How School Lunch Became the Latest Political Battleground

New York Times ^ | October 7, 2014 | By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

[Oldeconomybuyer]

The lunch ladies loved Marshall Matz. For more than 30 years, he worked the halls and back rooms of Washington for the 55,000 dues-paying members of the School Nutrition Association, the men and still mostly women who run America’s school-lunch programs.

So when Michelle Obama started Let’s Move!, her campaign against child obesity, in 2010, the members of the School Nutrition Association were her natural allies.

Today the School Nutrition Association is Washington’s loudest and most public critic of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. Even as they claim to support the act, the lunch ladies have become the shock troops in a sometimes absurdly complex battle to roll back the Obama’s administration’s anti-obesity agenda. Some Democrats in Congress fear that if Republicans win control of the Senate this fall, Obama’s reform will be gutted within a year.

The first shot in the Cafeteria Wars was fired in January 2011. That was when, under the terms of the new law, a team of dietitians, economists and nutritionists at the Department of Agriculture released the revised meal pattern for school breakfasts and lunches.

Participation in the free-lunch program, reserved for children from low-income families, actually climbed slightly in the first year after Obama’s changes. But by the end of the year, roughly one million fewer kids were participating in the National School Lunch program, the first decrease in more than two decades.

Internal surveys by the S.N.A. found that schools of all sizes and income levels were struggling with higher costs, lower participation and what they call plate waste — kids throwing away perfectly good food.

[mmichaels1970]

High School kids? Oh ya their school store can't sell Otis Spunkmyer Cookies anymore or anything, that doesn't meet her highness's food edicts.

Yup. And kids can't do their $1 candy bar fundraisers any more. Those were the only fundraisers that ever worked well IMHO. My daughter raised about $200 towards a choir trip last year. She was disappointed when the fundraiser was banned this year (no trip for her!).

[strider44]

I taught my kids about taxes last night by eating 38% of their ice cream...