Cynthia Peters
Ivy
League institutions, major hospitals, and corporate money teamed up recently to
make the startling revelation: kids should eat breakfast.
You
may be forgiven for thinking that you already knew eating in the morning was a
good idea for kids, and for having come to that conclusion based on common
sense, or, perhaps, experience. But, in the future, you should leave these
complex issues to the experts.
After
all, experts play an important role in our lives. They remind us to doubt our
own common sense, which can’t be trusted, as it is not buttressed by advanced
degrees and corporate funding. And they do the important job of narrowing in on
tiny aspects of common sense assertions, separating them so drastically from
their context that we cannot think clearly about the whole picture. Thus, we are
expertly brought round full circle: desperately needing an expert to make sense
of the situation.
Consider
for example the recent research showing a link between school breakfast programs
and improved “psychosocial” behavior in children. According to a report in
the September 1998 Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, children who
participate in school breakfast programs not only have less “depression,
anxiety and hyperactivity,” but they show up at school more often and get
better grades in math.
Whereas
many of us might have accurately guessed that hunger and malnourishment make
kids anxious – and might not have even needed to know that much to have been
able to say simply that hunger should be remedied no matter what type of
behavior it results in – we are now left to wonder, absurdly, what happened to
the English and Social Studies grades? Why did they not improve along with the
math? Perhaps future studies will control for which kinds of breakfast foods
produce improvement in all subjects, or how much of a decrease in hunger-induced
anxiety is needed to improve concentration, or what additional enticements might
decrease absenteeism.
Further
research, in this case, would lead us even further away from the point. And that
is: if kids are hungry, they should be fed, simply because it is a human right.
Not because it will improve their math scores, help them sit still, visit the
nurse less often, and/or reduce tardiness. It is a sign of the mechanistic
product-oriented way we view children that we think of them (and study them) as
vessels receiving certain inputs (a little, a lot or no food) which then offer
up certain outputs (good or bad math scores).
Ronald
Kleinman, MD, chief of pediatric gastroenterology at Mass. General Hospital and
a conductor of the 1998 school breakfast study, says, seemingly without irony,
“This series of studies shows that those children who are consistently hungry
are most likely to do poorly in school and in other aspects of their lives.”
Digging
deep, the researchers made another common sense discovery: there is a stigma
attached to being poor. Students were more likely to participate in school
breakfast programs when the meals were offered free to all students, compared
with programs that provided free meals to low-income youngsters while others
paid for their breakfasts
Provide
free meals to all children, and everyone benefits, including the funders of the
study – Kellogg corporation and the Mid-Atlantic Milk Marketing Association
– who get an opportunity to develop brand name recognition and product loyalty
in their target audience. Free breakfast programs provide cereal-makers with a
direct route to children. They don’t have to advertise their product, convince
children to convince their parents to make a purchase, or figure out how to
bypass the ethnic foods that might be the norm in multi-cultural inner-city
kitchens.
In
1999, the parent corporation of Post offered free cereal in the Boston public
school system. Indeed, high rates of poverty and welfare reform may mean many
children are going without breakfast. But rather than support families by making
it possible for them to have the time and resources to make breakfast for their
kids, our policy choices direct kids instead towards sugary cereals washed down
with milk. Not everyone agrees this is a step forward. State Senator from
Roxbury, Dianne Wilkerson, responded, “It’s crazy we should be giving urban
children milk for breakfast when such a high proportion of them are children of
color.”
According
to the Boston Globe, “Many nonwhites are lactose intolerant, which is the
inability to digest milk sugar, or lactose. If lactose is not broken apart, it
ferments in the intestines, causing abdominal cramps, diarrhea, and gas.
According to a review of studies on lactose intolerance by the Physicians
Committee for Responsible Medicine, it affects to some degree 70 percent of
African-Americans, 90 percent of Asian-Americans, 74 percent of Native
Americans, and 53 percent of Mexican-Americans. Minority children make up 84
percent of the 63,000 students in Boston public schools, according to a school
spokeswoman.”
Interestingly,
Kellogg’s’ and the milk marketer’s funding of the school breakfast study
is reported in the media without comment, but when Project Bread – a
Boston-based hunger advocacy group – sponsored a similar study in November
2000, the Boston Globe made a point of uncovering the group’s “political”
motivations. It turns out Project Bread supports legislation that would require
schools serving low-income students to offer breakfast as a built-in part of the
schedule for all students regardless of income, thus avoiding the stigma
associated with being poor. Activists at Project Bread think that school
breakfasts should be part of a statewide program to reduce hunger, which
remarkably has not decreased despite the robust economy.
The
corporate funders’ profit motives merit no mention, but the goals of an
advocacy group – to reduce hunger for no other reason than hunger is bad –
are suspect.
Project
Bread might consider why it needs fancy studies and experts to justify breakfast
for children. (Incredibly, Dr. Kleinman who also authored the 2000 study in
Boston, so far knows only that breakfast “helps,” though he’s not sure
why. “It may simply be that breakfast helps organize the day, provides some
stability. Perhaps there is a nutritional benefit. Perhaps diminishing hunger
per se makes the difference.”) Project Bread might respond with a common sense
(and extremely inexpert) question: “Who cares?” The newsworthy story here is
that some children are hungry. Their families don’t have the money, time or
resources to feed them. That is an inexcusable disaster in a wealthy country
like ours.
Let’s
get the kids some breakfast – preferably not served up by the milk marketers
or the makers of Cap’n Crunch. And when everyone’s had a proper meal,
let’s study how it came about that 1 in 5 children under the age of 12 in
Massachusetts is hungry or at risk of being hungry, and how it evolved that
expert talking heads are spending lots of time and resources to draw
self-evident conclusions such as being consistently hungry causes anxiety. Such
nonsense not only deprives children of their humanity – by seeing them as
productive units who function less well when hungry – but it removes the rest
of us one step further from basic common sense conclusions that require no
justification, such as: hunger is unacceptable.