One of the strongest parts of Lawrence Lessig's campaign to change Congress is that Congress keeps on proving that it needs to be changed.

Today's case in point is a congressional conference committee's actions to undercut healthier nutrition standards in the school lunch program, solely because corporations asked them to. The Obama administration had proposed in January to make it harder for school districts to obtain subsidies if they serve junk food such as prepackaged pizza and prepackaged French fries every day. Absolutely no one — except the industries that profit from their sales and, now, the members of Congress who have been bought them — would argue that those are healthy options that benefit the children or our country.

Just the fact of the proposal had already put better food on some students' plates. For the Boston Globe recently, I wrote about one school district that had already made significant changes toward serving scratch cooking using more local food — students even grow some of it, just outside the cafeteria's windows. Said Manchester Essex (Mass.) Regional School District nutrition director Sheila Parisien: "The changes were instituted when the new state and fed guidelines were coming out [and we could see] what the future of school lunch was going to look like." (Note: The quote is an outtake from our conversation, and isn't in the story.)

Now, though the bill hasn't yet been signed yet, it appears that those changes aren't in its immediate future, because brave Congressional mavericks have planted their standard firmly in defense of prepackaged pizza and as many French fries as the nation's youngsters will gobble down. So what if a third of American youngsters are obese or overweight, and some of them are on a path to food addiction?

My first reaction is to disgustedly dismiss industry's congressional lackeys as a bunch of assholes, but I can also see this act as an unwitting cry for help from addicts who are too far gone to know what's best. There is nothing, apparently, that these "representatives" won't sell out on as long as their drug (money) continues to flow. They need — we need — an intervention.