But, no matter what the shortcomings of the law, their own study of the US Department of Agriculture showed that children generate about as many waste five years after the adoption of the law, as before. A small study in 2015 showed that after the implementation of the law, children ate significantly more fruits and more of them, provided at school, and threw less food. And, despite the excessive dependence on the ultra of processed products, school cooks still managed to feed children or even a little better, on average than parents who prepared dinners at home. Lauren Ay, a food professor at the University of California in Davis, co -author of co -authorship of 2019, showing that children who eat at school consume modestly more fruits and vegetables, dairy products, whole grains, calcium and dietary fiber than children who eat school breakfast less or not at all; School dinners provided better profit for dairy products and calcium. “This is very upset when you have RFK, Jr., saying that school dinners are poison, because it stigmatizes school food,” Au said.
Juliana Cohen, a food professor and director of the Center for Health, Research and Politics at Merrimack College, told me that the dinners brought from the house “Usually,” she said, ”you have a sandwich, which is ultra processed bread and ultra-treated grocery meat. And then you have fresh fruits or vegetables ”-what can or cannot be organic, and then you have something crispy that usually adjusts, usually ultra-processing.” A Increase The mother of socio-media-landscape is filled with ideas for healthy ones brought to the house, but no number of parental ingenuity can completely save the family from totalizing industrial food systems, which are also forced to navigate.
For many years, Cohen studied the consumption schemes provided by the school throughout the country, working with a cafeteria and a team of researchers to weigh and write down what children leave in their lunch, up to the last fragment with chicken or soft apple apple. Cohen and other researchers have revealed many subtle corrections that improve children's nutrition habits. If employees in the cafeteria have time, staff and cutting boards to previously deprive their apples, apples become more tempting to the youngest children and children of any age who wear braces. The salad bar exceeds individual portions of salad, because children love autonomy, wherever they find. Several years ago, Amy Haga schools in Minnesota installed mass milk annoyers in their cafeterias, because children like to serve themselves and be responsible, ”she told me. “It is cold, amazing milk from the nearby, consumption has grown, we do not throw out the boxes, we do not have these flowing, smelly bags of old milk.”
All these interventions cost money, and even the most outstanding defenders of improved nutrition of children and programs from farms to school cannot understand the economic realities of the kitchen of the state school. In the “School Lunch” revolution, Waters explains: “My colleagues and I started this book, challenging myself to make a menu and prepare dishes that fell into line with the leading principles of the US school lunch of school dinner.” She notes that in the 2023-24 academic year, the level of compensation was four dollars and twenty-five cents per lunch and approximately half as for breakfast. But these numbers are the average indicator of the entire food budget: not only food products, but also staff salaries, equipment maintenance, trays, cutlery and napkins. In fact, there are about two dollars for lunch in schools. “When you buy at the local and season, food is more accessible by nature,” Waters writes. But not so affordable.
In addition to the disappearance of USDA programs, the Trump administration will also oversee deep blows on CLICK Food aid program set forth in Big beautiful accountField a CLICK Reductions will mean that fewer children will automatically have the right to receive free breakfast and lunch at school, and less schools will be able to continue to offer universal free marking programs. IncreaseThe declared commitment to improving the nutrition of children and the administration antipathy to social services is incompatible. “There is a contradiction here,” said Christopher Bossso, a professor of state policy and politics at the North -East University. “If you are really going to fulfill the values ​​that Increase According to, the question is how to do this in a conservative administration, which, by its very nature, is not inclined to regulate and is not inclined to spend money on state programs. ”
On the first Friday morning in September at an academic school, in Bratlboro, Vermont, Sterling, director of food service, showed me in the kitchen. “My speech in the stump is that dishwashers are the most important part of the equipment,” he said. “They determine how many scratches you can do, how many dishes and trays you can clean.” Until recently, in Academy, a state school in which more than three hundred primary students participate, there was one vessel washing machine that could process one large pan at a time. “This is all the work at the end of the day,” Sterling said.
A giant pot with pasta and cheese was robbed on a stove, which had one of three full -time kitchen staff. Parents of young children revere pasta and cheese as a dinner both thoughtless and magical: to cook water, pour the shell, drop in radioactive powder, and soon everything disappears. But the degree of complexity is much higher for cooks, which should produce hundreds or even thousands of servings per day of something that is ideal, tasty, local and committed to the USDA for nutrition, while they also foresee updated power rules that can make their work more difficult or easier to land tomorrow or never land.
