Because we all know the best way to teach kids to resist the urge of poor food choices is to ban the ban food they’d choose.  See, if the federal government makes the choice for them, they don’t even have to think about it!

I’m sure this is the sort of thing the founders envisioned when they wrote the Constitution.  Actually, sarcasm aside, the founders didn’t even intend for the federal government to have a role in education at all, let alone dictating what sort of food is available in what are supposedly state-run schools.  But this is the danger we face when we allow our states to become dependent on the federal government for funding.  See, Congress can’t outright order state schools to ban certain types of food.  That branch of our government simply isn’t afforded that power by the Constitution.  But since our state schools have become dependent on federal funding they can threaten to remove that funding if state schools don’t comply with their wishes.

Meaning, in a lot of ways, our locally-elected school boards, municipal leaders and state leaders aren’t setting policy in our schools so much as the Senators and Representatives in far-away Washington DC are.

As is usually the case with these absurd government power grabs, it’s attached as an amendment to the totally unrelated farm bill.  Because the people behind it know it’d never pass were it a bill of its own, they they have to sneak it through.