The marquee on the large golden arches sign on Route 37 was talking to all the local teenagers in Toms River: "H.S. STUDENTS: LUNCH AVAILABLE AT 9:30 A.M.!" It's one of the older signs, with a giant "M" as the entire sign, anchored to the ground. It's Americana, an old McDonald's sign like that.

And they're trying to kill off the kids before they graduate from college. Seriously now, what benefit does serving lunch beginning at 9:30 a.m. serve other than a way to make a buck, to get more high school kids in earlier? I remember getting hungry during third period in high school, but I wasn't ready for a cheeseburger then. (I might be able to eat one now, but not one from McDonald's. I'm talking about grillin' 'em up, ideally on a small portable grill behind a parked car in a field with a beer in hand and a football stadium in the distance.) Granted, with high school days beginning as early as 7 a.m., which I believe they do in some places, if lunch periods are still staggered (as they were at my school) starting with fourth period, then some kids are eating at 10:30. There's also the possibility of unstructured study halls and, depending on the school, the likelihood that students � or at least seniors � are allowed to leave campus. But 10:30 is when many McDonald's switch over to lunch anyway, so are they really getting that much more out of an extra hour?

Kids have enough trouble eating well to begin with, and while offering lunch at 9:30 a.m. and specifically targeting high school students may be a sound business decision, it's not a very responsible one for the community. I wonder if any parents objected, if any school officials had a comment. While it's still ridiculous to claim McDonald's is to blame for making people fat, it's another for the chain � or, at least, a franchise � to make a policy change that promotes unhealthy habits. Blaming the corporation for making people fat is absurd because nobody forced those people to go there in the first place, and nobody forced them to order the unhealthiest, fattest things on the menu. And I'm sure those people were eating Big Macs and fries more than Egg McMuffins and Hot Cakes, which in most restaurants is what you get when you walk in at 9:30 a.m.

It may appear like I am contradicting myself here, but in my mind I'm not and if I can come up with a better way of explaining myself, I will. In the case of the lawsuits, I laugh at the people who went to McDonald's five times a week and then became surprised when they got fat. But high school kids have routines, especially once they reach driving age. Especially in New Jersey's affluent communities, you can take any four high school students, and the odds are pretty good that one of them has a car and picks other students up on the way in. And I'm sure many of them get together during free periods and shoot off-campus for lunch, whether they're allowed to or not. By offering crappy lunch food (any talk of bad food at McDonald's excludes the fries, because they are good, dammit, I don't care what you say) at an earlier time, I just think you're becoming an enabler.