As an ideologically-correct Marxist with shit-all understanding of economics, I was shocked and outraged when my high school invited Pepsi to install two (it may have been three) vending machines in the hallways. OMG teh corporate!!1!

I can’t resist:

Let me explain to you how this works: You see, the corporations sell junk food, and then kids eat the junk food… and the corporations sit there in their… in their corporation buildings, and… and, and see, they’re all corporation-y… and they make money.

–Tim Robbins by Trey Parker (well, sort of)

When others pointed out that the Pepsi machines brought much-needed money to the school (allowing us to replace our tattered and obsolete history textbooks, for instance), I indignantly replied that schools ought to get as much money as they want need from the government — this was about the same time that King Ralph was slashing and burning the “health care and education” section of Alberta’s budget, and it was easy to get indignant about such things. (Of all the things upon which government can spend money, education comes closest to being a genuinely wise investment — but that’s another post.) And of course when some wit wondered where the government would get all that money, I cited John Ralston Saul’s The Doubter’s Companion in which — beginning at the bottom of page 88 of the 1995 paperback edition — he explains that governments never prosper by paying their debts, and do well to default instead; thus, I argued, the province should simply borrow as much as it needs, then forget about it. (See “shit-all understanding of economics”, above.)

In my defence, I was a high-school student at the time: I had no reason to worry about whether reality conformed to my views. A year or two later, I enrolled in a hard-science programme at the University of Alberta, and reality suddenly began to matter. And in this real world of ours, so tenuously linked to political fads and fashions, vending machines selling junk food generate money for schools.

Unless, of course, those schools expel the vending machines:

• Junk food ban in B.C. schools trims funding sources: official (CBC.ca)

(Get it? “Trims”? The CBC’s reporters are trying to be witty these days, but it’s painfully obvious that they’re decades out of practice.)

Some secondary schools in British Columbia are taking a big financial hit as a result of the no junk-food policy brought in by the provincial government earlier this year, a school board chair says. Ken Denike, chair of the Vancouver Board of School Trustees, said the new policy has cut down one huge source of “flexible funding” schools have had for sports and music events.

The depressing part is that these schools don’t seem to have planned for the loss of funding.

“What we’re looking at is [that] probably the parents along with the staff will come up with some type of plan to meet any shortfall that might be realized,” [Connie Denesiuk, president of the B.C. School Trustees Association] told CBC News on Friday.

While I applaud the idea of people giving money to schools directly, rather than filtering it through an elephantine government bureaucracy first (read: “paying taxes”), this seems rather unnecessary. But hey, it’s for the children:

Denesiuk said schools will eventually find ways to adjust to a policy that everyone knew had to be put in place for a healthy lifestyle.

Right. “Everyone knows” that the policy is necessary. Blah blah bad influences blah blah blah obesity epidemic blah. Bullshit. Kids who want chips and Coke will buy chips and Coke elsewhere if they can’t get it in school. Perhaps a few kids will have one or two fewer Cokes a week thanks to the junk food ban; is that worth the cost of curtailing sports and music?

The notion that reducing children’s exposure to junk food will mould them into health-conscious adults reminds me of Mark Twain’s story The Man who Corrupted Hadleyburg. Briefly: a town of people raised from birth to avoid temptation nearly destroy themselves when a vengeful traveler tempts them powerfully. The Hadleyburghers could not resist temptation when they finally found it; similarly, people kept innocent of simple carbs and saturated fats aren’t likely to shun them for broccoli and filet mignon. (We’ve evolved, after all, to treasure sugary and fatty foods as easily-digested and energy-rich — exactly the sort of thing that would prevent someone from starving to death. That the average human could have too much food hasn’t been a “problem” until the past few hundred years, if that.)

I find it particularly amusing that the provincial government’s attempts to legislate healthy kids by banning junk foods from schools has instead curtailed athletics programmes. That said, I doubt that anyone will learn from this clusterfuck: the object isn’t to improve kids’ health, but rather to appear to be doing so for political and social gain. So it goes.