Nutrition and Obesity—What’s Ahead for School Food?
February 27, 2004
Nutrition and Obesity--What's Ahead for School Food?
Doctors who gave physical examinations to young draftees during World War II were surprised to find that many of the men were severely and chronically malnourished. They were children during the Great Depression, and some remembered having being sent to school with a slice of bread, or less, for lunch. Indignant that so many American children had grown up ill-fed, Congress responded by enacting a new law, the National School Lunch Act, signed into law by President Truman in 1946, which offered federal financial assistance to school districts to provide hot lunches to children. The law and its regulations also mandated what a federally reimbursable school lunch should contain, requirements that remain in place with some modifications today.
Recently, debate about the content of those lunches involves concerns about overweight and obesity in the early years of life. Social programs enacted in the 1950s and 1960s, have changed the picture of poverty and malnutrition--children are no longer gaunt, but a great many of them, poor and affluent alike, are now too fat, a condition with equally serious implications for personal and public health.
The school food program that has evolved in the past 60 years is a massive and complex undertaking—in fiscal year 2004 alone, Congress appropriated and transferred more than $11.4 billion "for necessary expenses to carry out the National School Lunch Act." That money not only pays part of the cost of most lunches served at school, it also buys, distributes, and processes commodities such as flour, ground beef, and potatoes that eventually appear on school menus. And the school lunch program is the major recipient of "donated" commodities—surplus foods that the government is obligated to buy in order to support market prices. These federal contributions, coupled with the money students pay for lunches, are the only assets most school food programs have; it is rare for states or school districts to contribute to the cost of school lunch.
The National School Lunch Program is directed and regulated by the Food and Nutrition Service in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but it is administered by states through state school food authorities, which are responsible for transmitting requests for reimbursement to the federal government, and for distributing state allocations of commodities.
The meals for which schools can claim federal reimbursement must meet specific nutrition standards. The "Type A lunch" mandated in 1946 and still pretty much in place requires schools to offer children five food items from four food components—a serving of meat or meat alternative, a bread or bread alternative, two different fruits or vegetables, and fluid milk. That pattern meets most nutrition recommendations, including the Dietary Guidelines, and the rules now allow enhanced amounts of the fruit/vegetable and grain/bread components. In the most recent development in meal planning, it's now possible for schools to buy computer software that analyzes the nutrient content of foods and enables the menu planner to adjust portion sizes and food components as needed.
An important part of the school food program has nothing to do with meal components. School food also runs a welfare program—the "free and reduced-price" school meal. Under that program, the school food service invites parents to complete forms detailing their incomes and resources, and then applies federal poverty guidelines to determine whether children are entitled to eat free or at a reduced price. The federal government reimburses schools in full for the free meals they serve. The membership organization for school food, the American School Food Service Association (ASFSA) has lobbied for "universal free school lunch," arguing that the bookkeeping involved in free-and-reduced meals costs more than it would cost to give everyone a free meal. Those proposals have always met opposition from members of Congress who insist that "middle-class parents" should pay for their children's lunches.
School food sometimes encounters other high-level political pressures. There was the example of whole milk--school food managers who had worked hard to convert children to drinking skim and low-fat milk with their meals were distressed several years ago to be required by congresspersons from dairy states to put whole milk back in the refrigerated section along with the skim.
Regulatory pressure, when it comes at the federal level, is usually in the form of recommendations by the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS). As an example, FNS in the 1980s and 1990s began urging schools to reduce fat in their meals and to emphasize the "food pyramid" with its stress on grains and breads.
But the pressures most school food programs face these days are likely to be not legislative or regulatory, but societal. In a culture where fast food establishments are ubiquitous and fast food is many youngsters' idea of what's fit to eat, school cafeterias that want to keep their customers feel they have to offer choices, even at elementary school level--and many of those choices may bear a close resemblance to fast food. The ultimate move in that direction is the introduction into school cafeterias of franchises that sell pizza, hamburgers, or other fast foods a la carte. Those foods are not subject to the federal government's requirements for nutrition content and receive no reimbursement, but franchises can be profitable for a school, which usually contracts to receive a portion of the sales.
The same interest in raising revenues may drive a school to install soft drink-dispensing machines, sometimes with exclusive "pouring rights" for a specific manufacturer. By regulation, schools that participate in the National School Lunch Program are required to turn the machines off or otherwise prevent sales during lunch periods—which may be most of the day in some overcrowded schools—but this rule is not widely adhered to.
At the same time that they try to accommodate students' preferences for fast food, school food programs often reflect new thinking about diet and nutrition—salad bars are now a fixture in most school cafeterias, and there is more emphasis on fruits and vegetables in menus. Ethnic foods are widely available, and many schools have parent or student "tasting panels" that preview new food introductions.
How the tension between more healthful menus and the appeal of fast foods plays out is probably crucial to current efforts to reduce overweight and obesity in young people. Researchers who analyzed daily food intake reported in a recent issue of the journal Pediatrics that they found measurable weight gains in children who ate fast food.
The National School Lunch Program is permanently authorized and does not need to be reauthorized periodically, but other child nutrition laws are expiring this year, and debate in Congress is expected to include the lunch program. Lawmakers have indicated that they are concerned to know whether a program that helped eliminate childhood hunger is now contributing to overweight and obesity in children.
Check websites www.fns.usda.gov/fns (Food and Nutrition Service) and www.asfsa.org (American School Food Service Association) for current information about the National School Lunch Program. For a recent survey of parent and teacher attitudes about school food, click on the Center for Health and Health Care in Schools website at Overweight Survey Results.
What to Do
The director of a school food program may be the least well-known person on the school staff. Find out who it is, and ask to talk. Offer support for menu changes or improvements in service. Make clear that you know about the fiscal and other constraints the program faces.
Communicate with your members of Congress about the federal program—is the Type A lunch still a valid requirement, for example?
Vote with your feet—a child who brings lunch from home is a customer and reimbursement lost to the school food program, and if you have strong preferences for what your child eats at lunchtime, the school food service director is probably eager to hear them.