The School Cafeteria: Where the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act and the Farm Bill Meet

Together with SNAP and WIC, the National School Lunch and Breakfast programs and the Child and Adult Care Feeding Program (CACFP) make up more than 90 percent of the federal funding for nutrition programs.¹ Schools and daycare centers play a central role in making sure healthy foods are available to low-income children. To do this, they depend on the foods provided through the National School Lunch and Breakfast programs and CACFP. The federal government became a much better partner with the passage of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which includes the first significant improvements to child nutrition standards in 16 years.

Improving the quality of meals served to U.S. children shouldn’t end with the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, though. Additional improvements could be made through the farm bill. The Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, for example, is funded though the farm bill. It provides fresh produce to schools in neighborhoods where children might never have seen such foods before. All schools are eligible to participate, but the program gives priority to those with the highest proportion of students eligible for free or reduced-price meals. The program was launched in the 2002 farm bill as a pilot in just four states. Because the pilot was a success and demand for the program began to come in from across the country, the 2008 farm bill made the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program permanent and available in all 50 states.²

Fresh fruit and vegetable consumption in schools has been on the rise for the past decade in Burlington, VT, where nearly half the children qualify for free or reduced-price meals. Burlington is one of 15 school districts in the nation to be named a USDA model farm-to-school program, an effort where local farms are tapped to provide a share of the foods served in schools.³ Burlington’s program has now grown beyond the cafeteria to bring healthy, fresh snacks into the classroom.

“If you put a bowl of grapes in a classroom, kids will eat them,” says Doug Davis, food services director of Burlington Public Schools. “By the same token, if you put a bowl of chips there, they’d eat those too. But I’m not convinced that if you had a bowl of chips and a bowl of grapes, that they’d choose the chips instead of the grapes.”⁴

Davis doesn’t believe it’s his job to stop kids from eating chips, or to get them to prefer grapes to chips. Instead, he wants to expose them to healthy foods they might not see at home. He sees that as his role as an educator. “In five or 10 years, these kids will be making their own food purchases.  I hope when they go shopping for themselves or for their families, instead of two bags of chips they might decide to get a bag of grapes and a bag of chips. If we don’t expose them to these foods early, we lose the opportunity to affect that decision.”

Parents choose not to serve their kids certain foods for many reasons. For low-income parents, it may first be an economic decision: when food dollars are scarce, families simply can’t afford to waste money on foods that kids might refuse to eat. Exposing children to healthy foods in the child nutrition programs reduces that risk somewhat. It can support parents who crave healthy foods but don’t feel they can give themselves permission to buy them without knowing that their children will eat them—this lack of knowledge is part of what makes food choices tougher than they should be. Yet parental fruit and vegetable intake is one of the strongest predictors of fruit and vegetable consumption in young children.⁵

Fruits and vegetables are often spoken of in one breath as if they are one and the same, but research shows that children gravitate more naturally towards fruits than vegetables.⁶ One way schools have gotten children to sample unfamiliar vegetables is by including them on salad bars. Schools that want a salad bar find they have a supporter in First Lady Michelle Obama, whose “Let’s Move” campaign is championing public-private partnerships to add thousands of new salad bars to school cafeterias.⁷ A salad bar in every school may sound like a dream, but there are measures USDA can take to help make it a reality. The agency shouldn’t relax its rules on food safety or ignore salad portion sizes, but it should work with food service directors to help them make rules and standards work “on the ground.”

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act requires schools to add more fruits, vegetables, and whole grain products to their lunch and breakfast programs. The federal government has agreed to help by increasing reimbursements by 6 cents per meal. However, meeting the new nutrition guidelines carries an estimated cost of an extra 15 cents per lunch and 51 cents per breakfast.⁸ The additional 6 cents provided by the government is helpful but leaves schools scrambling to come up with their share.

The farm bill includes some sources of additional funding that can be applied toward school meals. Section 32, a commodity distribution program, allows the Secretary of Agriculture to spend a little more than $1 billion on domestic nutrition programs,⁹ including $400 million earmarked for fresh fruits, vegetables, and nuts.¹⁰ Spending all the Section 32 funding on school meals wouldn’t close the gap between what schools need to meet the new nutrition requirements and what the government has pledged to reimburse them, but it would help ease the burden. The problem with this idea, though, is that other institutions relying on the Section 32 program—such as food banks and daycare centers—would then be completely cut off from their funding.

Streamlining farm policies, as described in Chapter 1, would free up resources to improve school meal programs. The Environmental Working Group estimated that in 2009, California could have doubled the quantity of fruits and vegetables served in its schools for the equivalent of just 2 percent of the cotton subsidies received by farms in the state ($75 million).¹¹ Most of the cotton subsidies go to the largest and most profitable farms. With one in four Americans participating in a federal nutrition program, and farm income holding steady at the highest level in decades, it’s harder than ever to argue that the most profitable farms are most in need of financial support. The poverty levels in our country today make it critical to align national farm and nutrition policies.

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