I’ll be one of the first people to admit that American diets need some help. And while I don’t think it’s exclusively children who need the help, an argument can be made that they need it the most.

Still, it seems to me some Pennsylvania schools are going a bit too far in their “wellness campaign” to help “combat” childhood obesity. (Everything in America these days is about war, isn’t it? You have to wonder what that says about us as a society.)

According to the Associated Press (via Yahoo! News), the school district in Palmyra, Pennsylvania is considering creating a rule that parents who come to visit their children at the school for lunch must eat school food.

The parents, naturally, are somewhat disturbed at this attempt to curtail their freedom to spend a little quality time — if not a quality meal — with their offspring.

Frankly, I think it’s a further portent of the future I strongly believe most, if not all, people will experience one day: complete lack of personal freedom in nearly all decisions about one’s own life. But, then, I’m a fruitcake liberal who believes the natural and best state of humanity is for individuals to be largely left alone to make their own decisions about what’s best for them, without the intrusion of institutions like the government, the corporation one happens to work for, and schools.

I also ponder why it is that schools are no longer about teaching. Babysitting, yes. Law enforcement, apparently. But diet police? Wouldn’t it be something if, instead of schools getting into the business of legislating people’s individual choices, they educated them about those choices?

Egads! What a revolutionary idea!

Of course, we could all be wrong here. From what I remember of school lunches as a child, this could just be Palmyra’s way of making sure parents stay away from school premises, so that schools can get on with the job of education without parental interference.

Hmmm….