Image: Bill Longshaw / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
New York Coalition for Healthy School Food (NYCHSF) introduces plant-based foods and nutrition education in schools to educate the whole school community. We develop, test, and implement plant-based (vegan) entrées in schools, and develop nutrition education materials that are impacting more than 100,000 children each day.
A few weeks ago, Congress blocked a spending bill that would at least partially fund changes to the school meal program. The proposed changes were not completely funded by the pending bill, but that’s another story.
Why would Congress block spending to help provide healthier food to kids? It turns out that the food industry’s desire for profits are more important to Congress than our children’s health. The potato industry was not happy that potatoes would have been limited to 1 cup per week (2 half-cup servings). The frozen pizza industry was upset that the changes would mean pizza would no longer count as a vegetable (we’re talking pizza without veggies on top, just sauce, cheese, and optionally meat). That’s because the new rules would require 4 tablespoons of tomato paste to count as a vegetable, and since tomato paste is only part of tomato sauce, it would take too much pizza sauce to meet this requirement.
Some of the proposed changes to school meals were positive, and some were not. A positive proposed regulation was to require that legumes be served once per week, and that’s great. But the legumes would have counted as a vegetable, not as a meat/meat alternate. It would have made much more sense for legumes to replace meat and dairy rather than broccoli. It’s possible that the thinking could have been to introduce them slowly as a vegetable side at first, that they might not go over as an entrée. However, New York Coalition for Healthy School Food, with its Project Cool School Food in Ithaca and New York City has shown that children will eat beans as an entrée.
There were many other positive changes, and some that were positive but not well thought out.
An unhealthy proposed change was to the breakfast “meal pattern”. Instead of offering one grain and one meat/meat alternate, or two grains, or two meat alternates, they wanted to require one grain and one meat/meat alternate. Currently, schools are not required to offer meat/meat alternates for breakfast. They may, but they don’t have to. The new regulations would have required that a meat/meat alternate be offered each day. The reality is that what would have been served was meat, not the meat alternate. It’s unlikely that schools will be serving beans for breakfast. Tofu doesn’t qualify as a meat/meat alternate. There are a few highly processed soy veggie burgers that qualify as a meat alternate, but we should be trying to get away from highly processed foods – and they probably wouldn’t be serving veggie burgers for breakfast anyway.
As long as Congress considers pizza a vegetable, and schools are serving things like Trix yogurt for lunch (with artificial colors and high fructose corn syrup), the New York Coalition for
Healthy School Food will have much work to do.
Amie Hamlin is the Executive Director of the New York Coalition for Healthy School Food.
Please help support our efforts – we are currently in 17 NYC schools and in the Ithaca City School district upstate, potentially reaching over 15,000 students. We need your help to continue our work. A generous anonymous donor has offered us a $30,000 matching grant. We will need to raise that much before the end of the year in order to get the full match. Please be as generous as you can (even if that means $10), by making a donation today at www.healthyschoolfood.org/donate.htm.
Learn more at http://www.healthyschoolfood.org/.
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