Public school students in Maryland’s Montgomery County know they’d better not even think of holding a bake sale to raise money for the football team or math club. Selling sweets is outlawed during the school day, and officials make the rounds to ensure no illicit cupcakes are changing hands. “If a bake sale is going on, it’s reported to administration and it’s taken care of,” says Marla Caplon of the county’s food and nutrition services. “You can’t sell Girl Scout cookies, candy, cakes, any of that stuff.”
Montgomery is one of a growing number of school districts around the country that have in recent years declared the humble, beloved bake sale a threat to children. Schools in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, and Texas have regulations aimed at limiting bake sales to nutritious food. Massachusetts will soon join them. Beginning in August, it will prohibit fundraisers that sell non-nutritious foods in school, and take it one step further: Kids will no longer be allowed to hand out sugary cookies—or other treats deemed unhealthy—to classmates on their birthdays.
With so many overweight kids, it’s easy to see why schools want to discourage high-calorie snacks.
Oh, wait. It's "for the children." Never mind, then. At some point in the anti-public smoking crusade, it became pretty obvious that more than health concerns were involved. A lot of these zealots were using the prohibitive measures to express their moral disapproval of smoking. I think we've reached that point in the childhood obesity campaign. Nobody in his right mind really believes banning a bake sale to raise money for band uniforms would make one iota of difference in student eating habits. But it serves to signal the moral superiority of Those Who Know Better Than Us.
Via Reason's hit & run, which manages to find disapproval of such nonsense in de Tocheville's "Dem0cracy in Action":
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.
