I broke some bad news to my children last week: Their days of eating Fruit Loops and Lucky Charms cereal for breakfast could be numbered.

Shocked, they immediately demanded to know why.

Apparently Oklahoma Senate lawmakers hate rainbows, Toucan Sam, and colorful marshmallows. They’ve decided to use their valuable and limited time this session to declare war on the manufacturers of popular children’s foods and diet soda.

Our legislators are merrily chugging along with a plan that they believe will force manufacturers to ban 21 different food and color additives in foods, drinks and medications. Some of those are found in our family’s favorite foods – and I bet yours, too.

Republicans are convinced that banning these 21 “dangerous” ingredients — including aspartame which is found in diet sodas and sugar products and blue, green, red and yellow dyes, which are in many popular children’s cereals — will force food companies to change their business model.

Rather than leaning on the Trump administration to force these changes at a national level – and all these Republicans are following the lead of California’s Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom on food dyes –  it turns out some of our lawmakers are so arrogant that they believe that giant corporations will change their recipes just because a state that makes up less than 1% of our nation’s consumers says they must.

More likely if Senate Bill 4 becomes law, these companies will just stop selling their foods here, meaning Oklahomans will have less to choose from at the grocery store, which will allow the remaining manufacturers to drive up prices on everything that’s left.

This is hardly the first time our legislators have insultingly tried to force feed us their beliefs about nutrition. For some reason, year-after-year, our legislators find themselves embroiled in messy food fights that end with pies to the face.

Five years ago, lawmakers were battling businesses that produce non-dairy milk alternatives, trying to get them to remove the word “milk” from cartons and breast milk banks for any product that doesn’t come from hooved mammals.

As everyone was distracted having a good laugh over the notion of women having hooves, legislators quietly passed an ode to the meat industry called the “Oklahoma Meat Consumer Protection Act” that forbids labeling “alternative or fake meat products” as beef or pork.

Unsurprisingly, before their constituents could even stock up on a pack of Impossible burgers lawmakers got themselves sued by a Chicago company that produced meat-like products and the Plant Based Foods Association on the grounds that restricting labeling was a free speech violation and that it’s cost-prohibitive to change labels. In June, the case was dismissed without prejudice, meaning they can refile, due to lack of standing.

Why do our legislators treat us like children when it comes to determining what we should eat? Why do they have this notion that we’re so ignorant that we don’t know what we’re buying in the grocery store?

We know that buying plant-based burgers means it is not a food item originating from a cow. We know that soy milk comes from a soybean. We know that there’s a health risk to everything we put in our body, including fruits and vegetables treated with pesticides.

Food fights represent low-hanging fruit for our legislators and are a way to signal we’re paying attention to our agricultural industries, which hold huge political sway in our Capitol.

If only the Legislature would reach a little higher. Rather than spending so much time fighting over what to put in our bodies, they should focus on the fact that hundreds of thousands of Oklahomans are struggling to find any food to put in their bodies.

Over 15% of Oklahoma households are food insecure, according to Hunger Free Oklahoma.

Feeding America reports that nearly 1 in 4 Oklahoma children faces hunger.

Lawmakers, meanwhile, continue to resist calls to spend money to ensure that all children have access to free lunches at schools, and our leaders have refused to participate in a federal summer feeding program that would provide $40 per child per month to help feed low-income children.

Our state continues to struggle with food deserts, which are defined as areas where Oklahomans don’t have easy access to healthy, affordable foods.

Yet we’re spending our days arguing about whether Fruit Loops and Lucky Charms are safe to eat. Sugary cereal is better than no cereal.

There’s a saying that new mothers are told in the hospital: “Fed is best.” A baby must be fully nourished to achieve the best outcomes.

That’s a lesson that shouldn’t stop the moment a child celebrates their first birthday.

My kids understand that. Too bad Oklahoma lawmakers don’t.