I’ve been at this blog for three weeks and have yet to discuss perhaps the most important issue going on right now with respect to school lunch — the Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act pending in Congress.
This hasn’t been an oversight – rather, I’ve been trying (as best I can between another looming writing project and keeping the kids amused) to get a handle on the big picture so I could then share it with you. Unfortunately, I still feel pretty far from that goal. But given that all of this is going on right now, I decided around midnight last night that I should at least point you to the best resources I’ve found so far and save the refined analysis for a later date.
First, a little background. All federal child nutrition programs – school breakfast and lunch, WIC, child care meals, summer food and after-school snacks — were up for Congressional reauthorization in 2009, which was later postponed to 2010. This translates into a once-every-five-year opportunity to improve these programs in a meaningful way.
The reauthorization of the CNA is the primary legislation of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign, which seeks to solve the epidemic of childhood obesity within a generation. Obama administration goals for the legislation include: (1) improving nutrition standards for school meals; (2) increasing participation in school meal programs; (3) increasing parent and student education about healthy eating; (4) establishing nutrition standards for the so called “a la carte” foods (see my School Lunch FAQs for more information on these); (5) promoting increased consumption of whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and low- and fat-free dairy products; (6) strengthening school wellness policies and promoting physical activity in schools; (7) training people who provide school meals and providing them with better equipment; and (8) enhancing food safety. President Obama has asked for $10 billion over the next ten years to fund these initiatives.
One concise and readable analysis of the CNA (although it was written in April so may not reflect the most current legislative activity) is this article written for The Atlantic Monthly by Marion Nestle, the widely respected professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University.
As the legislative process moves forward, countless groups devoted to school lunch reform are circulating to their constituents various petitions and calls to action. One of the biggest issues is funding — many observers have already expressed concern that the reauthorization will not provide adequate funding to achieve the Obama administration’s goals. (Here’s one Washington Post op-ed from Chef Ann on the subject.)
Below are a few calls to action that have made their way into my inbox (and feel free to share whatever you’ve received as well):
From Two Angry Moms, this email letter (attached here as a somewhat messy Word document) urges supporters to write to House members seeking to increase the funding levels for the bill. The group also asks its members to support the inclusion into the House bill of The Healthy School Meals Act (which would require more plant-based meal options in accordance with recommendations made by the American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association) and to provide comments to the House supporting changes to the Farm Bill (in 2012) to increase federal support for local, organic diversified agriculture.
The folks at Slow Food USA have an entire campaign devoted to this issue called Time for Lunch. You can read their policy platform there, get talking points, send emails to your legislators from their site and also donate money to their lobbying efforts.
The Lunch Box has its own advocacy page here. It, too, has links to legislative updates, sample letters for your legislators, and more.
This is a big topic and I’ve only given it the most bare-bones review here. More to come in the near future, and please feel free to comment on any factual errors or to share any additional information you may have.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Bettina Elias Siegel
Jenny Staff Johnson says
Thanks, Bettina, I so appreciate your keeping abreast of all this for me/us. Looking forward to reading more…..
Keep up the good work,
JSJ
bettina elias siegel says
My pleasure! 🙂
Hagit Fefferman says
I love all your blog articles because it brings up so many ideas I have been ruminating about lately! As a mother of 3 young children (7, 4 & 1) I try my best to feed my family healthy foods, but there is so much confusion as to what is healthy. “Healthy food” is not a black and white issue, like cigarettes, everyone knows they are not healthy. I recently read Michael Pollan’s “In Defense of Food” and much of what I believed about food, according to Pollan’s book, was incorrect. Even the adults in my family do not agree on which way of eating is healthy. I am not sure what your views are about what is healthy, but I am assuming you read the Pollan’s book and that is what you believe to be healthy. I was wondering, why is the Obama initiative try to promote low fat and fat free dairy products when according to “experts” that is not a healthier choice? It seems even the “experts” are in disagreement as to what is healthy. At this point in time I don’t send my children to public schools, but I do care that the children in public schools are not getting the healthy options they deserve. I don’t choose to buy school lunches because I didn’t like the choices and I try to avoid processed foods, which means I spend a good chunk of time cooking and baking. I understand that not everyone enjoys cooking and baking, but it is fun for me. I just wanted to share what I have done in my house to promote vegetables and fruit. I made pictures of all the fruits and vegetables I could think of and listed under them how they help the human body. I tried to illustrate it as much as possible for my 4 year old, who does not read that well, and I gave it to my kids to look at. Also, when they eat those foods we sometimes talk about how it helps them. I don’t sweat it if my kids have cupcakes at parties or at school, but I do try to promote the foods I think will benefit them the most. As a side note for my daughter’s 7th birthday I brought home made cupcakes (one per student) to her class and 2 pints of strawberries. The strawberries were devoured immediately and I had left over cup cakes.
