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Readers have written me to point out that my posts rarely cover good news, and that they badly need to hear some.

Point taken: I devote this week’s blog to good news items.

Let’s start with Friday’s announcement that the USDA will extend universal school meals through June 30, 2021 (you can read the entire announcement here).

Is this an election-year ploy?  Maybe, but it’s the first thing Trump’s USDA has done that I think is worth doing.

It must have happened as a result of strong advocacy pressure.  I say this because, as The Counter’s Jessica Fu reported in August, the USDA was determined not to extend free meals to school children, arguing that it did not have the authority to do so.

“While we want to provide as much flexibility as local school districts need during this pandemic, the scope of this request is beyond what USDA currently has the authority to implement and would be closer to a universal school meals program which Congress has not authorized or funded,” Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue wrote in a letter last Thursday explaining the decision.

But a week later, the USDA did extend the universal meals program through the end of December this year.

Now it has extended that extension through the end of this school year.

Yes!

This means, as the announcement says, USDA will:

• Allow…meals to be served in all areas and at no cost;
• Permit meals to be served outside of the typically required group settings and meal times;
• Waive meal pattern requirements, as necessary; and
• Allow parents and guardians to pick-up meals for their children.

Universal school meals:

• Ensure food justice for children
• Make sure all children are fed
• Avoid stigma
• Avoid expensive and cumbersome exclusionary paperwork

So this is good news, but there’s more work yet to do.

• Make sure those meals are healthy and do adhere to nutrition standards.
• Make universal school meals permanent.

My go-to reference on this topic:

In this week’s updates of items related to food and Coronavirus, let’s start with the good news (yes, there is some).

I.  Free meals for New Yorkers

The New York City Department of Education has announced that it will make three free meals available every day for any New Yorker, at more than 400 locations.

• No one will be turned away at any time
• All adults and children can pick up three meals at one time
• Vegetarian and halal options available at all sites
• No registration or ID required

What, you might wonder, is in these meals?

• Breakfast
• Lunch

This is no time to criticize, and I won’t.

This is a monumental undertaking and city officials deserve much praise for making what look like typical school meals available to everyone.

Much praise also to the school food service and other personnel who are preparing these meals.

II.  Recognition that the lowest-paid workers are essential

The economy and society run on the work of farmworkers,  many of them immigrants and undocumented, health care employees, restaurant delivery and food service personnel, and so many others involved in our food system.  The indispensible value of their work has suddenly become visible.   That’s a good first step, but not enough, of course.

III.  An opportunity to document history

A crisis of this magnitude calls for analysis.  It’s hard to do that when you are right in the middle of it, but the Association of Public Historians of New York State has issued a call for documentation and offers suggestions about what to write and collect right now.  We can all do this and lay the groundwork for future historical analysis.  I’m interested in the food and food politics aspects that I’ve been posting about on this site.  All suggestions welcome.

IV.  A return to home gardening and cooking

Salon’s recent article about renewed interest in gardening, canning, and baking focuses attention on how difficult it has become to get seeds and find flour, yeast, and eggs in supermarkets.   My local CSA baker (Wide Awake in Ithaca) is offering sour dough starter, flour, recipes, and instructions along with weekly loaves.  It’s still too cold to plant anything up here in the Finger Lakes, but the robins are back, the forsythia is in bloom, and it will soon be time to start the peas.

Here’s something useful to do while waiting out the Coronavirus crisis: help preserve school nutrition standards.Dea

The Center for Science in the Public Interest has organized a call for action.

The USDA recently proposed changes that would weaken school nutrition. The latest proposal would allow students to choose pizza, French fries, and cookies regularly in place of a healthier school lunch. It would allow more French fries in place of carrots in school lunch, more fried hash browns in breakfast, and less fruit in some school breakfasts. These changes are on top of the 2018 school meal rollbacks that locked in unsafe levels of sodium and reduced whole grains.

Deadline for comments extended until April 22.

Here is what you can do to help:

• Submit a comment to the docket here.  If your organization needs  model (here is one).
• Get your social networks to generate individual comments. You can use CSPI’s online alert for this
• Sign a group letter by Friday, March 20. (download the letter here.)
• Spread the word through social media. CSPI provides some model Tweets:
  • @SecretarySonny @USDA announced plans to allow kids to choose pizza, French fries, and cookies regularly in place of a healthier school lunch—jeopardizing progress on school nutrition and could decrease meal participation, school revenue, and exacerbate stigma. http://bit.ly/protectschoolmeals
  • @USDA’s own data shows nutritional quality of school meals significantly increased, participation highest when meals are healthiest, and food waste has not increased. Yet @SecretarySonny announced plans to make school meals less healthy. http://bit.ly/protectschoolmeals
  • Hold the fries please: under @SecretarySonny @USDA’s plans, kids could get an additional eight cups of French fries over the week. Schools could serve potatoes every day for breakfast in place of fruit and more potatoes at lunch in place of carrots, cucumbers, and other veggies. http://bit.ly/protectschoolmeals
  • Breakfast in the classroom just got less healthy. Under @SecretarySonny @USDA’s plans, kids would have decreased access to whole fruit and could get more juice instead. Kids already drink plenty of juice and do not consume enough whole fruit. http://bit.ly/protectschoolmeals
  • Cakes, cookies, and donuts for little kids? Join us in stopping @SecretarySonny @USDA to allow grain-based desserts into child care and afterschool programs. http://bit.ly/protectschoolmeals
• CSPI also provides a model Facebook post:
  • The Trump Administration announced plans to roll back school nutrition. They’d allow students to choose pizza, French fries, and cookies regularly in place of a healthier school lunch. They would also allow more French fries in place of carrots in school lunch, more fried hash browns in breakfast, and less fruit in some school breakfasts. Tell the Trump administration: stop harming kids’ health. Please join us and our public health partners in urging the administration not to weaken nutrition for school children. http://bit.ly/protectschoolmeals

