A Fresh Look at What School Menus Can Be

Dan Frosch, The New York Times, July 17, 2012

DENVER — With the authority of a celebrity chef, Adam Fisher gestured toward the bushels of fresh basil, oregano and parsley sitting on the counter in front of him, as the crowd leaned forward.

“We almost want to treat fresh herbs like we treat fresh flowers,” he commanded, speaking into a microphone clipped to his apron. “You want to snip off the ends, and ideally you want to store them in some water.” 

Mr. Fisher may not be some fast-talking TV personality, but he is a chef, a food supervisor for the Denver Public Schools, and he was giving a demonstration on how to whip up cafeteria food — in this case, cucumber and pasta salads — from scratch. 

With new federal standards for school meals going into effect this month, and a renewed focus on the issue brought by the first lady, Michelle Obama, thousands of school chefs, food service workers and nutrition experts from around the country gathered in Denver this week at an annual conference put on by the School Nutrition Association, a nonprofit organization of school food professionals. 

As vendors hawked samples of every imaginable school fare — whole-grain rolls, turkey sandwiches, pizza squares — cooks and school food administrators traded tips on how to improve their schools’ cuisine, part of a nationwide push to make school food tastier and more healthful. 

But it was the new federal Department of Agriculture nutrition standards for school meals that seemed the main topic of conversation. 

The rules establish calorie and sodium limits for meals, require schools to serve larger portions of fruits and vegetables and mandate that all milk be 1 percent or nonfat. Requirements for the use of whole grains are also being phased in. 

With more schools cooking meals from scratch — which invariably means more fresh local fruits and vegetables in the kitchens rather than processed foods — districts have largely been able to keep pace with the new regulations, nutrition experts said. 

“School districts for the last 15 years have been working on ways to improve their menus,” said Julia Bauscher, the School Nutrition Association’s new vice president and school nutrition director for the Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, Ky. “The majority of the members that are here probably are already meeting some of the new standards.” 

Gone, at least in many places, are the days when lunch ladies served fried just-about-anything with a side of unrecognizable slop. These days, many school meals start with raw ingredients and take longer to prepare. School staples like chicken nuggets are typically baked, not tossed in the fryer, and hot dogs are more likely to be made of turkey. And even those longtime favorites are served in the cafeteria less frequently. 

“Ten or 15 years ago, you wouldn’t have seen a salad bar, a fresh fruit and veggie bar, homemade pasta salads,” said Theresa Hafner, executive director of the food services department for Denver Public Schools. “You probably wouldn’t have seen homemade biscuits, or homemade hamburger buns, made with a white whole-wheat flour.” 

In Denver, for example, 95 percent of the public school lunch menu and about half of the breakfast menu is now prepared from scratch, since the school district introduced cooking from scratch in the fall of 2010. 

The switch has not come without a cost. Since 2010, Ms. Hafner has hired more than 100 additional food service workers, as scratch cooking is more labor intensive. And her food expenses have gone up 20 percent, since fresh produce must be bought for the schools’ fruit and salad bars. 

Adam Simmons, the child nutrition director for the public school system in Fayetteville, Ark., said that while the new rules were well intentioned, he worried that sodium limits and expanded servings of fruits and vegetables could result in more food being left on the tray.

“You’re increasing serving sizes on fruits and vegetables so much, I think you’re really going to just increase trash,” said Mr. Simmons, who spearheaded a switch to 70 percent scratch cooking in his school district. 

Ultimately, though, he and other nutrition experts viewed the new regulations as positive, as long as the school chefs still make the food taste good. 

“Putting things on a plate doesn’t make it a nutritious meal. The students have to consume it,” he said. “And if they do, it will open them to more fresh fruits and vegetables. In the long run, this can do great things.”

Special Report: How Washington went soft on childhood obesity

Duff Wilson and Janet Roberts, Reuters, April 27, 2012

Washington, D.C. (Reuters) - In the political arena, one side is winning the war on child obesity.

The side with the fattest wallets.

After aggressive lobbying, Congress declared pizza a vegetable to protect it from a nutritional overhaul of the school lunch program this year. The White House kept silent last year as Congress killed a plan by four federal agencies to reduce sugar, salt and fat in food marketed to children.

And during the past two years, each of the 24 states and five cities that considered "soda taxes" to discourage consumption of sugary drinks has seen the efforts dropped or defeated.

At every level of government, the food and beverage industries won fight after fight during the last decade. They have never lost a significant political battle in the United States despite mounting scientific evidence of the role of unhealthy food and children's marketing in obesity.

Lobbying records analyzed by Reuters reveal that the industries more than doubled their spending in Washington during the past three years. In the process, they largely dominated policymaking -- pledging voluntary action while defeating government proposals aimed at changing the nation's diet, dozens of interviews show.

In contrast, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, widely regarded as the lead lobbying force for healthier food, spent about $70,000 lobbying last year -- roughly what those opposing the stricter guidelines spent every 13 hours, the Reuters analysis showed.

