Will Ferrell Offers Himself to Michelle Obama's 'Let's Move' PR Campaign

February 25th, 2014 7:48 AM

As part of the ongoing public-relations campaign to define First Lady Michelle Obama as cool even as she lectures the kids to eat their vegetables, Will Ferrell offered himself as a co-star in a YouTube video. It’s pitched as a focus group of kids asked about the favorite fruits and vegetables, and their favorite dance moves.

Ferrell tries to crack up the kids by asking if diet cola is a vegetable and asking if you eat a sound diet all week, you can spend your Sunday eating only candy. When the kids chant “no,” Ferrell says he’s done that for two years. The video is below:

Krissah Thompson at The Washington Post reported on this and underlined:

Obama and [Secretary of Agriculture Tom] Vilsack also plan to unveil a study that shows 90 percent of school districts are complying with the federal government’s tougher nutritional standards for school lunches, for which the first lady lobbied. Studies by USDA showed that as recently as 2007, fewer than a quarter of school districts met the government’s standards....

The high compliance rate comes with an asterisk: Some of the federal nutrition standards will not go into effect until the 2014-15 school year. For the next academic year, elementary schools will need to lower sodium levels to 1,230 milligrams at lunch to meet nutrition standards. By the 2022-23 school year, the sodium must be down to 640 milligrams during lunch. By this coming academic year, schools will need to meet a new standard for whole grains: The primary ingredient, whether in bread or pasta, must be whole grain. That means no white bread, no white-flour pasta and no white rice. For the past two academic years, schools could meet the nutrition standard if only half of the products were majority whole grain.