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What does the Latest USDA Appointment Mean for School Lunch? More Chicken Nuggets
By Ann Cooper, with Kate Adamick and Beth Collins —
We’ve been asked numerous times over the past few months what we think about Obama’s Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack. At the onset, we were critical. Vilsack had supported many agribusiness practices that we abhor, such as promoting GMOs in the food supply. However, as time has gone on, we have become more optimistic about the future of sustainable food under his watch, and with the recent appointment of Kathleen Merrigan to the department’s No. 2 post, we found ourselves discussing the potential of a “new” USDA.
Enter this crisis Dr. Janey Thornton, whose job it will be to help form policy for the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service Department, which sets policy for the National School Lunch Program. We don’t know Dr. Thornton, and although we were glad to see that a nutrition services director was picked for the post, our research about her school district has begun to evaporate much of our former optimism.
Thornton’s small school district (15,000 students) has menus that are similar to ones school advocates like us are trying to replace. The ubiquitous chicken nuggets, chicken patties and popcorn chicken (all products of the USDA commodity food program) show up weekly in Thornton’s cafeterias. Pictures of children drinking chocolate milk adorn the district’s website, and cookies are served on a daily basis. And to put the proverbial icing on the cake, breakfast offerings include fresh-baked cinnamon rolls.
When we think of all the sugar, fat and salt children are consuming, we cringe. When we think about the multinational agribusiness companies this kind of school food service system supports, we cringe. And when we think about the negative overall effect that this system has on People, Planet and Sustainable Profit, all sense of optimism just drains away.
As we mentioned earlier, we’ve never met Dr Thornton, and we don’t know what plans she may have to help move FNS forward. But if we had the chance to speak to her and explain what we believe would bring back our optimism and assure the health of our children, here’s what we’d propose:
- Make meals, both breakfast and lunch universal, a system where every child is fed every day.
- Replace the current system of tracking menus by nutrients with one where the guidelines are based on healthy, delicious balanced meals. These meals should consist in large part of fresh fruits, fresh vegetables and whole grains, and should include plant based protein.
- Replace the definition of nutritious food, on which the current system is based, with one that defines and is based on real food.
- Raise the federal reimbursement rate to $4.00 - $5.00, based on the cost of living of the geographical area, and dedicate a minimum of $1.75 for spending on food. Additionally, dedicate at least $1.00 for spending on fresh fruits, fresh vegetables and whole grains with a priority placed on procuring regionally produced food.
- Dedicate resources to building or rebuilding kitchens in school districts to accommodate scratch cooking.
- Dedicate resources to set up a training program to teach school food service workers to cook from scratch.
- Set up a National Culinary Cooks Corp which allows culinary students to work off student loans by working in K-12 schools.
- Institute hands-on experiential learning in the form of cooking and gardening classes that become a mandatory part of the educational system.
- Dedicate resources to a national marketing campaign to help change children’s relationship to food, so that healthy and delicious school food becomes cool food.
- Underscore the importance of eating healthy food by instituting questions on the standardized tests that highlight sustainable food and agriculture.
We hope that Dr. Thornton can become an advocate for these changes. If she doesn’t, our children may die at an ever younger age because of the food we’re feeding them. And that is truly unthinkable.
Kate Adamick is the president of Food Systems Solutions LLC, which specializes in improving institutional food through farm-to-cafeteria programs. Beth Collins is a consultant for Lunch Lessons LLC, which promotes healthy eating in schools.
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