Industry critics also contend that the White House all but abandoned a multi-agency effort that recommended healthier food be marketed to children, even after First Lady Michelle Obama told a grocery trade group two years ago that food manufacturers needed to "step it up" to protect children.

"I'm upset with the White House," said Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Health Committee. "They went wobbly in the knees. When it comes to kids' health, they shouldn't go wobbly in the knees."

The White House disputed the characterization. Sam Kass, an assistant chef there and senior policy adviser on food initiatives, said in a statement: "We are incredibly proud of the commitments that many food companies have made, and are continuing to work with others to advocate for even more change to make sure our children are getting the healthy, nutritious food they need."

The political battles over what children eat and drink are crucial to the nation's health, experts say, because the tripling in childhood obesity in the last three decades foretells diabetes, heart disease and other illness in decades to come. America is one of the fattest nations on earth, and the Institute of Medicine, in a 2006 report requested by Congress, said junk food marketing contributes to an epidemic of childhood obesity that continues to rise. The institute is the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences.

SHORTER LIFESPAN?

Health experts and Harkin say the food industry has employed some of the same tactics as Big Tobacco in its efforts to fight stricter regulations -- chief among them the argument that the industry should regulate itself.

Although no major legislative action on childhood obesity is pending during this election year, the public debate is expected to resume next month. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will hold a conference in Washington from May 7-9 called "Weight of the Nation." It will include an Institute of Medicine update and the premiere of an HBO documentary series of the same name. Health advocates also plan a "Sugary Drinks Summit" in Washington from June 7-8.

"We haven't reversed the epidemic," Dr. William H. Dietz, director of the division of nutrition, physical activity and obesity at the CDC, said in an interview. "This may be the first generation of children that has a lower life span than their parents."

Food and beverage manufacturers and advertisers say they aren't to blame for obesity. Indeed, they say they are part of the solution.

The American Beverage Association says its members have cut 88 percent of the calories shipped to schools since 2004 by offering less sugary drinks and emphasizing water, low-fat milk and juice in elementary and middle schools. The drinks now list calories on the front of labels.

Sixteen major companies with about 75 percent of the food ads on TV aimed at children under 12 are regulating themselves under the Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative of the Better Business Bureau. They are limiting ads for certain foods and adopting nutrition standards.

"It's made a big difference," said Elaine D. Kolish, the initiative director and a former head of enforcement at the Federal Trade Commission. More than 100 products have been changed or created to cut salt, fat, sugar or calories, she said. Tougher self-regulation is promised by 2014.

At the same time, Kolish said, there is no proof of "a causal effect between food advertising and obesity."

The Institute of Medicine had found strong evidence that TV watching was associated with child obesity. But researchers have found no proof that obesity is directly caused by ads for sweets or junk food.

Armed with those arguments and a bulging political war chest, the $1.5 trillion food and beverage industry has defeated soda taxes and marketing restrictions in cities and states across the nation, mounting referendums to overturn the taxes in the two states that passed them and persuading 16 states to prohibit lawsuits over fatty foods.

Reuters analyzed spending reported by more than 50 food and beverage groups that lobbied against the federal effort last year to write tougher -- but still voluntary -- nutritional standards for foods marketed to children.

The groups have spent more than $175 million lobbying since President Barack Obama took office in 2009 -- more than double the $83 million spent in the previous three years, during the Bush Administration.

The totals do not include broader lobbying efforts by the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and media and advertising interests that also opposed the federal plan. Those groups lobby on other issues, and lobbying disclosure reports do not specify how much they spent targeting the food marketing proposal. The Reuters analysis was based on records from the Federal Election Commission, the Secretary of the Senate and the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics.

In a stark example of lobbying muscle, PepsiCo Inc, Coca-Cola Co, bottlers and the American Beverage Association spent more than $40 million lobbying in 2009 when Congress was considering a soda tax. That was more than eight times the $4.8 million they had spent the previous year, the analysis showed. After the proposal died, the groups cut spending to $24 million in 2010 and $10 million in 2011.

In recent interviews, lobbyists, lawmakers, policy leaders and industry insiders described the power of money in politics and the appeal of self-regulation to explain how they have been so successful countering legislation backed by public health interests that they portrayed as overreaching.

The public health advocates "hit a nerve," said Marshall Matz, a Washington lawyer and industry lobbyist who advised the 2008 Obama campaign on agricultural issues. "There's a bipartisan feeling you can tell someone to eat less fat, consume more fiber, more fruits and vegetables and less sugar. But if you start naming foods, you cross the line."

WHITE HOUSE WITHDRAWAL

The effort to defeat the tougher food standards heated up late last spring and summer, when lobbyists said they went on high alert.

On July 12, White House visitor logs show a who's who of food company chief executives and lobbyists visited the White House. The group met with Valerie Jarrett, Obama's senior adviser, and Melody Barnes, then director of the president's Domestic Policy Council. Among the group at the meeting: CEOs of Nestle USA, Kellogg, General Mills, and top executives at Walt Disney, Time Warner, and Viacom, owner of the Nickelodeon children's channel -- companies with some of the biggest financial stakes in marketing to children. Those companies have a combined market value of more than $350 billion.

