To the Teacher
This two-part lesson consists of two readings on the effort to improve the quality of food in school meals programs across the United States. The first reading provides an overview of recent changes to federal nutrition requirements and discusses an initiative to involve students in school menu decisions. The second reading touches on attempts at the local, state, and federal level to move toward using locally sourced food and preparing meals that are reflective of students’ cultural backgrounds. Questions for discussion follow each reading.
Reading One: The Challenges of Running The Biggest Restaurant in Town
In the years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an expansion of state and federal government programs that expand students’ access to school meals, some of which have made those meals free to all who come to school. While this has been a promising development, school nutrition directors who run their programs on tight budgets have continued to face an enduring problem: how to make meals that are both healthy and tasty for students.
Activists have long pushed to expand funding for the federal government’s National School Lunch Program, which was established in 1946 but has been consistently underfunded. Given this challenge, school staff with tight budgets have often prioritized low-cost, pre-made food that was increasingly marketed by corporate food manufacturers in the second half of the 20th century, and they have also catered to student tastes with items such as pizza and burgers.
In the past decade and a half, we have seen a renewed push to make school lunches more nutritious. In an April 2024 article for The New York Times, business reporter Julie Creswell described the recent history of school nutrition rules promoted by the federal government. Creswell wrote:
While far from perfect (cafeterias serve plenty of processed foods), school lunches are arguably much healthier than they were a few years ago, thanks to a signature program geared toward combating childhood obesity and championed by Michelle Obama when she was First Lady. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, passed in 2010, required schools to reduce the calories, fat and sodium in foods served in cafeterias and to increase offerings of whole grains, fruits, vegetables and nonfat milk.
The new regulations drew sharp criticism, however, and the Trump administration rolled back some of them, such as a prohibition on 1 percent chocolate milk. But last year, the Biden administration proposed updates that would gradually limit salt and sugar in school lunch foods in an attempt to meet federal dietary standards.
[In April 2024], the Agriculture Department made the new rules final after scaling back several provisions in the earlier proposal and shifting the start dates. Instead of gradually cutting sodium in lunch foods by a third from current levels by the fall of 2029, school cafeterias will have to cut sodium levels 15 percent by the 2027-28 academic year. And for the first time, schools will need to limit the amount of added sugars in cereals and yogurts, starting in the 2025-26 academic year….
Many nutritionists and health-policy watchdog groups say the new rules on sodium and sugar are important, with so many children struggling to have or make nutritious choices outside school….
“Nutrition standards, in general, are so contentious right now,” Meghan Maroney, the head of federal child nutrition programs for the [The Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group], said in an earlier interview. “But we have to do what the science says is best for kids’ health.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/25/business/school-lunches-salt-sugar-regulations.html]
While schools have worked to follow new guidelines, they have also needed to make sure students are willing to eat the food their cafeterias serve—lest school lunches end up “feeding the trash cans,” as one saying goes.
One potential solution to this dilemma is for staff to include students in the decision-making process around school meals. In a 2022 survey of 1,000 school students between the ages of 12-18, the food advocacy group, No Kid Hungry, found that 87 percent of the teens said they were more likely to eat cafeteria meals if their schools asked them for their input on those meals. Along similar lines, in a December 2024 article for Minnesota Star Tribune, education reporter Mara Klecke covered a Minnesota public school’s efforts at including students in their schools’ food preparation plans, noting that a local “school district is using student taste tests to determine what new foods to add to the menu.” Describing one session where students tasted prospective menu items, Klecke wrote:
The directions for the teenage taste-testers were simple: Be honest. Don’t cheat off each other. And be specific with feedback.
“Just telling me ‘this sucks’ or ‘this is disgusting’ won’t help me,” said Noah Atlas, the director of the child nutrition program for Anoka-Hennepin schools. “You all are my guests, and I need to know what you want to eat.” ....
Now, Atlas and his staff are looking to add some new flavors to the rotations. But he needs to make sure students will actually eat the food before he orders thousands of meals.