The USDA has produced four infographics on its purchasing practices for school meals.

• USDA Foods in Schools – This infographic summarizes nationwide USDA Foods purchases including the average cost per pound by food group and the breakdown of total spending and pounds received by food group.
• USDA Foods in Schools: Summary by Program – This infographic shows a summary of purchases from all three programs: USDA Foods Bulk for Processing, USDA Foods Direct Delivery, and USDA DoD Fresh. It is important to note that the USDA Foods Bulk for Processing section only includes items classified as a bulk product on the USDA Foods Available List.
• USDA Foods in Schools: State Overview– This infographic shows the average number of products ordered by States and the top five products by dollar value and volume. This infographic also displays the value of food orders by State.
• USDA DoD Fresh in Schools – This infographic provides an overview of USDA DoD Fresh purchases including a summary of the top five fruit and vegetables received and the total pounds purchased. It is important to note that the items available through USDA DoD Fresh may vary by State.

I took a look at the first one and got stopped cold by this:

Protein?  What’s that?  The answer:  meat, poultry, fish, eggs, peanut butter, and sunflower seed butter.

I also wondered what DoD Fresh was about.  It is an agreement between USDA and the Department of Defense to supply fresh fruits and vegetables to schools.

For school food aficionados, there is much information here in a readily accessible format.  Enjoy!

If it weren’t so tragic, we could all have a big laugh at the USDA’s latest announcement of how it plans to weaken the nutrition standards for school meals.   Here’s how it starts:

Delivering on his promise to act on feedback from dietary professionals, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced two proposals today that will put local school and summer food service operators back in the driver’s seat of their programs, because they know their children best. Under the school meals proposed rule, school nutrition professionals have more flexibility to serve appetizing and healthy meals that appeal to their students’ preferences and subsequently reduce food waste…These improvements build on the 2018 reforms that preserve strong nutrition standards while providing schools the additional flexibilities they need to best serve America’s students [the words in red are my emphasis].

This is USDA doublespeak.  My translation:

• Dietary professionals: USDA is not talking about me here.  It is referring to the School Nutrition Association, which represents school food service workers, and receives nearly half its funding from food companies that sell products to schools.
• Driver’s seat: This is Trump’s USDA saying that it is not bound by anything accomplished by Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign.
• Flexibility: This means that schools can decide on their own to ignore nutrition standards and let kids eat all the junk food they want.
• Improvements: This refers to benefits for the companies that sell junk foods in schools.
• 2018 reforms:  In USDA-speak, “reform” usually means rollback of rules or budget cuts; it never means real improvement.

I just can’t get my head around why there is so much political pressure to feed junk food to kids.  Doesn’t everyone want kids to be healthy?  Apparently not.

Bettina Siegel, author of Kids’ Food and blogger at The Lunch Tray, has her own analytical deconstruction of what this announcement means.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest interprets USDA’s proposals as an “assault on school meals.”

In an email, a reader who wishes to remain anonymous sent me some notes on the large body of research, some of it from the agency itself, countering USDA’s claims that the current nutrition standards are not working.

• USDA’s own research shows that meals are healthier, plate waste has not increased, and most schools are complying with nutrition standards.
• Healthy Eating Research shows that the nutritional quality of school meals has improved under the current rules.
• A study from the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity shows that low-income kids are eating better under the existing standards.
• Surveys from Bridging the Gap show that most kids like the healthier school lunches.
• A poll conducted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, and American Heart Association shows that more than 70% of parents support healthier school nutrition standards, and more than 90% want fruits or vegetables served with every meal.
• A Harvard study stimates that the current nutrition standards will prevent more than 2 million cases of childhood obesity and save nearly $800 million in health care costs over 10 years.

In short, school meals are not broken and do not need fixing.  This is about politics, in this case USDA’s pandering to food company interests at the expense of kids’ health.

Shameful.

Jennifer Gaddis.  The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools.  University of California Press, 2019.

This book is a welcome addition to the growing library of works focusing on labor in the food system.  This topic deserves attention and Gaddis is looking at the plight of an especially neglected group, the people who make and serve food to kids in schools.   Unlike any other school program, the USDA-managed National School Lunch—and Breakfast—Programs are expected to be self-supporting through payments by parents and federal reimbursements.  They are chronically underfunded and issues of cost matter far more than food quality.

