Students in England's state schools are up in arms over the government ban on junk food lunches, according to an article in today's New York Times:

Five months after the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver succeeded in cajoling, threatening and shaming the British government into banning junk food from its school cafeterias, many schools are learning that you can lead a child to a healthy lunch, but you can’t make him eat.

The fancy new menu at the Rawmarsh School here?

“It’s rubbish,” said Andreas Petrou, an 11th grader… “We didn’t get a choice,” he said of the school food. “They just told us we were having it.”

Goodness! What is this evil and draconian menu foisted upon the helpless children of the Empire?

The government’s regulations, which took effect in September, have banished from school cafeterias the cheap, instantly gratifying meals that children love by default: the hamburgers, the French fries, the breaded, deep-fried processed meat, the sugary drinks.

Now schools have to provide at least two portions of fresh fruit and vegetables a day for each child, serve fish at least once a week, remove salt from lunchroom tables, limit fried foods to two servings a week and cut out candy, soda and potato chips altogether.

Why is this so objectionable? Two reasons: 

1. Nobody likes to be told what to do. Don't believe me? Call a meeting at home tonight and announce that you've become an ardent follower of a website called FitFam.com. Tell them that you now ban sodas, fried snacks and all dairy products from your home. See your partner gazing at you in admiration and love. Watch your kids fling their arms around your neck, squealing, "Oh, we knew you loved us, we just didn't realize how much! Thank you thank you thank you."

Or not.

2. Junk food is addictive. It's naturally addictive, because of our genetic love of calorically dense foods that can be gotten with minimal effort (a preference that made a lot more sense in the Savannahs of Kenya than the food court at the mall). And it's manufactured to be even more addictive, a strategy that tends to correlate with large profits and high quarterly earnings.

Banning addictive substances without a withdrawal plan is a pretty harsh thing to do. Just watch any of those gritty 1970s movies about heroin addicts (there's one, Midnight Something, whose exact name escapes me but involves a nasty Turkish prison). And just like any addiction, when you take away the government-sanctioned supply, a black market emerges:

Mrs. Critchlow [a parent of a Rawmarsh student] has become a notorious figure in Britain. In September she and another mother — alarmed, they said, because their children were going hungry — began selling contraband hamburgers, fries and sandwiches to as many as 50 students a day, passing the food through the school gates.

The campaign to reduce smoking has taken 25 years in the US to significantly change attitudes and create pro-health social pressure. Changing eating habits will take at least that long, probably longer, because food is a more emotionally charged topic, and you can't just "quit" eating like you can quit nicotine.

The lesson? Make sure your home conveys the right kind of peer pressure and gives the appropriate messages, so your kids are innoculated against the food and diet insanity in our culture that is arguably more harmful than the harmful foods themselves.