Two people who attended -- lobbyist Scott Faber of the Grocery Manufacturers Association and Kolish of the Better Business Bureau -- said the group told the White House that it opposed government action and favored voluntary initiatives. Other participants and the White House have declined to describe the meeting or did not respond to requests for comment.

Advocates for tougher standards tried to counter the lobbying surge, calling, emailing and visiting the White House scores of times last year.

Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, recalled an October 31 White House visit that included 11 other representatives of nonprofit groups who supported the food standards. The group met with Barnes, White House visitor logs show. Among the advocates there that day: the American Heart Association and Children Now.

The effort by the advocacy groups had little effect.

In the weeks after the meetings, proponents of tougher standards said, neither the president nor the First Lady spoke out for the work on healthy food guidelines that had been drafted by the administration's own agencies. And industry representatives said their White House lobbying -- which also included calls, letters and visits to the White House -- proved successful on a hot political issue.

Wootan concedes as much. "There was so much industry pushback that it led to a lot of foot-dragging," she said. "The president and White House were as much to blame as House Republicans."

Meanwhile, Michelle Obama's childhood-obesity campaign pivoted from criticizing foodmakers toward promoting exercise.

"We need you all to step it up," she told the Grocery Manufacturers Association in a March 2010 speech. "We need you not just to tweak around the edges but to entirely rethink the products that you're offering, the information that you provide about these products and how you market those products to our children."

By last November, Mrs. Obama was praising the manufacturers for product improvements -- "a fundamental shift in the Let's Move campaign," according to the widely cited blog Obama Foodorama. Instead, the First Lady (with free advertising from broadcasters) emphasized exercise -- a favored cause of companies that lobbied against stricter food guidelines.

Nicholas W. Papas, a spokesman for the White House, disputed the notion that it had failed to champion the work of its own agencies. "The Obama Administration consistently supported the Interagency Working Group and we were disappointed when Congress granted the food industry's requests and placed new demands on the working group," he said in a statement.

But Papas could not point to any specific example of the president or First Lady voicing support for the working group report. Lobbyists on both sides of the issue and two key members of Congress said the administration stood back at crucial junctures, allowing Congress time to thwart the effort.

Kelly D. Brownell, a Yale professor and director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, said he believes the First Lady has become too friendly with industry even as she has been a passionate, effective advocate for healthier food and exercise. He pointed to the possible influence of a 2010 Supreme Court decision, criticized by the president, that removed limits on corporate and union campaign spending.

"It does seem that there's been a shift in priorities in the Let's Move campaign in an election year," Brownell said. "And with the Citizens United case and the companies being able to lobby almost without limit, it's not surprising that the White House is more friendly toward the industry."

Wootan had a similar view: "I'd focus more on exercise, too, if my husband was up for re-election."

The First Lady's office declined to respond publicly to questions about its support for the agencies' proposed standards for foods marketed to children, or charges that Let's Move had changed focus. Kass, the Let's Move policy adviser, responded to similar criticism last year from New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle by saying the emphasis on exercise added to previous work on nutrition and was not a pullback from topics that the industry opposes.

BIG TOBACCO'S PLAYBOOK

Although food and beverage companies say they are making dramatic strides in self-regulation, their critics say they are moving too slowly and trying to influence public opinion by using some of the same approaches that tobacco companies used to defend their products.

Kraft Foods, the nation's largest food company, was owned by Philip Morris, the nation's largest tobacco company, from 1988-2007. Philip Morris makes Marlboro cigarettes.

Brownell and Kenneth E. Warner, a professor and former dean of the University of Michigan School of Public Health, have written papers comparing Big Food to Big Tobacco.

Both industries dispute links between their products and ill health, Brownell said -- tobacco companies claiming cigarettes don't cause cancer and food companies saying there is no proof that sugar causes obesity. Both have rewritten product labels without making major changes, he said. And both emphasize self-regulation -- to Brownell, an effort to preempt government standards.

"I can't think of a single thing the food industry is doing that the tobacco industry hasn't done," Brownell said.

Both industries also have relied on marketing to kids, he said, and both use what Brownell called "front groups" with consumer-oriented names that would not show their industry connections.

The Center for Consumer Freedom is a nonprofit group led by Washington lawyer and public relations executive Rick Berman. Formerly known as Guest Choice Network, it was founded in 1995 with a $600,000 pledge from tobacco giant Philip Morris. Today, the center attacks "food radicals" and runs websites including obesitymyths.com. The group says it is funded by food and restaurant companies but declines to name specific benefactors.

A group called Americans Against Food Taxes, calling itself a "coalition of concerned citizens," was formed in 2007 and has been financed by sugary beverage makers to fight soda taxes. It bought a 30-second ad during the 2011 Super Bowl.

Spokesmen for the food and beverage industries say comparing their tactics to tobacco's is unfair.

"Food processing is not an evil thing," said Derek Yach, PepsiCo's senior vice president of global health and agricultural policy and a former World Health Organization official who was well-known as an adversary of sugar and tobacco interests. He was hired by Pepsi, which also owns snack-food maker Frito-Lay, five years ago.