That’s why, on a recent morning, Atlas turned to the Coon Rapids High School culinary class for feedback. He passed out bite-sized portions of several different foods, including kielbasa on a bun, gyro with tzatziki sauce and chicken tikka masala. The students then rated each food on a detailed scorecard.
Among the winners:
- Chicken Wings - 80% approval
- Maple Chicken Sausage Breakfast Sandwich - 78% approval
- Turkey Kielbasa on a bun - 74% approval
- Chicken Caesar Salad with Homemade Dressing - 88% approval
The top-scoring items will then be tested as a meal choice later this school year. If enough students choose to buy it, it could earn a spot on the menu for next school year. Atlas said the Caesar salad earned a high enough approval rating to be added without further testing….
The class’s teacher, Aimee Halverson, said she loved seeing the students get involved in district decision making while also trying new foods from various cultures.
“I do think kids have a more sophisticated palate these days,” Halverson said. “And even if they don’t like it, it’s good that they’re trying new things.”...
“I think this is an awesome idea,” [Junior Devin Taylor] said after commenting that the gyro’s tzatziki sauce needed a tad more dill. “It works way better to actually ask us our opinions than to just say, ‘Oh, they’ll probably like this.’”
In a move that could assist in the spread of such programs, the state of Minnesota recently put into place a law that would ensure that the costs of meals are covered for all students who come to school on a given day. Providing more money for cafeterias allows schools to update equipment, buy higher quality food, and hire more staff to prepare food from scratch. States, however, also depend on federal funding for their cafeteria operations. The change in administration now taking place in Washington will mean that both the future of nutritional standards and federal investment in school meals may be called into question.
For Discussion:
- How much of the material in this reading was new to you, and how much was already familiar? Do you have any questions about what you read? What personal connections, thoughts, or feelings did you have about what you read?
- According to the reading, what challenges do schools face when trying to create food that is both nutritious and that tastes good?
- One proposed solution to improve school meals is to include students’ input in menu decisions. What do you think of this idea?
- Drawing on your own experience and outside information, can you think of any additional ways in which schools can work to provide better meals for their students? How might you approach this challenge if you were administering your school’s cafeteria?
Reading Two: Schools Experiment With New Ways to Do School Lunch
Providing high-quality school meals on a limited budget is a problem that is not easy to solve. However, there are a variety of different experiments that students, families, and educators can look to for inspiration.
For one, schools in the United States can draw lessons from how other countries approach school meal programs. In a May 2024 op-ed for The Guardian, professors Jennifer Gaddi and Sarah Robert, discussed how nations such as Brazil and South Korea have made strides in using better ingredients in their school meals:
Since the pandemic, the USDA has ramped up financial support for local and regional food systems at the national level, including providing schools with local food-purchasing assistance funds and granting $4.8m to foster partnerships for local agriculture and nutrition transformation in schools. Then, in April, the USDA issued new school meal standards that will encourage schools to purchase more local foods.
These are promising changes. Buying local – let alone organic – food is not a requirement for schools participating in US school meal programs. Only a small fraction of the multibillion-dollar school meal budget goes to build shorter, more equitable and environmentally sustainable supply chains. This is a missed opportunity.
In Brazil, for example, schools have been required since 2009 to spend at least 30% of their budget on ingredients sourced from small-scale or family farms that use organic or agro-ecological production methods. The city of São Paulo has set an even more ambitious goal: by 2026, the municipal government aims to source all school food ingredients from such producers and serve 100% organic school lunches by 2030. This is the direct result of federal law and increased investment: in March, the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, increased federal funding for school meals by about 35%.
The Seoul metropolitan government in South Korea has moved toward this type of transformation, after several decades of activism in support of food sovereignty and against the privatization of school meals. With the enactment of South Korea’s universal free and eco-friendly school lunch policy in 2011, Seoul needed new infrastructure for sourcing and distributing ingredients that met the newly established “eco-friendly” criteria. The Seoul metropolitan government built Orbon, a publicly funded distribution hub for eco-friendly food, which supplied ingredients to 75% of the city’s schools in 2021.
