Dear readers,

    Just as the conductor announced, “Stand clear of the closing doors,” I was able to hop onto an uptown subway in the city and slide onto one of the orange and yellow benches. Still trying to catch my breath from the run, I heard the door leading to the adjacent car open and slam shut. I looked up and saw a young boy with a string hanging around the back of his neck. At the end of the rope was a tray. The tray, pressed against his stomach and supported by the rope and his hands, was full of bags of candy. He then started speaking. He was a little shy, but his speech was well rehearsed. He was selling the food on the tray to raise money for the public elementary school that he attended. The school needed funds to support a basketball trip it had planned. While I had seen older people selling the same thing on the subway before, this was the first time I had seen a child selling good for fundraising.

    School fundraisers were the most common way we raised money for certain projects or events for student clubs.

    Of all the different types of fundraising, though, an all-time favorite was probably bake sales. Who doesn’t enjoy a delicious chocolate cookie after a long day at school when you can practically taste the sweet, melting, oven-fresh cookie from halfway down the hall.

    Bake sales are a pillar fundraiser for a few reasons. First, they require little capital to host. Most of the time, our table would be full of goods to sell if each club member just brought one platter of homemade desserts. Second, the process is simple and not very time-consuming. Advanced preparation is minimal, the space needed is no bigger than the size of a collapsible table, and the cleanup is quick. The third reason bake sales work is because everyone loves small, affordable treats.

    My good memories of bake sales would be more pleasant if I didn’t have to think about the health implications of all the excessive, unhealthy ingredients that could be in the baked goods. I recently read that a federal law now imposes new requirements for bake sales. Specifically, it requires food sold during bake sales to meet nutritional standards.

    For those homemade goods, for example, the new law may be limiting since nutritional facts can be hard to determine. The appeal of bake sales as an easy and time-efficient fundraiser may be lost if there is a tedious approval process for foods. Finally, can the initial good intentions of the law be reached in spite of the regulations? It will take time to see how the enforcement and theoretical pros and cons play out. Until then, it seems like eating healthy is still up to us. Don’t we all want to keep the cookies but not the calories?

    Sincerely,

    BingyinLi Bingyin is studying finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University.