USDA moves to relax school nutrition rules
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration moved on Friday to roll back school nutrition standards championed by Michelle Obama, an effort long sought by food manufacturers and some school districts that have chafed at the cost of Obama’s prescriptions for fresh fruit and vegetables.
The proposed rule by the Agriculture Department would give schools more latitude to decide how much fruit to offer during breakfast and what types of vegetables to include in meals. It would also broaden what counts as a snack.
Food companies applauded the proposal, while nutritionists condemned it, predicting that starchy foods like potatoes would replace green vegetables and that fattening foods like hamburgers would be served daily as “snacks.”
“Schools and school districts continue to tell us that there is still too much food waste and that more common-sense flexibility is needed to provide students nutritious and appetizing meals,” Sonny Perdue, the agriculture secretary, said in a statement. “We listened and now we’re getting to work.”
Combating childhood obesity was Obama’s signature issue, a rallying cry for her supporters and a lightning rod for conservative critics.
Obama pressed to update federal nutrition standards and to bring healthier foods to schools. She planted the White House kitchen garden on the South Lawn — the first real garden since Eleanor Roosevelt’s World War II “Victory Garden” — and invited students to sow and harvest it each year. And she created the first Task Force on Childhood Obesity and developed the “Let’s Move!” campaign that aimed to get children to engage in 60 minutes of physical activity each day.
Obama’s work “improved the diets of millions of children, especially vulnerable children in food insecure households,” said Juliana Cohen, a nutrition professor at Harvard University’s School of Public Health. More students are eating vegetables and foods rich in whole grains because of the former first lady.
“Food waste was a problem before the healthier standards were enacted, so rolling them back won’t solve that problem,” Cohen said. “It’s just that more people are paying attention to the issue now.”
With nearly 14 million American children, or 19%, considered obese, few doubted Obama’s intentions, and with more than 30 million children participating in the National School Lunch Program, school meals were a powerful way to target poor diets. Of that total, 22 million children are from low-income families.
But the cost and prescriptions of her policies had detractors from the beginning: beef-and-potato state lawmakers, libertarians, and camera-ready conservatives like Sarah Palin, who showed up at events carrying cookies and accused Obama of robbing children of dessert.
“The school breakfast and lunch programs have been riddled with waste for a long time, plate waste being one, and that turns into financial waste,” said Jonathan Butcher, a senior policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
“Clearly, no one wants kids to be served unhealthy foods,” he added, but if nutrition requirements lead to children throwing away the food offered, the standards are pointless.
The Agriculture Department said the changes reflected requests made over the past two years by those at schools who serve meals to children and teenagers. The department plans to release a regulatory analysis and to open the public comment period on Jan. 21.