Oh, what Bridget O’Brien Wood could do if the government allowed her just a little more salt. She could serve potato salad that isn’t bland. She could experiment with curry sauces. And O’Brien Wood, food service director with Buffalo Public Schools, could finally tell parents that the French fries at lunch taste like the ones their kids gobble up at restaurants.
As it is, O’Brien Wood finds herself in a pickle: She has to serve foods that Buffalo’s schoolchildren will eat, but in a way that complies with strict federal nutrition standards intended to combat childhood obesity.
Those standards have forced her and her colleagues to get creative. Not all attempts have worked. When they serve whole-grain spaghetti with meat sauce, some students eat only the meat sauce. When they brought in a local chef to prepare shepherd’s pie that met the requirements by including turnips and other root vegetables, most kids wouldn’t touch it. Fruit, salad bars, and potatoes have been hits. But other veggies, like oven-baked sweet potato fries, are a tough sell because of clampdowns on sodium.
“You put a little salt on something, they’ll eat it,” she says. “The vegetables are the new challenge. Just that little bit of extra salt makes all the difference in the world.”
Around the country, school officials are contending with the effects of the regulations—effects that differ from the ones policymakers intended when the rules went into force five years ago. Some teachers have said students return from lunch hungry. Administrators say they’re concerned with wasted food. And though it’s early in this grand experiment to improve the dietary habits of the country’s children, there’s little proof that it is actually accomplishing its goals. For all the work done in Washington to ensure healthy food is served on school cafeteria trays—and there are pages upon pages of regulations, menu guides, and Department of Agriculture interpretations—policymakers have still not figured out what most parents learn the hard way: You can’t force picky eaters to consume food they find unappealing.
“It’s not nutritious,” O’Brien Wood says, “if they never eat it.”
The food fight could be about to get messy, ahead of even more stringent restrictions on sodium levels due to kick in this summer. Congress has debated relaxing the rules in the last few years, but previous efforts failed against Obama administration opposition. The issue seems to be small potatoes to the Trump administration, which hasn’t taken a stand. But interest groups are weighing in. On one side are health advocates, including anti-hunger groups and the American Heart Association, who want the regulations maintained. On the other side, though, are groups on the front lunch lines of the healthy-eating battle: trade groups representing school boards, school superintendents, and school-meal planners. They hope to undo some of the mandates while saying they support the larger health goals.
It’s part of a continuing struggle pitting local control against the strings that come with taking federal money. Lunch menus are the latest way that schools are being asked to shoulder greater responsibility for thorny societal issues, much as they have been enlisted in efforts to combat teen pregnancy, drug use, and racial housing patterns.
Although some states and local districts have been running lunch programs for more than a century, federal school lunches trace their roots to the Great Depression. The Agriculture Department bought crops to prop up farm prices and sent the food to schools. In 1946, seeking to provide some stability to fluctuating crop purchases, Congress provided consistent money to states to help them establish school lunch programs.
By 2010, the federal school lunch program had grown into a $10 billion colossus feeding 32 million schoolchildren, two-thirds of whom were poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price meals. Pushed by first lady Michelle Obama as part of her campaign against childhood obesity, the Democratic Congress pumped $4.5 billion more into the program and laid the groundwork for updated nutritional standards. Any school that accepts federal lunch money has to abide by the healthy food rules.
“When our kids spend so much of their time each day in school, and when many children get up to half their daily calories from school meals, it’s clear that we as a nation have a responsibility to meet as well,” Michelle Obama said at the bill’s signing ceremony, adding, in a line that rankled conservative commentators, “We can’t just leave it up to the parents.”
When the Agriculture Department released its proposed nutrition rules the following year, local school lunch planners found them a tough nut to crack. The new regulations all but outlawed desserts, required all grains be whole grains, sharply cut sodium levels, made fruits or vegetables mandatory, and imposed calorie limits on meals. Some schools couldn’t figure out how they could possibly make it all palatable.
“Kids will eat only the foods they like, regardless,” wrote one food-service manager in Wichita, Kansas, in response to the new rules. “I think we do an excellent job of finding that balance between what a student will eat and what we offer. . . . Please do NOT make my job even harder than it already is with your high ideas and no way to implement them in a way that will work. I know I am just a little food service manager who you think knows nothing—but words are easy to say and very easy to make into law. Forcing kids to eat green broccoli is not easy at all!!!!”
Since the rules took effect in 2012, results seem mixed at best. Pro-regulation groups report, anecdotally, that in some cases, children are trying the new, healthier foods. A handful of small studies have found that students are putting more fruits and vegetables on their trays—which is unsurprising, because that is now required—but it is unclear whether overall consumption is up. One of those studies revealed that more than half of the vegetables on student trays wind up in the trash.
A 2014 poll by the Pew Charitable Trusts and other organizations favoring the Obama childhood health initiatives found that 72 percent of parents favor some kind of nutritional standards for school meals. A 2015 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, though, found “no change in obesity prevalence” in comparing the years before the new standards took effect with those after. (About 17 percent of U.S. youth are obese.) Crystal FitzSimons with the Food Research & Action Center says it is too soon to draw meaningful conclusions: “It does take time to get kids to change their habits, but it’s an important shift.”
Another shift taking place since the new standards and resulting higher costs went into force: fewer lunches and fewer students served. Students taking heavily subsidized free and reduced-price lunches are up slightly, while the number of students buying lightly subsidized “paid lunches” is down by one-fifth since 2012. Experts say that’s because the nutritional standards have driven up costs on food that paying students won’t buy. Some school districts are choosing to forgo the meager federal cafeteria subsidies on these lunches, freeing themselves from the nutritional standards and allowing them to offer lunches they can more easily sell. As a result, wealthier students are less likely to buy their lunches in a federally subsidized, healthy-food cafeteria than ever before. A record 73 percent of students participating in the federal school lunch program were eligible for free and reduced-price lunches in 2016, according to Agriculture Department data. In 1969, the figure was 15 percent.
Around the country, schools are confronting a lot of challenges springing from the rules and are suggesting ways to make the standards more palatable. Diane Pratt-Heavner, spokeswoman for the School Nutrition Association, says the requirement for whole grains has led to some nontraditional takes on regional dishes, such as whole-wheat tortillas in the Southwest and whole-wheat biscuits in the South. She says her organization’s members would like the “flexibility to offer a white tortilla or white rice.”
Louise Radloff, school board chair of the Gwinnett County Public Schools outside Atlanta, says she sees kids “simply as hungry as they can be because they are not eating exactly what the lunchroom people are preparing.” She says she’s struck when she walks into churches and community organizations, and children are eating macaroni and cheese or Beefaroni. “I wonder how many of the folks in D.C. would like to eat the food without the seasoning and the salt,” she says.
In 2015, the president of the board of trustees of the Blackford County school system, south of Fort Wayne, Ind., testified to Congress that some students in his district “have been caught bringing—and even selling—salt, pepper, and sugar in school to add taste to perceived bland and tasteless cafeteria food.” He said some parents even check their kids out from school during lunch and take them home or to a fast-food restaurant to eat.
In Buffalo, O’Brien Wood says she doesn’t know what the solution is. She’d just like the freedom to spice up a menu that’s becoming “a little monotonous.”
“I know the good intention is there, that we want children to grow up and live healthy lives,” she says. “I get it. But if the goal was to get kids to eat more vegetables, we are having a hard time.”
Tony Mecia is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
