| In an expected and mostly uncontroversial move, the USDA just proposed new nutrition standards for school lunch. These are the rules that govern ONLY the food given out in the actual "school lunch" (i.e. what kids who are eligible for free or reduced cost lunch get) and not the a la carte items available in the lunch line or in vending machines. (There will be rules on the a la carte items but they are coming later.) You might have read the excellent piece about the new standards by Ed Bruske earlier this week, but if not, here's the quick and dirty on what the new rules require.
The new rules add maximum calorie limits to meals for the first time, gradually reduce sodium over 10 years (eventually reducing it by more than half), ban most trans fats, require more servings of fruits and vegetables, require all milk is low fat or nonfat and that all flavored milks are nonfat, and require more whole grains. Additionally, for breakfasts, schools must serve both a grain and a protein instead of one or the other. My favorite change is that the new rules require more variety in the vegetables served during the week. In other words, french fries served 5 days a week won't cut it. You'll have to serve something orange, something green, and some beans too.
However, these rules do NOT address sugar or - perhaps more significantly - added sugar. They also take no action to ban or limit chocolate milk or other flavored milks. Surely, if they had done either of those things, the rules would be more controversial than they are now. Rather than banning flavored milks outright, I think a limit on added sugars would be a good idea (with the understanding that the entire meal including flavored milk should not exceed the added sugar limit). My only worry is that a limit on added sugars would result in an increase of artificial sweeteners in school lunches.
To hear a pretty mainstream reaction to these proposed rules, you can hear an interview of the School Nutrition Association's Vice President-Elect on the radio show AgriTalk. It's a pretty simple interview with no real controversy, as you will hear. Perhaps the most significant and interesting point in the interview is the idea that parents can help by introducing their kids to homecooked foods and more types of veggies at home so that they will be more likely to eat them at school. (As Bruske notes, the kids often dump their veggies in the trash.)
All in all, I don't expect these rules to make too much of a difference in the quality of school food. The rule changes are a good thing, of course, and certainly a step in the right direction, but they are being adopted without providing the schools very much in the way of additional resources to meet the new requirements or to make any other perhaps more significant changes, like increasing the amount of whole foods or decreasing the amount of pre-processed foods that is merely defrosted, heated, and served. Those changes would require more training, labor, supplies, and equipment in addition to, of course, buying the actual food - and all of that takes money. Money is, of course, the one thing that the recently passed Child Nutrition Reauthorization did not provide. (To be accurate, the bill did provide an additional 6 cents per lunch, but that's nothing compared to what's needed.)
If you want to read the rules or submit comments to the government on the proposed rule changes, you can do so here. (If the link doesn't work, it's Regulations.gov with the Docket Number FNS-2007-0038-0001.) |
