The United States Department of Agriculture recently offered members of Congress an opportunity to sample commodity foods that are part of the current school lunch program.
Meals still have bad reputation
The goal, officials said, was to show legislators how healthy and tasty meals are under the current system. The agency has been working hard to make school lunches healthier by cutting back on salt and adding more fruits and vegetables, for example, but the meals still have a bad reputation as being nothing but oily pizza, chicken nuggets and vegetables from a can.
The USDA is now providing schools with green beans that have 64 percent less sodium than commercially available beans, and the agency’s mandate for sodium levels in canned vegetables is 71 percent less than what’s deemed healthy by the Food and Drug Administration.
Kids who eat school lunches get 95 percent lean hamburger patties, while the leanest meat commercially available is 92 percent lean.
In 1981, the USDA offered just 54 different fresh and processed options to schools; now there are more than 180. The program provides between 15 and 20 percent of all food served in American school cafeterias. And school officials say it is possible to make good, healthy meals with those options, such as choosing brown rice, unprocessed meat and dried fruit and nuts.
You can lead a kid to the lunch line . . .
The food may be better quality and healthier than it used to be, but that doesn’t seem to be helping kids much, given that a third of American kids are overweight or obese.
One big problem has always been that kids simply don’t want to eat school lunches, and it can be difficult for schools to produce healthier, less processed meals when they lack real kitchen facilities and the workers aren’t really trained to cook (many schools just reheat meals these days).
The USDA hopes Congress will provide more money to fund the school lunch program when it considers the reauthorization of the program early next year. Child nutrition programs, including school breakfasts, lunches and the WIC program, are now funded at $12 billion a year. USDA head Tom Vilsack says more money is needed because healthy foods are more expensive.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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Congress gets a taste of school lunches