"I might not agree with a lot of things we do, but are we on a track where we're struggling to get to the right place? Absolutely," Yach said. The industry is well-intentioned, he said, focused on improving products and transparent in its fight against higher taxes and marketing restrictions.

CANNING THE SODA TAX

Beverage companies showed their political clout in 2009 when they faced a proposed penny-an-ounce tax on sugary drinks in a Congress eager to raise money to pay for obesity-related health care costs. The soda tax died in committee.

Other plans to tax soda have fizzled from coast to coast in the past two years. Twenty-four states and five cities considered them, according to the beverage association. None passed except in Washington state, where legislators approved a 2-cent-a-can soda tax on the last day of the 2010 session.

Within a month, a trade group for Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Dr. Pepper Snapple mounted a referendum campaign. It spent $16 million, a state record for an initiative effort, to gather signatures and flood the airwaves. The public voted 60 percent against the tax.

The pro-tax group, outspent $37-to-$1, grumbled that the soda group misled voters with TV ads that the Seattle Times concluded were "mostly false" because they suggested a wide range of grocery items also would be taxed. The beverage industry mounted a similar $3.5 million campaign that knocked out a soda tax in Maine in 2008.

When Governor David A. Paterson of New York proposed an 18 percent tax on sweetened drinks in 2009, he said he wanted to raise money to treat obesity-related disease. Soda makers spent $12.8 million lobbying and advertising against it, and PepsiCo said the tax could affect its decision on whether to move more than 1,000 bottling jobs to Connecticut. The governor withdrew the proposal, and the company decided to keep its headquarters in New York.

"We got smashed," Paterson said in an interview. Labor unions had joined the attack because they worried about losing the Pepsi jobs, he added, comparing the soda lobby to a Mack truck. Paterson also said soda makers "bought off" lawmakers with donations and advertising even in districts where 40 percent of minority children were overweight or obese.

"We ran into the machine the way anti-smoking activists did in the early '60s," he said. "It's not a fight you're going to win right away."

Pepsi spokeswoman Gina Anderson said the proposed soda tax was "a serious concern and consideration" in the company's siting plans before the proposal died. The company decided last year to renew its lease through 2015.

Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, also compared the industry tactics with those of alcohol, tobacco and nuclear power.

"It's all the same playbook, isn't it?" he said. "You lobby. You make campaign contributions. You buy advertising. You threaten to move your plant. You use your workers as lobbyists."

The beverage association rejects the analogy. Its website says, "If anyone is using the ‘tobacco playbook' in their tactics, it is some of these activists." The group pointed to two recent examples, both involving the New York City Department of Health and both first reported by The New York Times.

In one, an email showed a city official asking, "What can we get away with?" in anti-soda advertising. In the other, a photo was altered on a subway poster that warned of the risks of diabetes from sugary soda. It portrayed an overweight man as an amputee. His right leg had been photographically removed. The city health department declined to comment further on these incidents.

Christopher Gindlesperger, a spokesman for the beverage association, explained the group's success in staving off soda taxes this way: "People feel very confident they can decide what to eat or drink without government help."

SEMPER FRIES

Public health officials thought the least nutritional items would drop off the government's $10.5 billion school lunch program last year when they announced the first menu overhaul in 15 years. White bread: gone. Milk: low or no fat only. Fruits and vegetables: doubled. Portions: smaller.

Then Congress got involved -- at the behest of potato and pizza companies -- to preserve French fries as a menu staple and to declare pizza, with its tomato sauce, to be a vegetable.

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) was one champion of the pizza rollback. Minnesota is home to Schwan Food Co, a private company with nearly $3 billion in sales and 70 percent of the school frozen pizza market. Klobuchar, who is running for re-election this year, wrote a letter last June to the Department of Agriculture. One sentence in it was identical to that in a Schwan official's later testimony before a Senate committee. The similarity was first reported by Minnesota Public Radio.

Both documents contained this statement: "By changing the crediting, many tomato-based sauces and salsa-type applications would no longer be factored into the weekly requirements for vegetables."

Klobuchar's spokesman, Linden Zakula, said he could not explain how the same language was used in the senator's letter because the aide who drafted it had left. He said Schwan was among many constituents to contact the office. Schwan declined to comment.

In fighting the menu change, the American Frozen Food Institute spent $543,000 lobbying last year, up from $334,000 in 2010; Schwan spent $50,000, and ConAgra Foods Inc spent $400,000. The companies also financed a group called the Coalition for Sustainable School Meal Programs.

House Republicans, citing "overly burdensome and costly regulations," added language to a budget bill in November to keep French fries and frozen pizza on the school lunch menu. The measure took effect earlier this year.

FIRST AMENDMENT PROTECTION

James H. Davidson believes in the First Amendment. The former college newspaper editor turned lawyer turned Senate aide is now one of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington.

For two decades, Davidson has been the point man for the advertising industry in free speech issues. More recently his clients have also included food and beverage companies in alliance with advertisers. They have joined forces to lead the fight against the proposed government guidelines on sugar, salt and fat in food marketed to 2- to 17-year-olds.

