Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk. Mr. Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chair, today I rise in support of my amendment to direct the Secretary of Agriculture, in coordination with the Secretary of Health and…
Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.
Mr. Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Chair, today I rise in support of my amendment to direct the Secretary of Agriculture, in coordination with the Secretary of Health and Human Services, to develop a low-risk classification for healthy fresh fruits and vegetables and other fruits that are typically consumed raw.
I would like to tell the body a little bit about how this came to be. I have a 4-year-old. I was touring a daycare, like many in our State, and a daycare worker came up to me. She asked me: Hey, Congress lady, why can I legally open a bag of chips for the toddlers, but I can't peel a banana?
This was perplexing and annoying to me. I dug into this, and I kept asking questions. What I heard from regulators and licensers over and over and over was that this woman was stupid, that her boss had lied to her, and that she just didn't understand the rules.
When I dug and I dug and I dug, what I found was that, yes, buried deep in the bowels of the 1,200 pages of documents a licensed daycare provider has to follow in my State is the number of sinks they would need per exterior linear wall foot. I am not kidding.
This daycare would have needed six more sinks before they could legally peel a banana, because peeling a banana apparently is considered food
preparation, but opening a bag of chips is not.
I doubt anyone on God's green Earth would have chosen to advantage Cheetos over a banana. That is what has happened through a lack of respect and regard for people who actually work in childcare, through, candidly, an establishment that is so old that they don't have kids in daycare or so rich that they had nannies instead of ordinary daycare.
I am so proud of this body for listening to this issue, for hearing me, and for helping me to find a way to legitimize fresh fruits and vegetables in daycare centers again. What this does is it directs the Secretary of Ag to develop a list of food.
It says that handling a raw chicken cutlet is not the same thing as peeling a banana. Let's have a different classification. Let's post these on a website somewhere, and let's say that States who are taking money for childcare will not negatively impact the licenses of daycare centers based on their provision of these foods to children given a handwashing sink is available.
It is a very simple, commonsense rightsizing of legislation, and one that I have heard from people across the country. This is not an issue just in my State. This is across the country where legislation has not paid attention or genuflection to people actually doing the work of taking care of children who have mistaken following a checklist with care for children.
Those are not the same things. We need to empower the people who are actually doing the work. We need to bring down the cost of childcare, and that is what this legislation does.
I am so grateful to the body for working with me to find a way to do this.
Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Chairman, I think we all agree that childcare is underfunded. What we don't agree about here is the question of whether and how to appropriately fund it and who is the one who decides where those dollars should go.
I would say that in my case, in the case of the daycare worker I was speaking with, they would have had to install six more sinks to comply with the regulations as written.
How much money do you think that takes? Do you think that is going to make daycare stretch further and provide daycare to more families?
No, these rules were not written--they were not perfect. We should not treat legislation as if it is manifest from God in a perfect form on our notebooks.
The reality is that legislation is more similar to doing the dishes where you do the dishes to do the dishes, to do the dishes. It is never done, and you have to keep going back to the people who are actually doing the implementation of it to understand if it is being implemented and if it is the point of the legislation.
Nobody wanted us to spend these limited dollars installing a myriad of sinks. Maybe the plumbing industry did, but I doubt that.
Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Chair, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Thompson).
Mr. Chairman, States that choose to negatively impact the licenses of daycare providers based on their provision of a peeled banana to a child, I think we ought to consider whether or not that is the best place for us to be spending our limited Federal resources. I yield back the balance of my time.
