NBC Washington posted a story about the lunch calorie counts as mandated by the county. I was doing fine with the story until I hit the last paragraph, quoted here in entirety:

The schools need to be wary, however. Body image is a challenging issue for many young people, and approximately 10 percent of U.S. teenagers suffer some sort of eating disorder. This useful information could be misused by some young people to feed into their existing anxieties.

My immediate response to this paragraph was disgust. The idea that providing facts pertinent to a child’s life will harm them is one of the most appalling and horrifying ideas that I could imagine . And, of all topics, we’re talking about nutritional facts. Why not pick an easier topic to censor truth like meth-recipes and bomb-making and the state of the sex trade in Eastern Europe? Even then, depending on the age group, I’m probably going to tell you to go soak your head.

Information needs to be as readily available for kids as we can possibly make it. If we can’t baseline our national education standards to help kids cope with how they react to A NUMBER, then how are we going to get them ready for anything? In fact, I don’t think I’d be far off in saying that an eating disorder is the direct coupling of a)personal issues surrounding self-image or lifestyle [very complex, I realize] and b)not knowing common, healthy behaviors and the resulting impact from operating outside those standards.  We all agree that kids need to learn more about nutrition at younger and younger ages…this seems like a perfectly acceptable way to get started. Make it a talking point in Health class, bring it up in Home Economics (do we still teach that?), and for god’s sake please use it as sample problem material in Mathematics.

I spoke with my brother about this story, and he offers a more logical counterpoint. He thought that this wasn’t far enough: the schools need to add more robust information about the prepared foods to give a more holistic picture of the food being served. Given the choice between no information and just the caloric count he said, “Nothing, because a calorie count isn’t a good indicator for whether a food is good or not. People need to decide what to eat based on whether the food is appropriate for what their body needs. Somebody might say, ‘oh, that’s got the most calories’ in order to be the bold one, or ‘that’s what I will have, it has the least calories’ because they want to lose weight. That’s just not healthy.”

We want kids to be protected [for some small period of time] from some of the darker truths of this world: Santa doesn’t exist, growing facial hair is really not that fun, and sex is so great that some people spend their whole lives trying to get more. I agree that these things should wait out until kids are mature enough to handle them, but if you think one of these dark truths is a caloric index then we need to sit down and map this out. There’s a big difference between “teaching kids to do” and ”doing things to kids”, and yes…it’s exactly as bad as it sounds…please teach.