Davidson also says there is no proof that food marketing causes obesity, and without it, there is no legal basis for restricting the ads.

"The First Amendment protects this type of speech," he said.

Other lobbyists pointed to the role of potentially unlimited political donations in explaining how industry has been able to so thoroughly defeat the proposed salt, sugar and fat guidelines.

In 2009, Congress passed a measure proposed by Harkin and Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) to ask the FTC and three other agencies -- the CDC, the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration -- to draft voluntary nutrition standards for children's food marketing. The two senators were motivated by studies showing that children develop lifelong preferences from watching ads that target them with saltier, sweeter foods than adults.

"We are calling on the food industry to tackle this threat and boldly reinvent the food marketplace," FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said at a hearing in December 2009. As for kids' marketing, he noted, not only Congress but some companies wanted government guidance. "We will have such a uniform framework in place, we expect, by this summer," Leibowitz said.

Summer came and went. Brownback left the Senate at the end of 2010. When the draft guidelines were finally published in April 2011 -- to praise from health groups -- business interests say they were shocked by the low sugar and salt suggestions.

"These are voluntary guidelines," Harkin said. "What's the industry so afraid of?" The companies said the recommendations could become requirements and kill marketing of 88 of the 100 most popular food products, including Cheerios, whole wheat bread and yogurt.

The industry mobilized. Food and media companies hired Anita Dunn, former White House communications chief under Obama, to run media strategy. The industry created a group called the Sensible Food Policy Coalition. And it paid for a report that said the restrictions would result in 75,000 lost jobs and $28.6 billion in lost revenue to companies -- estimates based on the supposition that the guidelines would cut one in five food ads.

Not true, government officials and public health advocates said, arguing that industry had five years to improve the products. A review of the report by three marketing professors for the website politifact.com and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution termed its findings "false."

Nonetheless the report was widely circulated in Washington and repeatedly cited in letters to the administration signed by about 200 members of Congress from both parties. As the effort gained momentum, congressional staff members and lobbyists described calls and visits from chief executive officers of companies.

The industry's campaign, lobbyists say, focused on Representative Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.) and Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who chaired the appropriations subcommittee in each chamber that funded the FTC.

Emerson knew Davidson, who had attended college in Missouri and who had worked for Senator Stuart Symington (D-Mo.). In an interview, Emerson said she opposed the food guidelines because they would inevitably become mandatory. She said she learned how that could hurt business while working for the National Restaurant Association in the early 1990s. "I felt very passionately about anything that's voluntary," she said.

Last December, Emerson wrote the budget bill provision that stopped the guidelines, and she insisted on keeping the language as the bill moved through a House-Senate conference committee. It was a 55-word sentence in a 130-page omnibus budget bill, requiring the agencies to do a cost-benefit analysis of their recommendations before finishing the report. The agencies said such a requirement was unprecedented for a voluntary guideline and would prove far too expensive.

In the Senate, a lobbyist involved with the issue told Reuters, Durbin simply needed to stay quiet so as not to make it a partisan issue and eventually nudge Harkin into accepting Emerson's House provision. A Durbin spokesman, Max Gleischman, said the senator agreed to the House language because the industry was moving to regulate itself.

Durbin's home state of Illinois is home to Kraft. Its political action committee has been a regular contributor to his campaign committee, donating $14,000 since 2007.

"There was an outcry across the spectrum of the business community," said Dan Jaffe, executive vice president of the Association of National Advertisers. The proposal was too extreme, Jaffe said, and in the end, "It fell of its own weight."

Said Jeff McIntyre, policy director for the advocacy group Children Now: "We just got beat. Money wins."

Harkin also pointed to the power of corporate money. "They've scared some Democrats," he said in an interview. "It just shows you how heavy the lobbying is on the part of the industry."

Food and beverage groups targeting the proposed marketing restrictions had given Harkin's campaign more than $75,000 from 2007 through 2009. In 2010, after he helped initiate the push for food marketing restrictions, they contributed nothing. They gave him only $3,000 in 2011.

Comparing the last three years of the Bush administration to the first three years of Obama's, total campaign contributions from the more than 50 food and beverage groups and companies analyzed by Reuters were about the same. But during the Obama administration, the contributions increased substantially to some candidates who played key roles in warding off regulation.

Klobuchar, whose state is home to a number of large food companies, benefitted most. Her campaign received more than $160,000 in donations from 19 food and beverage groups during the last three years, double what they had given her in the three years prior. Her spokesman said there is no link between the donations and policy.

Food companies tripled their contributions to Emerson, who received more than $88,000 from the groups from 2009 through 2011. She received $39,000 in 2010 alone as she was poised to become chair of a key House appropriations subcommittee.

Emerson said most Republicans probably got more contributions when they became the House majority. However, the Reuters analysis shows the food and beverage groups strongly favored Republicans over Democrats, both before and after the 2010 election. On average over the last six years, they gave GOP political committees $2 for every $1 donated to Democrats.

The FTC issued a statement after the budget provision passed: "Congress has clearly changed its mind about what it would like the Interagency Working Group to do with regard to the report on food marketed to children."