Simply put, what ends up on students’ plates is the direct result of food politics and government priorities. In the fight to fix America’s broken food system, schools can meet ambitious procurement goals when legally required to do so and given strong financial support.
[https://www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/article/2024/may/31/free-healthy-school-lunches]
There are a variety of reasons that using more locally-sourced ingredients encourages more healthy meals. Part of the reason that food manufacturers place sodium and sugar into their foods is that these serve as preservatives that extend the shelf life of ingredients that have to travel long distances to their end destinations. Food grown closer to its final destination requires fewer preservatives, which child nutrition advocates cite as a positive.
Another way in which school districts are trying to improve school meals is by crafting menus that reflect the cultural backgrounds of their student bodies. In a September 2024 article for Chalkbeat Colorado, educational reporter Yesenia Robles cited parents’ insights on a program meant to diversify the cafeteria menus in the school district of Jefferson County (Jeffco), Colorado. Robles wrote:
Azucena Rubio’s kids often complained about meals in their Jeffco schools.
Her elementary school daughter said the food was cold, sometimes frozen, and had no flavor. She often skipped lunch. Her son, now 16, left campus to buy snacks for lunch from the local gas station and was often late coming back to class.
So when she heard that the district was working with a group of parents on improving school meals, she joined in.
For the past two years, more than two dozen parents and district staff worked to think up new meals that might be healthier, and culturally responsive for the largely Latino population in Jeffco’s Edgewater schools on the western boundary near Denver.
This fall, the district has started serving 15 new recipes at three Edgewater schools, including some submitted by parents. Rubio, for instance, submitted a recipe for enchiladas and one for fried rice, which she got out of a nutrition book she uses in a health class she teaches.
When the district first made the recipes for a parent taste test, the food was great, Rubio said. But now at schools, it hasn’t been consistently good, her kids report.
“It is getting better, I see they are trying, it’s progressing, slowly, but it is,” Rubio said. Her son is leaving campus much less often….
Parents submitted 27 recipes, then settled on the top 15. The district had to see which could be scaled up to make in large quantities, which could be tweaked to meet federal nutritional guidelines for school meals, and which were doable with the ingredients and kitchen equipment available to the district….
Brisneida Barrueta, who arrived in Colorado from Venezuela in December, is living with her husband and two daughters in Jeffco. Barrueta also participated with the group of parents working on the pilot program after realizing her daughters refused to eat their school lunches….
Barrueta submitted a couple of recipes, and one of them, baked chicken with potatoes, a dish she made at home in Venezuela, is one of the meals being piloted. She said her daughters definitely enjoy that meal, but are still picky about eating some of the other foods. Even when the meal is similar to something they like, she said, it’s prepared in different ways or with different ingredients.
If school meals were healthier and her daughters could eat it, she said, “it would be such a great help.”
Although the initiative in Jefferson County faced some logistical challenges, most parents agreed that the program helped schools create menus that were more culturally aligned with the students—even while there remained room for improvement.
Creating food that is both tasty and healthy can be challenging for school administrators who are operating on tight budgets. The same is true for providing food that is both culturally relevant and locally-sourced. However, experiments in school meal programs, both in the United States and abroad, have proven that positive advances are possible.
For Discussion:
- How much of the material in this reading was new to you, and how much was already familiar? Do you have any questions about what you read? What personal connections, thoughts, or feelings did you have about what you read?
- What are some of these changes that Brazil and South Korea enacted to improve their school lunch programs?
- How did the Jefferson County school district go about creating a cafeteria menu that was more reflective of the cultures in its student body? What are some of the challenges that arose?
- Put yourself again in the shoes of the administrator of your school’s cafeteria. You want to bring more culturally appropriate, tasty, and locally sourced food ingredients onto your school’s menu. How would you go about doing so? What role do you think that students could play in such an effort?
–Research assistance provided by Sean Welch.