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Agriculture Department to Scale Back Stringent School-Lunch Requirements

By Tony Mecia

The Agriculture Department is scaling back some of the Obama administration’s most aggressive nutrition rules for school lunches, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said Monday at a Virginia elementary school.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported last month that schools have had a hard time meeting the Obama-era regulations, which took effect in 2012. The rules impose stringent federal restrictions on sodium and mandate whole grains and additional fruits and vegetables. Not only does this create lots of wasted food, it causes kids to skip meals and go hungry (thus not living entirely up to the name of Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act), school officials said.

One study showed that more than half of vegetables on students’ trays wound up in the trash, and youth obesity levels have not improved.

Perdue said Monday that the Agriculture Department would hold off on imposing tighter restrictions on sodium, which were due to take effect this summer, and that it would direct states to provide some flexibility to schools that have trouble meeting requirements for whole grains. In addition, he said he would work to re-introduce 1 percent flavored milk back into schools. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas), who also attended the event at Catoctin Elementary School in Leesburg, Va., said the moves are an important first step toward giving school districts flexibility in planning healthy meals and that Congress would follow up with legislation.

The rules created all sorts of unintended consequences, TWS reported:

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.” … 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.

The easing of federal sodium restrictions in school lunches could even be described as based in science, as recent studies have started questioning the health benefits of low-sodium diets.

For the record, if Perdue and Roberts ate cafeteria food with students, they feasted on the following options, according to the Loudoun County Public Schools’ menu: a choice of chicken bites with golden baked breadsticks or mini cheese calzones with dipping sauce; steamed sunshine carrots; fresh five-veggie salad; and a choice of chilled applesauce or fresh orange wedges

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