Damned if You do...

Pizza Hut seems to be finding out the hard way that "no good deed goes unpunished" (I promise that's the last cliché you'll find in this post). Since 1985, the pizza chain has been offering free pizzas to students as an incentive to get them to read more books. The program has been a very successful one but now a group of elitist weirdoes from Harvard have decided that the program harms children by rewarding their participation in the program with a deadly and sinful free pizza. How horrible!

Book It, which reaches about 22 million children a year, "epitomizes everything that's wrong with corporate-sponsored programs in school," said Susan Linn, a Harvard psychologist and co-founder of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.

"In the name of education, it promotes junk food consumption to a captive audience ... and undermines parents by positioning family visits to Pizza Hut as an integral component of raising literate children," Linn said.

...

But the program - which has given away more than 200 million pizzas - has deep roots and many admirers at the highest levels of politics and education. It won a citation in 1988 from President Reagan, and its advisory board includes representatives of prominent education groups, including teachers unions and the American Library Association.

I'm sorry Ms. Linn but I doubt that one free pizza, shared with a whole family, is going to contribute to the obesity of these particular students. They eat what their parents put on the table 365 days a year so one more pizza will not push them into the obese weight range. Do these people seriously expect children to grow up entirely on healthy food?