USDA Needs a Taste of Reality About School Lunches

[alp227]

On September 8th, Ms Audrey Rowe from the US Department of Agriculture visited Francisco Middle School in San Francisco to commend the school district’s meal program for achieving the gold standard of the USDA’s Healthier US Schools initiative. What a difference from just a year ago, when the USDA was withholding all federal money from that same program because of violations found during a routine inspection.

Those violations (since corrected) had nothing to do with the quality or safety of the food, and were entirely about bureaucratic regulations designed to guarantee that every child passing through the cafeteria line is sorted by family income level.

When hungry children are eager to get to their cafeteria table and wolf down their lunch, sometimes kids slip past the worker at the end of the line whose job it is to verify their eligibility for free meals. Those kids might accidentally be recorded in the wrong category for government reimbursement.

--snip--(for the hardest-hitting paragraph):

...oversight for child nutrition programs should not rest with a federal agency which contains “Agriculture” in its name, but not “Children” or “Nutrition.” Nor should anyone expect an agency with “agriculture” in its name to suggest that the additional $2 per free lunch, which is what it would take to be able to serve students a really healthy meal with mostly organic and hormone free food, could be easily found if this country were not spending $15.4 billion (in 2009) on farm subsidies, including $7.7 billion to commodities such as wheat, rice, corn, soybeans, and cotton.

Full article: http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=8504

[awoke_in_2003]

1. "cafeteria line is sorted by family income level"....

do these asshats have any idea how embarrassing it is to be on a free lunch program? Do you have any idea how many times I skipped lunch growing up, preferring to go to the library and read instead? Now they want to make it even more obvious- disgusting.

on edit: K&R for more exposure.

[Lorien]

2. Most of those subsidies go to corporations like Monsanto, who are doing worse

than nothing to improve nutrition. Without the heavy corn subsidies in America child obesity would not be the issue it is today.