On March 5, FTC Chairman Leibowitz, answering a congressman's question in a hearing, said the effort to write voluntary food standards was no longer an agency priority.

"It's probably time to move on," he said.

(Reporting by Duff Wilson and Janet Roberts; editing by Blake Morrison, Michael Williams, and Prudence Crowther)

Social media turn up heat on food industry

Monica Eng, Chicago Tribune,  March 28, 2012

Americans enjoy the cheapest food supply in the world, spending the smallest share of their income on groceries of any country.

But as activist groups continue to pull back the curtain on the techniques that make this cheap food possible, Americans are raising their eyebrows and voicing their concerns to surprisingly powerful effect.

This week, Beef Products Inc. announced the temporary shutdown of three of its four plants that produce an inexpensive, chemically treated recovered beef product the government calls "lean finely textured beef" but opponents have dubbed"pink slime."The company's decision came after McDonald's, the National School Lunch Program,Kroger Co.,Safeway Inc.and others made public their reduction or elimination of the product from their outlets in recent weeks.

While contamination problems had been associated with the product as late as 2009 — when theU.S. Department of Agriculturewas exempting it from routine safety tests — industry experts say new government and company testing protocols have made it a safe and incredibly efficient product for the food industry, which commonly adds it to ground beef.

But public outcry from consumers, parents and school district officials, triggered by YouTube videos and online petitions, drove industry and government to respond. It didn't hurt that the nickname attached to the product was so indelibly disgusting.

The responses by corporations and government are just the latest examples of consumer pressure leading to changes in standard practices in the food industry, such as housing hens and pregnant sows in cramped cages and feeding antibiotics to livestock.

"It was incredible," said Brianna Cayo Cotter, communications director of Change.org, a website that hosted a petition by Texas mom Bettina Siegel urging the USDA to stop buying ammonia-treated beef for school lunches. "In 10 days she made the USDA, the meat industry and major retailers all back away from it. Now the demand for pink slime has dropped so dramatically that some of the factories are starting to shut down."

Not everyone views such popular uprisings as a positive development.

"Something is seriously out of kilter in our communications environment when safe food products and proven technologies can be torpedoed by sensationalist, misleading, yet entertaining social media campaigns," said David B. Schmidt, president and CEO of the International Food Information Council. "We should all take several steps back and remember the critical thinking skills we were taught in school."

A spokesman for the USDA, which runs the school lunch program, said lean finely textured beef is still beef, though it is separated from fat through heat and centrifuge and treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill bacteria.

But because the agency also has to respond to consumer demand, the department announced that it would offer districts across the country alternatives to the product next year. The department acknowledged that it heard from school districts and was aware of the Change.org petition.

"Transparency is a reality of today, with more people paying close attention to what's in their food and especially (what's) being served in schools," said USDA spokesman Mike Jarvis. "We've said from the beginning: We think it's a safe product, but people have preferences and some schools didn't want it."

The term "pink slime" came from a 2002 internal email between two USDA scientists who were concerned at the time about its safety and lack of labeling. The emails surfaced when The New York Times, reporting on the safety of ground beef in 2009, obtained them under the Freedom of Information Act.

At the time, the USDA said it would start testing BPI's product for pathogens and would conduct a review of the company's operations. The company also said it would adjust ammonia levels in the product.

The topic remained dormant until April 2011, when celebrity chef Jamie Oliver made pink slime a topic on his "Food Revolution" TV show. It appeared again in January when McDonald's acknowledged that it had removed the product from its American outlets, and it spiked again early this month when Siegel launched her petition.

Attorney Bill Marler, who publishes Food Safety News online and represents plaintiffs in food poisoning suits, said he also believed that BPI's product was fairly safe. At the same time, he said, the company should have been more transparent about its processes rather than lobbying against labeling requirements.

"When you lobby not to label something, it just makes it look like you've got something to hide, which is ultimately a bad PR move," Marler said. "If government or companies have something positive or negative to say, it behooves them to get out ahead of it. Otherwise they get swamped by whatever narrative gets out by a former USDA official, Jamie Oliver or a mom with a blog in Houston. And look at the consequences.

Finally, Good News About School Lunches

Mark Bittman, The New York Times, January 31, 2012

Thirty-two million kids — 10 percent of the American population, and the future of the country —  are about to start eating better. That’s the bottom line of the new Department of Agriculture (U.S.D.A.) guidelines for government-subsidized school meals, announced last week. The  new rules are the first changes to the program in 15 years, and come as part of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act.

The guidelines are imperfect (what isn’t?) but worth celebrating: this is the single most significant improvement the Obama administration has made in the realm of food. The rules will double the amount of fruits and vegetables served in schools, set limits on damaging trans fats and salt, increase the amount of whole grains served, make low-fat milk the norm and establish suitable ranges for daily caloric intake.

And, incredibly, the U.S.D.A. moves will cost less than half of the agency’s original proposal. Even more stunning is that it’s doing this by scaling back on meat — abandoning requirements that schools serve meat or “meat alternatives” at breakfast. That is perhaps most commendable; teaching kids that nutritious meals don’t necessarily center on “protein” is one of the most important steps we can take in creating a sane diet for generations to come.

