Action alert: Pressures on school nutrition standards

Let’s be clear: democratic processes are at stake in attempts by the Maine potato growers and other self-interested parties to get Congress to overturn the USDA’s nutrition standards for the WIC program and for school food—through use of appropriations, not legislative, bills.

USDA hardly made the standards up out of thin air.  

Now, Maine senators—who should know a lot better—are doing an end run around USDA’s process- and science-based regulations for the content of the WIC package.  These, as I’ve written before, exclude white potatoes because WIC recipients already eat plenty of them.

And now 43 members of the House, mostly Republican, want the USDA to weaken the rules for school meals.

School meal standards, let me remind you, were the result of no less than three scientific and policy reports from the Institute of Medicine, and rulemaking processes that allowed ample public input.

URGENT: write your congressional representatives and ask them to vote against these attempts to undermine the integrity of USDA’s nutrition standards.  Congress is working on these measures right now.