California's latest attempt to force kids to do the right thing is having the expected result. Well, expected only if you believe outlawing something really does cause it to disappear. But there's more to it than that, check out their menu choices:

[B]lack bean burgers, tostada salad, fresh pears ... beef jambalaya, vegetable curry, pad Thai, lentil and brown rice cutlets, and quinoa and black-eyed pea salads ... Caribbean meatball sauce ...

How much does all that stuff cost? Even better:

Andre Jahchan, a 16-year-old sophomore at Esteban Torres High School, said the food was "super good" at the summer tasting at L.A. Unified's central kitchen. But on campus, he said, the chicken pozole was watery, the vegetable tamale was burned and hard, and noodles were soggy.

Cheap food is not cheap because it tastes good, it's cheap because it's easy to make. A great recipe will always taste great when prepared by a highly skilled, and motivated, kitchen. I obviously haven't seen the inside of a public school cafeteria in a long time but "skilled" and "motivated" were not words I would choose to describe the staff of the ones I did see, and I doubt much has changed.

So, let's review: at (presumably) great expense a group of bureaucrats came up with a school lunch menu that was undeniably healthy but completely ignored the practicalities of customer taste, cost of materials, and the skill of the preparation staff. Yes. These are exactly the sorts of people who should be trusted to competently and fairly redistribute the wealth of the 1% to us 99%-ers. They are doing such a stellar job at everything else, donchaknow?