card for each kid when school is out of session (to substitute for free breakfast and lunch programs). She isn’t doing it to be cruel, mind you. She is refusing the food funding – and this isn’t a joke, it’s an actual quote – because “childhood obesity has become an epidemic.” That’s right, Reynolds’s modest proposal is to help children lose weight by, you know, starving them a little.

Okay, that’s a bit of exaggeration. Reynolds doesn’t exactly intend to starve children into ectomorphism. Her announced reasoning is that the summer EBTs place too “few restrictions on food purchases” and therefore do “not have a strong nutrition focus.”

In other words, low-income parents cannot be trusted to provide adequate nutrition to their kids. Although Republicans in Iowa and elsewhere believe strongly in parental control over everything from library books to vaccinations, they draw the line at allowing poor people to feed their own children.

Instead, according to Reynolds, children’s diet must be determined by the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services, which will totally ensure “healthy choices around food and nutrition” in a way that would evidently elude any parents with an extra forty bucks to spend on their kids’ food. The governor's earlier statement -- "I trust Iowans to do the right thing" -- is evidently inoperative when it comes to rations for low-income kids. What parents really need is a menu mandate, full of "nutritionally dense food" approved by the state's HHS department.

Yes, Iowa Republicans are determined to keep the government out of family life, unless it involves dictating meal plans. And they are committed to respecting parental choices, unless the parents happen to be poor. Checkmate, libs.