i just read an article that people are trying to ban cupcakes from school! what is wrong with people? i don't usually get on my high horse...but, come on!!! CUPCAKES??? it's because everyone is so worried that kids are getting overweight, not excercising...what bothers me is that people want to regulate it....why do we have to have a law for everything? why don't we just be in control of ourselves and if we think that the cupcake has too much sugar...then, don't eat it! no one is forcing you...it just drives me crazy!!!! why do we have to have laws for so many dumb things? and i realize that people do stupid things...so, they ban cupcakes, but, how many of those parents are out drinking? or smoking?i think it's funny, that in the article, bakers from "across the atlantic" as they put it, are "perplexed" that we are having this problem...i totally agree...i'm very perplexed... i understand that we want our children healthy..but, one cupcake will not hurt you...it's better than eating a whole cake!
Here are the 2 articles:
Should cupcakes be banned?
I love cupcakes. LOVE them! I never really cared about them until I became pregnant, at which point, during my third trimester, I developed a craving for them. This turned into an obsession, which, once the baby was born, put cupcakes squarely into my life where they belonged.
My son is 6 months old, so I wouldn't be aware of the alarming -- and growing -- trend of banning cupcakes in schools. I get where the banners are coming from. Cupcakes are bad for you. They're made of sugar and butter and all those delicious things that I think it would ultimately sad to deprive our kids of.
But, I get where the banners are coming from. Start kids with sweets now and they could end up as obese kids soon enough, and obese adults later.
Still, I agree with the sentiment of a recent New York Times article. In it cupcakes are likened to apple pie. Some consider them to be the new definition of Americana.
Reading this article I thought about all the opportunities I had to eat cupcakes when I was growing up. Most of the time I declined them -- after all, even at a young age I knew they were bad for me, full of sugar and butter. They became the enemy. Well, frenemy -- special occasions merited a bite or two.
My grandmother never made cupcakes. She made pies, the old edible ideal of Americana. Reading about cupcakes made me wish she had.
What's interesting to me is that in the article the banning of cupcakes from classrooms is discussed, but so is the backlash. I think it's a pretty sweet fight.
Ideas & Trends
Don’t Even Think of Touching That Cupcake
By SARAH KERSHAW
Published: September 23, 2007
THE cupcake is at something of a crossroads. Edible icon of Americana, frosted symbol of comfort and innocence, it may not have faced such an identity crisis since first appearing in cookbooks sometime in the 18th century.
Mario Zucca
As we know, cupcakes have had a whopping resurgence: they are retro-food chic, the thing to eat for people in the know.
But cupcakes have also recently been marched to the front lines of the fat wars, banned from a growing number of classroom birthday parties because of their sugar, fat and “empty calories,” a poster food of the child obesity crisis. This was clear when children returned to school this month to a tightening of regulations, federal and state, on what can be served up between the bells.
And it has led some to wonder whether emotional value, on occasion, might legitimately outweigh nutritional value.
Schools trying to bring parents to the table in efforts to root out fat and sugar have faced what Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University who strongly supports limiting sweets in schools, calls “the cupcake problem.”
When included on lists of treats that parents are discouraged or forbidden to send to school — and when those policies are, say, put to a vote at the P.T.A. — “cupcakes are deal breakers,” Professor Nestle said. “It sounds like a joke, but it’s a very serious problem on a number of levels. You have to control it.”
While the merits of banning goodie bags filled with Reese’s and Skittles seem obvious — especially at a time when the risk of childhood diabetes is high for American children — many parents draw the line at cupcakes.
This could have something to do with the fact that in the modern age, the cupcake may be more American than apple pie — “because nobody is baking apple pies,” Professor Nestle explained.
The confection is so powerfully embedded in the national consciousness — and palate — that its future is quite possibly the only cause to unite Texas Republicans and at least some left-wing foodies behind a singular mission: keep the cupcake safe from harm.
“I think the wholesale banning of parents’ bringing cupcakes as a legal issue is over the top,” said Rachel Kramer Bussel, a former sex columnist for The Village Voice who founded the Web site “Cupcakes Take the Cake” three years ago.
The Texas Legislature agreed, in spirit, when it passed the “Safe Cupcake Amendment,” in 2005, in response to new federal child nutrition guidelines and lobbying from parents outraged by the schoolroom siege on cupcakes.
After the amendment passed, a blogger on Homesick Texan wrote: “i don’t think it necessarily warrants all the hubbub, or the intervention of legislature to intervene on behalf of the cupcake. ... but then, another part of me is screaming ‘CUPCAKES!!!’ because they just make people happy.”
Hillary Clinton perhaps was aware of this when on David Letterman’s show recently she listed as No. 9 of her Top 10 campaign promises, “Each year on my birthday everyone gets a cupcake.”
As Ms. Kramer Bussel, who organizes monthly cupcake meet-ups in New York City, said, “If you bring cupcakes to a party, you are so popular.”
Until the late 1990s, the cupcake often shared the mental dessert pantry with canned peaches and ambrosia; it was nostalgia food, mom-in-an-apron food, happy food.
But then cupcakes took a very chic turn. Trend-setting bakeries like Magnolia, the Greenwich Village cupcake empire, arrived on the scene; by 2005, a parody music video on “Saturday Night Live,” which was later viewed more than five million times on YouTube, included the lyrics, “Let’s hit up Magnolia and mack on some cupcakes.”
And now the new cupcake, having drifted so far from Betty Crocker, is facing fierce competition from the retro cupcake, which is the new, new cupcake that is really the old cupcake.
Americans still find time to whip up some batter and slide a tray in the oven. It’s easy, and the appeal is multifaceted. Cupcakes are portable, cute and relatively inexpensive. They are also “feminine and girlie,” Ms. Kramer Bussel said, so the majority of cupcake bakers and fans are women.
Cupcake is a term of endearment, but it can also be a rather mean-spirited word. “Cupcake teams” in sports are said to be soft and easily crushed. As food, though, cupcakes are democratic; everyone gets one. And they are libertarian; individual and independent compared with communal cakes, which may not have enough slices for everyone.
Across the Atlantic, where cupcakes have become increasingly popular in the last few years, some bakers said they were perplexed by word of an American cupcake crackdown.
“Over here people think it’s a bit like this innocent cake,” said Jemma Wilson, owner of Crumbs and Doilies, a new cupcake bakery in London. “And it seems more dignified and civilized to eat one portion, unless you kind of eat 10, which obviously happens a lot.”
A sub-debate within the cupcake debate has revolved around whether the meaning of cupcakes has been lost — and it’s not pretty.
Can the cupcake loyalist support the sale of a chocolate Guinness cupcake with green-tea cream-cheese frosting? Has the cupcake been stolen from the people by the baking aristocracy?
For a sense of how charged the subject is, consider what happened in July, when Magnolia Bakery, having vaulted to fad status by an appearance on “Sex and the City,” was briefly shut down by the city health department for not having enough sinks at its Greenwich Village establishment.
“At last!” said a blogger posting on Eater.com. “We neighbors get relief from cupcakistas who don’t realize Duncan Hines makes better-tasting cupcakes.”
After a long debate thread, another blogger wrote, “You people need to go back to the suburbs ... Seriously, bunch of grown up New York City residents obsessing over a cupcake shop. I miss the gunfire and crackheads.”
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