With Congress in the early stages of updating child nutrition programs costing $30 billion a year, researchers say the nutritional quality of school meals increased by more than 40 percent following a 2010 mandate to serve healthier food. The first comprehensive study of the 2010 reforms also found that student participation rates were highest in the schools that served higher-quality meals.
The 2010 child nutrition law required schools to serve more fruits, vegetables and whole grains while cutting back on sugar, fat and salt. When the new standards were being phased in, some school districts said the requirements were unduly costly, and Congress wrangled over them for years. In late 2018, the Trump administration issued rules that restored chocolate milk to school cafeterias, allows the use of whole-grain-rich foods instead of whole grains in many instances, and delayed a deadline for lower-salt food.
For the School Nutrition and Meal Cost Study, researchers working under a USDA contract compared school food during the 2014-15 school year with food offered during the 2009-10 school year, before the new standards took effect. School lunches and breakfasts scored much higher—up 41 percent for lunch and 44 percent for breakfast—on a so-called healthy eating index, said the report. “This suggests that updated nutrition standards for school meals have had a positive and significant influence on nutritional quality.”
Lunch participation rates averaged 60 percent or slightly higher for schools that rated in the top half of the healthy eating index, compared to a 50 percent participation rate for schools in the bottom 25 percent of the scores. Roughly 30 million students eat hot meals daily through the school lunch program. Nearly three-quarters of the meals are served for free or at a reduced price to children from low-income households.
The school lunch program was created to provide food for all students, but over the years, free and reduced-price meals have dominated participation; 1990 was the last time that students paying full price for a meal were more than 50 percent of participants.
“There was no significant association between reported cost per NSLP (National School Lunch Program) lunch and the nutritional quality of the meals,” said the report by Mathematica Policy Research in partnership with Abt Associates. “That is mean reported cost per NSLP lunch were not significantly higher in schools that prepared more nutritious meals…than in schools that scored the lowest on the HEI-2010 (healthy eating index).”
Schools reported that it cost more, on average, to produce meals in 2014-15 than they received in reimbursements from the USDA, whether in cash or donated foods. Total revenues, including sale of ‘a la carte’ items, meals for adults and meals not eligible for USDA reimbursement along with meals covered by the NSLP, covered 97 percent of total reported costs. Costs were much higher in 2014-15 than in 2005-06 or 1992-93, said the researchers. Food, labor and other costs are noticeably higher, they said, and the new nutrition standards may be a factor. “Total food service revenues kept pace with the trend in costs,” they said, so the 97 percent figure for revenues compared to costs in 2014-15 “was not significantly different than the break-even levels of approximately 100 percent” in the early periods.
The School Nutrition and Meal Cost Study is available here.