Over the last few years, the meals being served in schools have generated a lot of negative attention.  Whether you’ve watched it exposed on television with Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution or have listened to the First Lady speak about it, the chances are high that you’ve at least heard about school lunches being blamed for contributing to our youth’s obesity epidemic.  Although it may be easy to blame the schools or the infamous lunch ladies, the problem of low quality school lunches is much more complex.  The National School Lunch Program’s foundation, including its funding sources, nutrition standards and meal requirements, needs to be looked at to understand why schools have been compromising the quality of their food.

HISTORY OF THE NATIONAL SCHOOL LUNCH PROGRAM

Before we can assess the quality of the program, let’s first take a look at what it stands for. The federally funded National School Lunch Program (NSLP) was founded in 1946 to provide a “measure of national security, to safeguard the health and well-being of the nation’s children”.[i]  At that time, the major nutritional concerns were nutrient deficiencies that linked to common illnesses such as scurvy and rickets.

The program serves more than 30 million children per day and has provided more than 219 billion lunches since its inception. While diet and health information have come a long way in the last 65 years, the NSLP has been updated a mere three times.[ii] Its latest update in January 2011 (15 years following the previous update) announced plans to serve better food to help fight childhood obesity.

DIETARY GUIDELINES

So what are the nutritional standards of your children’s school lunch?  The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) guidelines provide the blueprint of all federal nutrition programs and are supposed to represent the most current and sound scientific information available.

By law, school lunches are to abide by the USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans.  For the last 15 years, the guidelines recommended each meal should have no more than 30 percent of its calories coming from fat and less than 10 percent from saturated fat. In addition, the meal had to provide one-third of the Recommended Dietary Allowances of protein, vitamin A, vitamin C, iron, calcium, and calories. Decisions about what food to serve and how that food is prepared are made by local school food authorities,[iii] operating under budget constraints, varying kitchen capacities and limited food choices.

The newest updates are seeking to address the country’s obesity epidemic by limiting the amount of calories and sodium contained in each meal schools serve.iii Some of the specifics include:

• Establishing the first calorie limits for school meals.
• Gradually reducing the amount of sodium in the meals over 10 years.
• Banning most trans fats.
• Requiring more servings of fruits and vegetables.
• Requiring all milk served to be low fat or nonfat, and require all flavored milks to be nonfat.
• Incrementally increasing the amount of whole grains served; eventually requiring most grains to be whole grains.

As a nutrition professional, I find that high-sugar chocolate milk being deemed more acceptable than natural, vitamin-rich whole milk is a step backwards.  Scarier is what serves as a whole grain in this context. We’re not talking about quinoa, wild rice and oats. Under the revised guidelines, enriched bread, pasta, pancakes or anything that has at least 51% of a whole-grain product makes the grade.[iv]

GOVERNMENT FUNDING AND FOOD COST

The majority of costs to provide meals to students are provided through government funding.  Schools that choose to take part in the lunch program get cash subsidies and donated commodities from the USDA.  In return, they must serve lunches that meet federal requirements and they must offer free or reduced price lunches to eligible children.

The government currently pays schools in 48 contiguous states between $2.32 and $2.89 for each lunch they serve through the program. Schools fully utilize those funds to pay for the food costs, labor and storage.  If we think solely about the cost of quality food, two to three dollars doesn’t seem like enough to cover the costs. And for most schools, it’s not.

Additional resources can be fond in at the links below.

• Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/12/13/president-first-lady-child-nutrition-bill-basic-nutrition-they-need-learn-and-grow-a
• Chefs Move to Schools: http://healthymeals.nal.usda.gov/nal_display/index.php?info_center=14&tax_level=1&tax_subject=225
• School Nutrition Association: http://www.schoolnutrition.org/LegislativeAction.aspx
• Farm to School: http://www.farmtoschool.org/

This article is not intended for the treatment or prevention of disease, nor as a substitute for medical treatment, nor as an alternative to medical advice. Use of recommendations in this and other articles is at the choice and risk of the reader.