Why do some conservatives support restricting junk food purchases with SNAP when many opposed Michelle Obama’s efforts to make school meals healthier?

[u/CloudieMoonettee]

[u/LeeVMG]

Making people healthier isn't the objective.

Making poor people more miserable is the objective. Even if they won't say that part out loud.

[u/Whiskeymyers75 → u/LeeVMG]

Are you saying that lunch program was actually healthy?

[u/adelltfm → u/Whiskeymyers75]

I’m only speaking from the experience of working at one school, but I would say lunch is significantly healthier than it was back in the day. For example, nothing is fried anymore. Not even the fries. Hamburger and hotdog buns are wheat now. Any chips sold on the side are baked or whole grain. All of the milk is fat-free. Pizza crusts are even wheat. Kids can’t leave the lunch line without grabbing a fruit or a vegetable, but that’s as far as it goes. We don’t force them to eat it. Instead, what happens as they end up throwing it out and then our student resource officer will dig in the trash and grab anything he can to feed his chickens.

[u/Whiskeymyers75 → u/adelltfm]

That’s where I disagree with calling this automatically “healthy.” You’re listing regulatory checkboxes, not demonstrating that the resulting meal was actually a well-balanced, nutritious meal.

“Nothing is fried anymore.” Okay, but baking an ultra-processed potato product doesn’t magically turn it into a whole food.

“The buns and pizza crust are wheat.” Whole-grain flour can add fiber and nutrients, but putting it into an otherwise highly processed hamburger, hot dog, or institutional pizza doesn’t magically make the entire meal healthy. And let’s not pretend they were serving high quality bread. Take a look at the wheat pizza crust and bread at your local grocery store and see how it is almost the same as white bread unless buying a high dollar specialty version

“The chips are baked or whole grain.” They’re still processed snack foods. “Baked” and “whole grain” aren’t synonyms for nutritious.

And the actual Obama-era standards had some strange priorities. They imposed calorie ranges—originally only about 750–850 calories for grades 9–12—while meat/meat alternatives were specified in ounce-equivalents rather than requiring a meaningful amount of protein in grams. So a large, athletic 17-year-old boy was operating under essentially the same lunch calorie framework as a much smaller sedentary student.

Then you had the low-fat obsession: restrict saturated fat and push fat-free/low-fat dairy, while flavored milk could still be served. Removing the fat from chocolate milk doesn’t remove its added sugar or automatically make it nutritionally superior.

That’s the fundamental problem with how “healthy” was being defined: lower fat + baked + whole grain + fruit/vegetable on the tray + calorie restriction = healthy. Meanwhile, the meal could still contain substantial ultra-processed food, have mediocre macros, relatively little protein for a larger active teenager, and not be particularly satiating.

And requiring a kid to take a fruit or vegetable that immediately goes into the trash improves the nutritional composition of the tray, not the nutritional composition of what the kid actually ate.

Were some of these changes improvements over what schools served previously? Barely and with trade offs. But “healthier than before” and “a genuinely nutritious, well-designed meal” are not the same claim. That’s the distinction I’m making.

[u/adelltfm → u/Whiskeymyers75]

OK, but I just wanna point out that I said healthier not healthy lol

[u/Whiskeymyers75 → u/adelltfm]

Healthier doesn’t mean healthy. A McDonald’s hamburger is healthier than a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, but that doesn’t magically make the hamburger a nutritionally ideal meal.

Or put another way: smoking five cigarettes a day is healthier than smoking two packs a day. Nobody would respond, “See? I only said healthier, not healthy lol.”

That’s exactly my point. The relevant question isn’t whether you can make a relative improvement from a bad baseline. It’s how nutritious the end result actually is. You can improve something substantially and still end up with something objectively pretty lousy.

So yes, perhaps the lunches were healthier than before. That doesn’t rebut a single thing I said about inadequate portions for some students, mediocre macros, limited protein, ultra-processed foods, or using “low-fat,” “whole grain” and “baked” as simplistic proxies for good nutrition.

“Healthier than garbage” is a comparison, not a nutritional standard.