Yes, the Obama administration has disappointed many of its enthusiastic supporters by reneging on campaign promises, a number of them food-related. But these particular changes deserve praise.

Of course, there are limitations: advocates for good food are correctly disappointed that the U.S.D.A. ultimately let corporate interests deter the agency from pursuing an even more aggressively healthy set of rules. Following recommendations made by the Institute of Medicine, the U.S.D.A. originally proposed limiting the amount of starchy vegetables in school meals — which up until now have been unlimited — to one cup per week.

Lobbyists for the potato industry made a fuss and the Senate stepped in to make sure that didn’t happen, and that concession is integrated into the new rules: Potatoes will still be unlimited[1]. Similarly, you might remember that Congress and industry worked together to make sure that the tomato paste on pizza would continue to qualify it as a vegetable.

Undoubtedly, it’s infuriating that sound science and nutrition policy can still be trumped by the interests of Big Food, especially when the health of kids is on the line. And yes, good food advocates should be making noise about further improving these guidelines.

But let’s remember that a Republican administration likely would have moved school lunches even more in the direction they were headed: inferior versions of bad fast food. Read this article from 2003 about the desperate state of school lunches and you’ll appreciate how much progress is being made. (In short, the story is that the U.S.D.A. long purchased “surplus” beef and dairy and loaded school lunch menus with it. This was considered a win-win situation, because it gave farmers a safety net while schools got free food. But left out of the equation was what this actually meant for kids’ lunches, which became beefier and cheesier.)

Of course, the U.S.D.A. still supports (and makes unacceptable concessions to) industry, but these current guidelines are a major step away from that.

So their importance can barely be overstated: this is movement in the right direction.
The fact that industry lobbyists are griping demonstrates that; compromise, by its nature, can leave everyone dissatisfied. But after taking a beating for generations, advocates of good food should see the new guidelines as a real victory.

As should everyone else, because in food, as in most other arenas of our lives, corporate interests have long enjoyed disproportionate and increasing influence, and shifting that balance of power is among the biggest challenges facing Americans right now. Government can be an ally or an enemy in that fight, and the new guidelines are a welcome example of it using its weight to benefit most of us. The school lunch program is at the forefront of the uphill battle to feed kids well in this country, and — one way or the other — it will set an example for them five days a week, probably until that example spreads to society at large.


[1] Giving school districts the option of serving potatoes at every lunch is undesirable not only because “potatoes” often means “fries,” which pack a triple-whammy of unhealthy fat, near-useless carbs and a missed opportunity to serve a healthier vegetable or whole grain. It’s also because even non-fried potatoes are a less-than-ideal food; a Harvard study named them as the single worst food you can have in your diet if you want to control your weight.

Still, as Ron Nixon reported in The Times, potato lobbyists aren’t entirely happy: “The National Potato Council, which had opposed the attempts to limit the serving of potatoes, said that it was pleased with the new rules but that it still had some concerns.
“’Despite the fact that Congress said the U.S.D.A. could not limit potatoes in school lunches or breakfast, we still feel like the potato is being downplayed in favor of other vegetables in the new guideline’ said Mark Szymanski, a spokesman for the council. ‘It seems the department still considers the potato a second-class vegetable.’”

Actually? It is a second-class vegetable, one that, generally speaking, is best enjoyed occasionally, not daily.

New Rules for School Meals Aim at Reducing Obesity

Ron Nixon, The New York Times, January 25, 2012

WASHINGTON — Hoping to combat the growing problem of childhood obesity, the Obama administration on Wednesday announced its long-awaited changes to government-subsidized school meals, a final round of rules that adds more fruits and green vegetables to breakfasts and lunches and reduces the amount of salt and fat.

The announcement came months after the food industry won a vote in Congress to block the administration from carrying out an earlier proposal that would have reduced starchy foods like potatoes and prohibited schools from counting a small amount of tomato paste on a slice of pizza as a vegetable. Under the latest rules, potatoes are not restricted, and tomato paste can qualify as a vegetable serving.

The rules were announced by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Michelle Obama at Parklawn Elementary School in Alexandria, Va.
“As parents, we try to prepare decent meals, limit how much junk food our kids eat and ensure that they have a reasonable balanced diet,” Mrs. Obama said in a statement. “And when we are putting in all that effort the last thing we want is for our hard work to be undone each day in the school cafeteria.”

About 32 million children participate in school meal programs each day. The new rules are a major component of Mrs. Obama’s campaign to reduce the number of overweight children through exercise and better nutrition.

The rules are the first changes in 15 years to the $11 billion school lunch program. They will double the amount of fruits and vegetables children are served in school and will require that all grains served are whole grains.

All milk served must be low fat, and for the first time the rules set limits on levels of salt and trans fats. They also set a minimum and maximum calorie intake per day based on student age.

The government estimates that the rules will add about $3.2 billion in costs to the program, about half the cost of the proposed rules that were blocked last year.

