New York City parents are demanding the right to sell homemade baked goods as the city starts to enforce new rules that set a once-a-month limit on PTA bake sales during the school day and prohibits student groups from selling home-baked items all together. The new rules have been put in place because of health concerns and the gathering obesity crisis in children. Schools are trying to keep caloric intake down by only allowing packaged snacks that fall within certain nutritional parameters to be sold on school grounds. Homemade items that have no visible calorie count are banned because there is no way to tell if they fall with in acceptable parameters.
Parents like Anisa Romero, a mom with a pre-kindergarten student in NYC, think that their homemade goodies are healthier and more wholesome than prepacked foods, even if they might have more calories. Romero, who refers to her PTA group as “Renegade Mommas” brings vegan chocolate cake to bake sales. She acknowledges that it might not be under the 200 calorie limit for snacks sold in schools: “Yeah, yeah – it’s full of calories,” she says. ”But I am all about my sweets. But I want them to be real sweets. Good, nutritious, homemade sweets.”
Romero and her cohorts agree, they’d rather have their kids eating homemade sweets made with real ingredients than processed junk food like Cool Ranch Doritos or Pop-Tarts – both of which can be sold as a fundraiser at any time on school grounds. To prove their point they brought their mouth watering wares down to New York’s City Hall to fund raise, and to protest.
David Cantor, press secretary for the New York City Department of Education explains that, “we’re trying to balance two things: the need to deal with the major child obesity epidemic – 40 percent of our kids [in New York schools] are obese or overweight – with the need to allow parents and kids to fund raise for their schools and extracurricular activities.”
What do you think?
