The Obama administration mandated that the U.S. Department of Agriculture tell schools to add more fruits, vegetables, and other vegetarian fare and USDA did as it was told.

They had data showing it would just lead to a lot of food waste, and it did, but it is often better to let the other side undo things than to take on your boss and have to find new work in a bad economy and USDA rode it out.

Now it is going away. Yet it is a small victory. It will be replaced by some other new fad project.

It isn't just Democrats who do it, it is just this century they have been more tedious about it. Politicization of science is common. In the opening of Science Left Behind I noted how Congress once used its bulletproof control of Congress to do something pointless during the Bush administration. Instead of helping constituents in a meaningful way, they demanded that the Congressional cafeteria get rid of Styrofoam and plastic and replace those with compostable (i.e. corn-based) alternatives. Because they were ready for prime-time, loybbists insisted.

It was an expensive boondoggle. Everyone hated them. The spoons melted in soup, the knives broke, and composting meant hauling all of the specially separated garbage to an processing factory site in Virginia. When Congress got back control of the House in 2010 the outgoing Democrat in charge of the cafeteria had recommended the program be scrapped and, as politics go, members of Congress all do favors for each other so the Democrat waited and the Republican came in and reverted back to what everyone wanted.

Rep. Pelosi et al. then declared Republicans were giving staffers in Congress cancer, poisoning the environment, etc., ignoring that her fellow Democrat, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, had written the report saying the program was a failure and needed to go.

Politics as usual.

So it goes with food. First ladies often take up causes of their own. First Lady Nancy Reagan saw that a lot of young people were caught up in the cesspool of drug addiction and declared war on drugs, First Lady Michelle Obama saw the obesity problem impacted young people and decided school lunches were her battleground. If you think the former was stupid and the last compassionate, or vice-versa, I know how you vote. Because neither one was based on knowledge of behavior. They were and are both problems, but the causes highlighted in both cases were not getting addressed by the political solutions.

It is good that this ridiculous school lunch program, which denied poor kids who might have a school lunch as their most nutritious of the day some meat, is getting fixed, but wealthy adults making policy based on their pet causes and claiming 'it's for the children' will never end.