There’s something perverse about a city that deems it wise to distribute instructional pamphlets in health centers aimed at teaching young people to shoot heroin properly into their veins — then bans homemade cupcakes and vegan tofu brownies from sales at school cafeterias.

There’s a freaky quality to a high school where you can get free condoms, but not fresh banana bread. Or a kindergarten that offers books about acquiring AIDS or promoting the wedded union of Harry and Steve — where you can buy Stacy’s Cinnamon Sugar Pita Chips and Cool Ranch Dorito’s. But Toll House cookies like grandma used to make are forbidden.

This is not satire or wacky science fiction. This is New York, circa 2010.

And the demonic nannies who run the joint have decided that your aunt’s famous carrot cake — not sex, drugs or hydrogenated oil — will kill you.

There was nary an ounce of fat present at City Hall last week, as several hundred sleek and preservative-free parents and designer tots showed up for a “Bake-In” to protest the Department of Education’s latest boneheaded attempt to keep kids slim.

Carrying signs reading “Joel Klein, Get Out of the Pantry,” the first muffins were launched in the war between a hip, nutritionally sophisticated crowd, and the education ignoramuses they say are threatening kids’ health and bankrupting school bake sales.

“We don’t wanna eat junk!” said Cassius Easton, 6.

“It’s dire,” said Helen Greenberg of Community School in the East Village.

“I’m the organic popcorn lady. At $1 a bag, I funded the sugar cane trays we want to replace Styrofoam lunch trays!”

Take that. The department opposes recyclable materials!

The lunacy behind the fight pitting Mom and apple pie vs. pre-packaged Pop-Tarts stems from a new department rule that’s aimed at reducing fat and calories. The school mafia has ordered that homemade goods can be sold just once a month — and not near the cafeteria. This is based on the belief that snacks bearing printed calorie counts on packages are superior to potentially caloric treats. The move has decimated the bake sales schools use to raise money for things like trips and art supplies at a time of budget cuts.

But what the city is really saying is this: We don’t trust you to raise your kids.

Or rather: We don’t trust people of certain racial and economic makeups to raise their kids.

So it was disheartening that last week’s Bake-In was limited to parents from downtown Manhattan and Queens, folks who have access to and funds for nutritious food. But there was not one attendee from Crown Heights or Harlem, the city’s obesity belt.

Schools should teach good eating, not push kids to preservative-packed junk. Various private organizations have cropped up, devoted to bringing fresh food and produce into neighborhoods that lack Whole Foods. Seeds in the Middle in Crown Heights, which I profiled recently, sells food at a discount in PS 91. This should be encouraged, not banned.

But make no mistake. It is control, not good health, that government craves most. For years, the city has pushed an agenda of sexual permissiveness and AIDS education on its youngest kids. This is the first time officials have gone for the stomach.

Fortunately, after an outcry, no new pamphlets promoting heroin use will be distributed in Health Department facilities in the next fiscal year. One down.

Now bring back the bake sales.

SUCCESS GETS ‘EM BY THE BAWLS

I’m no shrink. But the world of happily ever after has been upended of late by men who have no trouble committing — just not to women above their pay grades.

The madonna-whore cliché is alive and well. Tiger Woods scratched an itch that could be salved only by humiliating his goddess wife with a cast of interchangeable, sexting skanks. Maureen Dowd won a Pulitzer, but lost an actor. Kate Winslet took home an Oscar, while her hubby cavorted with a gal younger and needier.

Now Sandra Bullock, fresh from her Academy Award win, is the latest lady hit below the belt — by hubby Jesse James, who found a tattooed woman easier to grab onto than America’s sweetheart. Plus, the bimbo comes with printed instructions.

How tough is it to be a man, what with all these babes eager to dry your tears when the little woman makes good? Do something original. Grow up.



Aw, Gloria, lib a little!

Feminism, unlike politics and the circus, is sorely lacking in fresh talent.

The grandma of fem lib, Gloria Steinem, is 76 and bitter. In an interview with Reuters, the onetime (undercover) Playboy Bunny griped that chicks have yet to come a long way, baby — ignoring the fact that we’ve made mammoth strides in positions from law to secretary of state.

Steinem sticks to the old saw that gals only make 70 cents to a man’s dollar. That statistic was demolished several years ago when studies, conveniently ignored, found that young women make roughly the same as men. Older ones only lag after stepping away from the rat race, by choice, to have kids.

Saying she won’t see a female president, Steinem makes the sweeping generalization that “female authority is still associated with a domestic setting.” She doesn’t know me. I’m an expert in ordering in, but lack the talent to boil an egg.

Admit you’ve won, Gloria. Though I sincerely regret my lack of domestic skills.

Hit cabbies with pain of de-feet

Taxi victims — unite!

Two readers suggested a method for ripped-off riders to recover some of the money we overpaid to drivers who, for years, revved up their meters. Stop tipping.

When your taxi driver protests that he’s starving in the absence of that extra buck, tell him you’re just taking back what was extorted from your wallet. Problem is, this method punishes the good guys along with the creeps.

I think I’ll use the passive-aggressive approach: my feet.



Arrogance of scrape-and-sue pol

Stupidity pays. At least that’s what Brooklyn Councilwoman Letitia James is banking on, as this woman of the people presses a lawsuit based on her senior moment.

In July, David Day parked his truck on the street — legally. James rolled in behind him and, walking between the vehicles, scraped her leg on his truck hitch. So she’s suing.

James brings down $122,500 annually from taxpayers. Day makes a tenth of that. He wrote to his tormentor: “You are famous and powerful while I’m a nobody without means who has done you no harm.”

See ya in court.