Gaddis lays out the issues in her introduction:

The NSLP [National School Lunch Program] operates largely as a social welfare program for low-income families and a public subsidy for large-scale factory farms and processed-food companies.  Since the 1970s and the widespread embrace of neoliberal political and economic projects, the pursuit of cheap food, cheap labor, and cheap care has pushed millions of middle- and upper-middle-class families out of the NSLP.  They pursue seemingly “better” algternatives for their own children, but in so doing they fail to hold Congress, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), and Bg Food companies accountable for the quality of the NSLP…[This] inadvertently reduces political will to invest in an NSLP that provides high-quality food and care for all children and families. [p. 4]

The story she tells here is not pretty—it is one of contempt for the poor coupled with protection of big business, along with lack of political will and weak civil society demand.

Her advice: organize, mobilize, advocate!

One of the great ironies of this advice is that the School Nutrition Association, which represents food service workers, opposes advocacy for better quality food, in part as Gaddis explains, because it has been captured by the processed food industry.

Let grass-roots advocacy begin!

The book comes with resources.

• Labor of Lunch_curriculum guide
• YouTube videos: these include five short videos based on the author’s fieldwork for the book.  The first is The Labor of Lunch: Scratch Cooking.  The others are listed on the right side of the page.

It’s prediction season and NBC MACH asked for mine in science and tech.  Here it is, along with those of 18 others (I’m in impressive company).

My crystal ball shows a fairy godmother waving her magic wand, giving us adequate levels of food assistance for the poor, delicious and healthy school food for kids, honest food labels that everyone can understand, food so safe that nobody has to worry about it, wages for farm and restaurant workers that they can actually live on, and farmers growing food for people (not so much for animals or cars) in ways that protect and replenish soil and water, reduce greenhouse gases and provide them a decent living. Hey — a girl can dream. And do we ever need dreams — visions for a healthier and more sustainable food system — if we are to continue to thrive as a nation. I cannot get my head around the idea that anyone would object to ensuring that all children get fed the best possible food in schools, that animals should be raised humanely or that crops should be grown sustainably with the least possible harm to the environment. Our food system should protect and promote public health as its first priority. We can hope that 2019 will bring us some steps in thatdirection, but here’s my prediction: not this year. But let’s hold onto those hopes for when times get better.

Outside also asked for predictions.  Here’s what I said:

“Eat Less, Move More” Will Make a Comeback

I’m guessing that calories will be back as explanations for weight gain and dieting.  The arguments about “low-carb” versus “low-fat” go on and on and on, but get nowhere. Attempts to prove one or the other better for weight loss or maintenance remain unconvincing. Advice to eat less and move more still makes good sense. The trick is finding a way to do either—and preferably both—that is so easy to adhere to that it becomes second nature. Individuals have to figure that out on their own, and understanding calorie balance is not a bad way to begin.

If you like this sort of thing, here are some others:

• NutraIngredients’ predictions for 2019 food trends
• FoodNavigator’s
• Restaurant-Hospitality’s 

Have a happy and delicious new year!

The USDA has announced some changes to the school food rules implemented in the previous administration.  The USDA press release explains:

• First, it will broaden the milk options in the National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program by allowing local operators to permanently offer flavored, low-fat milk. For consistency across nutrition programs, it will also allow flavored, low-fat milk in the Special Milk Program for Children and in the Child and Adult Care Food Program for participants ages 6 and older. [My translation: a green light to sugar-sweetened milk].
• Second, this final rule will require that half of the weekly grains in the school lunch and breakfast menu be whole grain-rich, thus ending the need for the exemption process. [Translation: Schools can serve a lot fewer whole-grain foods].
• Third, it will provide schools in the lunch and breakfast programs more time for gradual sodium reduction by retaining Sodium Target 1 through the end of school year (SY) 2023-2024, continuing to Target 2 in SY 2024-2025, and eliminating the Final Target that would have gone into effect in SY 2022-2023. [Translation: Good-bye Target 3; forget about serious sodium reduction].

By codifying these changes, USDA acknowledges the persistent menu planning challenges experienced by some schools, and affirms its commitment to give schools more control over food service decisions and greater ability to offer wholesome and appealing meals that reflect local preferences.  [Translation: USDA is committed to letting schools serve junk foods].

It’s worth reading the Federal Register notice:, which reveals:

• 97% of more than 84,000 comments on grain flexibility opposed the changes.
• 96% of more than 83,000 comments on sodium flexibility opposed the changes.

Most schools had implemented the previous rules just fine.  In today’s Orwell-speak, greater “flexibility” means that USDA cares a lot more about the health of the companies that sell meals and snacks to schools than it does to kids’ health.

These changes provide further evidence of corporate capture of USDA.

Three reactions of interest

• CSPI’s statement
• American Heart Association’s statement
• The Lunch Tray’s Bettina Siegel’s reevaluation