Barack Obama’s favorite food may be broccoli (uh-huh), but it sure isn’t going over well with America’s students. An increasing number of school districts are finding their food budgets in the red. And it’s not from the pizza sauce.

After spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to comply with Michelle Obama’s newest food mandates for public schools, the kids are not buying it. Smaller portions, higher prices, and less of the foods they love, are compelling kids to bring lunches from home. And rather than educating our kids, many teachers are now complaining about Big Brother Sister sticking her schnoz into the lunch trays of their students.

“I’m a registered dietitian,” said Amy Anderson, the food service director for the Carmel Clay School District in Indiana. “I used to feel that I was an educator and part of the education system. I currently feel like I’m a food cop,” she said. “I don’t get credit for the 98 percent of our kids who are within normal weight range. I only get slammed for the 2 to 3 percent who aren’t.”

Ms. Anderson is afraid this most recent fiasco coming from the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do crowd occupying our White House will force her into retirement. Michelle Obama’s lunch program has cost the district $300,000 in lost revenue. But Ms. Anderson’s district is not the only one that Michelle Obama’s school lunch program is causing hunger headaches.

New York’s Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake School District is rejecting Michelle Obama’s War on Tasty Food. The district has also canned the shrunken menu after its students complained of being hungry. So, like Carmel Clay, students brought their own lunches, resulting in a loss to the school district of $100,000.

“Students felt they weren’t getting good value for their money,” food service manager Nicky Boehm said. “The high schoolers especially complained the portion sizes were too small and many more students brought in lunch from home. The intent of the federal regulations was great, but the rigidity of the program was a back-breaker,” Boehm said.

The program has reduced caloric intake by 200-400 calories per meal, for a total of around just 650 calories. Try running around the playground, some kids until late afternoon, on that fuel level. Often it is the only meal they’ll receive all day.

At a time when school districts are struggling to make ends meet following year after year of deep budget cuts, they can nary afford to throw away money on tasteless, calorie-reduced food that their students refuse to eat, and teachers are finally speaking out all over the country. But the real heroes are the children themselves: Students at a school in Kansas staged a lunch protest, bringing their own bagged lunches rather than buying the smaller-portioned, over-priced food from their cafeteria. The protest eventually rocketed to include about half of the entire school.

Fun Fact: “The U.S. Department of Agriculture is in charge of managing the lunch program and estimates Mrs. Obama’s new wish list for student meals would cost about $3.2 billion to bring to fruition around the nation.”

We’ll just pile that on to the other seventeen trillion gas-inducing beans we’re already buried in. But hey, maybe it’ll help the energy crisis.

And, as with any other federally funded program, this one also has strings attached: Rejecting the program will result in school districts “losing partial reimbursements for the cost of food served to students receiving reduced-price or free food.”

Now I don’t know about your child, but mine is a Langolier. She eats everything in sight. Half a chicken patty, a few carrots, and an apple aren’t enough juice for her tank. Heck, I couldn’t survive long on that little intake. In Michelle Obama’s zeal for reducing the obesity levels of our children, she just may be inadvertently causing two even worse problems: mushrooming obesity levels, thanks to increased consumption of junk food brought from home, and nation-wide malnutrition. Way to go, Big Sis.