school food
McDonald’s responds on film “540 Meals”
McDonald's says the film "540 Meals," criticized as an infomercial that the fast food giant is pushing in schools, is about "making informed and balanced choices no matter where you choose to eat and incorporating exercise into your daily routine." The 19-minute film follows a school teacher from central Iowa, John Cisna, who lost weight while eating every meal for 90 days at McDonald's.
Everybody wants a bit of the USDA healthy-snack program
The Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program is a tiny part of USDA's child-nutrition portfolio, yet plenty of groups want their products approved for the trays of healthy snacks given for free to schoolchildren in the poorest neighborhoods, says Politico.
School-lunch debate – 25 calories apart?
The school lunch reforms of 2010 resulted in skimpy meals that leave high school students hungry, says House Education Committee chairman John Kline, who wants to give school districts "the flexibility they need to fulfill the promise of child nutrition assistance."
Berkeley schools to get garden, cooking funds from soda tax
The panel overseeing money collected from Berkeley's 1-cent-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages has recommended that $250,000 of the revenue go to the cooking and gardening program at city schools, says Berkeleyside, the independent news site.
Schools seek less paperwork, more money for meals
South Dakota's secretary of education told a House Education subcommittee that schools are swamped by too much paperwork from the federal school food program. A school board president from Indiana said some students smuggle in salt and pepper to season the bland meals served at school...
Roberts’ school food goals: local flexibility, spending lid
Congress should overhaul the school meals programs to allow some local flexibility in serving healthy food, said Senate Agriculture chairman Pat Roberts, who plans to hold down the pricetag - no new spending without an offset. "Our budgetary constraints are real," Roberts said during the committee's first hearing on reauthorization of child-nutrition programs costing $22 billion a year. The chairman said he intended to have a new law in place before the Sept. 30 expiration of the current programs, a fairly tight schedule to move legislation through both chambers of Congress and to the White House, with time out for the summer recess.
USDA: School-lunch error rate at 15.8 percent, but getting better
The error rates for the school lunch and school breakfast programs "remain unacceptably high," said the USDA, although there are signs of improvement, such as a lower overall error rate. In a report, the department said schools had an error rate of 15.8 percent for the $11.8-billion lunch program and 23.1 percent for the $3.3-billion breakfast program - a total of $2.7 billion for the 2012-13 school year that included over- and under-payments.
USDA expands “Team Up” program for school meals
The USDA announced a nationwide expansion of its "Team Up for School Nutrition Success Initiative" to provide additional help to school districts to meet food requirements.
Vilsack: Don’t use “flexibility” as guise to weaken school lunch
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack warned about weakening school food standards in the name of giving schools more leeway to satisfy requirements or to help them prune needless expenditures.
The school cafeteria, a place to chill out
San Francisco is remodeling its public school cafeterias to make them more attractive to students, according to stories in The Atlantic and on KGO-TV. The idea is to ensure students eat a nourishing meal.
FRAC: school breakfast reaches more low-income children
"School breakfast continues to make significant gains in communities across the United States," says the antihunger Food Research and Action Center, summarizing two new reports that it issued. FRAC says 53 percent of children who qualified for free or reduced-price school lunch also participated in school breakfast, up 1 percentage point from 2013 and 10 points higher than a decade ago.
Schools in poor areas adopt free-meals-for-all option
Some 51.5 percent of schools in high-poverty areas offer free breakfast and lunch to all students through the so-called community eligibility provision of the 2010 school food law, said USDA.
Six big US school districts specify antibiotic-free chicken
The Urban School Food Alliance, composed of six of the largest U.S. school districts, announced its members want antibiotic-free chicken to serve in their cafeterias.
Omnibus bill relaxes whole grain, salt rules for school food
Congress would relax rules that call for schools to use more whole grains and to reduce salt in meals provided to students, according to provisions of a government-wide funding bill. Unveiled on Tuesday night, the bill also calls for USDA to study the nutritional content of vegetables available in the so-called WIC program before removing any of them from the program - a response to complaints that white potatoes were being singled out unfairly.
School lunch vs brown bag, and visualizing 2,000 calories
Two studies suggest that school meals are more nutritious than meals packed at home, says the New York Times blog Well. The studies, conducted in urbanized Houston and in rural Virginia found the school food to be lower in fat and sugar than ...
USDA aids food supply in Africa’s ebola zone
The Agriculture Department is taking a supporting role in assuring food security in countries struggling with an outbreak of the deadly ebola virus in West Africa.
Parents strongly support school food standards, poll says
Ban on school vending machines can backfire
A ban on vending machines in schools can lead to increased soda and fast-food consumption if its the only change in a school's food policy, say researchers at the UI-Chicago.