bettina elias siegel says
Hagit – Welcome to The Lunch Tray and thank you for your thoughts. I agree, there’s quite a bit of disagreement about what = healthy food. In fact, I plan to post about this topic (in a related way) next week or the week after. And I love your story about the strawberries! I find that kids often surprise us that way. – Bettina
Mark says
Thanks for this update. I’m going to post a summary of the new House version of the CNR bill in the next day or two. I just wanted to make you aware of efforts of my organization, Healthy Schools Campaign. Thanks and great work on all your efforts. And feel free to email me.
bettina elias siegel says
Mark – Welcome to The Lunch Tray! I’ll put your site in my blog roll right now (and would love it if you could do the same) and will also direct readers to your site on Friday (I’m doing a post on various sites that people should know about). Let’s keep in touch! – Bettina
Jonathan says
I wonder if a federal mandate is the best way of tackling the problem of our public schools’ contributions to childhood obesity. I suspect that the most important strides in PS nutrition have been made on a school-by-school basis, usually the result of strong and consistent parent involvement combined with caring and creative local administrators. I would be interested in seeing any studies that might review what effect our previous national mandates on school nutrition have actually had on childhood obesity. My suspicion is very little effect, too much bureaucratic interference and profit potential by big suppliers. As one previous post noted, when you start approaching nutrition as a method for meeting mandated requirements, you get your children eating grahm cracker cookies as they fulfil some aspect of the mandate. Putting your trust in the local school does mean that some schools will be a nutritional mess. But isn’t that what we have now under the current system of mandates? Food for thought.
bettina elias siegel says
OK, first of all, your “URL address” is hysterical, if woefully inaccurate. Too bad I can’t change The Lunch Tray to http://www.haveyoutriedthewhiteclampie.com.
Second, I tend to agree with your assumptions about mandates and obesity — for example, the regulations require that fat calories be limited to 30 percent of the meal but over the time period that’s been in effect, we’ve only seen an increase, not a reduction, in childhood obesity. (But that’s true outside the school food context, too — American’s have grown steadily fatter ever since the Food Pyramid was introduced. It’s clearly a wider societal problem.) But I don’t think we can throw it entirely open to local communities and hope for the best (if that’s what you’re proposing). Doing so, it seems to me, would result in terrible disparities between affluent and poor schools, or schools where the administration/school board choses to make nutrition a priority and those where it takes a back seat. I’m not sure I want our children’s health to be handled so capriciously. Or did I misinterpret?
Lisa Suriano says
I agree with both of your comments. Although I am only 27 I have waning faith that my government can adequately address any problem in our complex society. I think the best the gov’t can do is increase funding for equipment & training in school kitchens and set VERY strict guidelines for manufacturers as to what ingredients can be used in school food. (Some academic nutrition education requirements would be helpful too!)
The rest needs to be up to us as a people and a movement. Parents need to demand that the food served to their children is made with whole and healthy foods. Schools need to recognize their role in shaping proper nutritional habits, implement nutrition education initiatives, and create healthy food enviroments. And as consumers we need to vote with our dollars and support the types of foods we want to see abundantly available. In my observation, government isn’t always such a powerful tool but money sure is . . .
christa says
Thanks, Bettina! I appreciate your blog so much.
bettina elias siegel says
Thank you! 🙂
Karen says
I’m confused about the goals of the CNA. Why do we need to increase participation in school meal programs? When these programs were first introduced, malnutrition and hunger were significant issues in our country. I read somewhere that in the Rio Grande Valley, for example, children came to school literally starving in the 1930s, and the primary objective of free lunch at school was to provide a significant number of calories to those hungry children. Back then, teachers could see hunger by observing how skinny the children are. These days, teachers in the same school districts observe how obesity is endemic in their students. (I think I recall this from one of Pollan’s NYT Magazine articles published a few years ago).
I would guess that in the US today, hunger is not a prevalent problem. Malnutrition might be, especially in certain demographics, and if that is the case then that should be the focus of federally mandated school meals. So perhaps we’d end up providing certain children nutritionally dense foods, which would drive the program towards fresh fruits, legumes, meats and vegetables I would hope, and not Cliff Bars, for example.
With our country’s culture of fast food and packaged processed meals, I find it hard to believe that even the most financially strapped community has children who are starving for calories.
bettina elias siegel says
Karen: Believe it or not, hunger is still a BIG problem, but so many of us are completely unaware of it and, as you note, are focused primarily on the other compelling issue of obesity. I am already working on a hunger post that should appear the week after next. I might even use a bit of your comment above (without your name – just “a reader wrote”). Thanks as always for reading and commenting! – Bettina
Taylor Walsh says
Nice job Bettina. It is important to keep the Feds alert to what makes a real difference in school meals. One way to do that is to point out that “healthy school food” is at present a veritable brush fire going on around the country: a lot of overlapping embers (i.e., locally grown foods) simmering for many years now stoked by the first lady. Check out what Tony Geraci is doing in Baltimore public schools, turning middle schoolers into a produce-growing and selling, land-conscious generation. “Institutionalized” facts-on-the-ground like these will make all the difference. One doesn’t have to wait on the Congress to approve this.
bettina elias siegel says
Welcome, Taylor. Thanks for your comment and I’ll be sure to look into the Baltimore program. – Bettina