WHY GOVERNMENT DOESN’T WORK: Promising Pilot Projects Don’t Scale:

It seems that the LA Unified School District recently revamped its lunch menus to eliminate fattening standbys like chicken nuggets, nachos, and flavored milk. The resulting meals are much healthier, but apparently also much less appetizing. As a result, participation in the program is down, and the LA Times found students replacing the Beef Jambalaya and lentil cutlets with things like Cheetos.

This happened despite the fact that the menu was tested extensively before they put it into operation. . . . I think one anecdote in the article is particularly telling. People complained that salads dated October 7th were served on the 17th–and the district responded by first, pointing out that that was the “best served by” date, not the date when the food actually went bad; and second, removing the labels because they were “confusing”. Now, as anyone who has forgotten to eat a bag of lettuce knows, while it may not actually be rotten after 10 days, it probably doesn’t look much like something you’d eat voluntarily. This is not something that you can change by stamping a different “sell by” date on the container. If that were my choice, I too would come to school with a backup bag of Cheetos.

So why would he say something so obviously weird? There are two reasons I can think of: 1) in a large and complicated distribution system, and with their limited funds, he knows that there is no way to actually solve this problem, so they mounted the only defense they could. Or 2) the school district still has the mentality of the old system, which is mostly focused on not poisoning anyone. In fact, there isn’t much difference between Chicken nuggets that won’t poison you, and Chicken nuggets at their absolute peak of freshness. And the employees just sort of assumed that the same set of rules would work for lettuce.

That’s what real world applications are up against.

I think that chicken nuggets deserve more respect than that. And changing the labels seems particularly like something that would happen in a public school system. Meanwhile, let me once again recommend James Scott’s Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes To Improve The Human Condition Have Failed.