school lunch

The USDA’s senior nutrition official, Brandon Lipps, announced an enhanced focus on program integrity for the agency’s 15 public nutrition programs, which include SNAP, school meals, and WIC.

About half as many children take part in the school breakfast program as the more than 30 million who eat a hot meal through the school lunch program, according to USDA's most recent data. The government and the anti-hunger group Food Research and Action Center say that participation in school breakfast grew at a slower rate during the 2016-17 school year than it did in previous years.

The omni-present polystyrene tray, a fixture in cafeteria and fast-food restaurants across the country, is almost too cheap to replace at 4 cents apiece. Yet the public schools in Philadelphia and Baltimore are switching to a molded-fiber compostable plate, made from recycled paper fibers, that is nearly as inexpensive at 5 cents each.

Declaring it “a major step forward” for food service workers, the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service released its first mobile app, which the agency said will make it easier to serve healthy and tasty meals through its child nutrition programs.

With Congress settling into its election year agenda, the School Nutrition Association, speaking for school food directors, says lawmakers should oppose any effort to convert funding for school food programs into block grants.

During a half-hour “bill passage event” that resembled a pep rally for the Republican-written and -passed tax bill, President Trump said farmers and small-business owners will benefit because “for the most part, [the] estate tax is wiped out.”

The Urban School Food Alliance, whose members serve a combined 3.7 million students across the nation, nearly doubled its membership this year, gaining five members, with Boston as the newest one.

Seven months after New Mexico passed a state law against “lunch shaming,” progress to end the practice is slow, writes school-food blogger Bettina Elias Siegel on Civil Eats.

The cafeteria menus in many public schools "suggest a universal idea of what constitutes American food," with tacos as an ethnic crossover, says Civil Eats. "Now, change is under way. Cafeterias have begun to incorporate ingredients like wild rice and buffalo and serve items ranging from poi to fajitas."

In a Federal Register notice today, the USDA announced it will extend its “three flexibilities” for school menus — salt, whole grains, and flavored milk — into the 2018/19 school year. It will also invite comment on the “long-term availability of the flexibilities,” which Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue introduced at an elementary school on his sixth day in office.

Beginning next spring, 15 schools in Brooklyn — a sliver of the 1,800 public schools in New York City — will participate in the Meatless Monday campaign by serving vegetarian breakfasts and lunches, city officials announced. Mayor Bill de Blasio said the mayor's residence, Gracie Mansion, also would go meatless for its Monday meals.

School districts serving Philadelphia, Baltimore and Las Vegas joined the Urban School Food Alliance, which now serves 3.6 million students in 10 of the largest U.S. districts with a combined $735 million a year in purchases of food and supplies. The alliance launched a procurement initiative in 2014 for antibiotic-free chicken, and said this year that its members would not relax school lunch standards despite a USDA offer of flexibility on salt and whole grains.

Brandon Lipps, who helped engineer $8.6 billion in food stamp cuts in the 2014 farm law, is the new administrator of USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, which oversees food stamps, school lunch and other public nutrition programs. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced the appointment of Lipps and two senior nutrition officials a day ahead of a trip, scheduled for today, to a summer meal site for school-aged children.

On his sixth day on the job, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, in the name of regulatory flexibility and making school meals more attractive to students, gave schools the green light to serve chocolate milk again. A new study suggests, however, that over time, schoolchildren do not miss flavored milk all that much.

Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a sponsor of a bill to prohibit “lunch shaming” at public schools, is taking a second legislative avenue toward federal action: a directive for the USDA to issue national standards on how schools should handle school-lunch debts.

Over the decade ending in fiscal 2019, before the pandemic, student participation in the school lunch program fell by 7 percent, to an average of 29.6 million meals a day, said a USDA report on the program. In enrollment and cost, school lunch is the nation's second-largest public nutrition program, behind SNAP, and operates in around 100,000 schools.