The Boulder Way

I guess Boulder's social engineers never heard the old adage about leading horses to water.

Gang Granola is trying to force healthier eating habits on area school kids, but the effort is faltering and losing money, according to this report in today's Daily Camera, indicating that the kids can't be force-fed jicama and beets and spaghetti squash (yum, yum!). The story doesn't say so, but the effort has probably spawned a booming black market in contraband Twinkies and Honey Buns at Sanchez Elementary School.

"If the adults are enthusiastic about it, the kids will try it," Sanchez Principal Doris Candelarie told the newspaper. "We're getting them to try different things. They've tried jicama, beets, apricots, plums. Many of them haven't had a lot of the fresher food. They've had to change their palates."

What planet is Candelarie living on? On the Earth I'm familiar with, there's a reverse correlation between the enthusiasms of adults and the tastes of their children. My mother's enthusiasm for liver and Castor oil never won me over, and I'm sure Candelarie's fondness for spaghetti squash is driving her young charges in the opposite direction.

Not to be deterred, the healthy food fanatics are collecting private donations in order to keep the food torture going. If curtailing options and subsidies won't work, the next step will probably turn coercive -- strapping members of the Healthy Food Resistance into modified dentist chairs, perhaps, and force-feeding them tofu burgers.

That's the Boulder way, after all -- better living through government intervention.