Junk food and schools

An article in the NYT today spends a thousand words telling us what we already know, namely that potato chips will outsell peeled carrots by about 5 to 1.  Forget the yogurt and apples in the same machine as the  kids say they can get all they want at home.  (In a middle class neighborhood on Long Island, anyway).  The point is our culture spends far more advertising money on junk food than on healthy alternatives.  Plus the science says the salt and grease in the junk trips the brain's pleasure centers.  Gnawing on a carrot doesn't seem to produce the same effect.  Meanwhile, the advertising budget for Doritos and Pepsi is probably greater than the entire revenue of most produce companies.   Denmark recently started to tax fatty foods in a effort, similar to the cigarette tax, to defray the cost to society that these foods incur.  We will need a sea change in the way Americans think before such a program comes to pass here.  In the meantime, as the CSNY anthem says, "Teach your children well".