Nutrition experts praised the new standards.

“We applaud the U.S. Department of Agriculture for issuing final guidance to help schools across the country serve healthier meals to students,” said Jessica Donze Black, project director for the Kids’ Safe and Healthful Foods Project, a joint project of the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “The updated nutrition standards for school meals are now in line with the most recent Dietary Guidelines for Americans.”
Representatives of the food industry generally also approved.

“From our perspective, the new rules improve school nutrition, but at the same time give schools the flexibility to serve a variety of foods to meet the standards,” said Corey Henry, vice president for communications of the American Frozen Food Institute. “It’s a balanced approach that meets the goals of everyone involved.”

The National Potato Council, which had opposed the attempts to limit the serving of potatoes, said that it was pleased with the new rules but that it still had some concerns.

“Despite the fact that Congress said the U.S.D.A. could not limit potatoes in school lunches or breakfast, we still feel like the potato is being downplayed in favor of other vegetables in the new guidelines,” said Mark Szymanski, a spokesman for the council. “It seems the department still considers the potato a second-class vegetable.”

Earlier versions of the proposal met with political opposition because they would have cut the amount of potatoes served, a move not popular with lawmakers from potato-growing states. It would also have required schools to put more than a quarter-cup of tomato paste on a slice of pizza for it to count as a vegetable serving, an idea food service companies opposed as unappetizing. And the rules would have halved the amount of sodium in school meals gradually over 10 years.

A group of farm state senators, led by Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, blocked those earlier rules. Ms. Collins, who once worked on a potato farm, said the proposal to limit potatoes was overly restrictive.

The American Frozen Food Institute was concerned about the previous guidelines’ restrictions on sodium levels and the amount of tomato paste required to qualify as a vegetable serving.

The institute backed the latest rules, which continue to allow about a quarter-cup of tomato paste on a slice of pizza to count as a vegetable serving.

Still, Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit research group in Washington, said the rules would provide healthier meals and have a major impact in reducing childhood obesity rates.

“Despite Congress getting involved,” she said, “this is a very significant and comprehensive change that should improve the quality of school lunches.”

Standards at http://www.ofr.gov/OFRUpload/OFRData/2012-01010_PI.pdf

First Lady to Announce New Nutrition Standards for Meals Served in America's Schools

Public-Private Partnership Aims to Connect More Kids to Nutrition Programs

WASHINGTON, January 24, 2012 – TOMORROW, First Lady Michelle Obama will be joined by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack at Parklawn Elementary School to speak with parents about the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) new and improved nutrition standards for school lunches. An important accomplishment of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act that President Obama signed into law last year, USDA is making the first major changes in school meals in over 15 years, and doing so in a way that’s achievable for schools across the nation.

The new standards make the same kinds of changes that many parents are already encouraging at home, including ensuring kids are offered fruits and vegetables every day of the week, substantially increasing offerings of whole grain-rich foods, offering only fat-free or low-fat milk varieties and making sure kids are getting proper portion sizes.

Mrs. Obama and Secretary Vilsack will join children in the lunch line in Parklawn’s cafeteria where the school’s food service employees and celebrity cook Rachael Ray will be serving a healthy, delicious meal that meets new and improved nutrition standards for school lunches. Mrs. Obama and the Secretary will then join elementary kids for lunch.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012
11:15am
WHAT:          First Lady Michelle Obama, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Kevin Concannon, Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services will announce the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) new and improved nutrition standards for school lunches.

WHERE:       Parklawn Elementary School
4116 Braddock Road
Alexandria, Va. 22312

Mrs. Obama’s and Secretary Vilsack’s remarks to parents will be open press – however space is limited and her visit to the lunch room will be pooled press. Please RSVP to FirstLadyPress@who.eop.gov by Monday, January 23^rd at 5:00 PM.

Media Advisory No. 5017.12   Contact: Office of Communications  (202) 720-4623

Food and Media Companies Lobby to Weaken Guidelines on Marketing Food to Children

Posted: 12/ 7/11 04:15 PM ET

This post was written by Nancy Watzman, consultant for the Sunlight Foundation.

A major lobbying push by a powerful group of food and media companies appears to be working, with a federal agency indicating it would back off on parts of proposed voluntary guidelines for marketing food to children. The guidelines are meant to combat childhood obesity.

Also, language in a pending congressional spending bill, one of several that Congress must approve before the end of the year to keep the government running, threatens to prohibit the agency, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), from issuing a final version of the nutritional guidelines at all without doing a cost-benefit analysis first.
Big companies such as Nestle, Kellogg, Viacom, McDonalds, General Mills, and Time Warner have indicated on official reports that they have lobbied on the controversial proposed guidelines; all together such companies have reported spending more than $37 million on lobbying this year. Most of these companies have a long list of concerns on Capitol Hill of which the nutrition guidelines are just one; however the totals reported demonstrate how powerful a presence these entities have in Washington. Most are also major sources of campaign money for members of Congress.

Kellogg complained that the new guidelines--which the government has stressed would be voluntary--were too strict and among other things could eliminate their use of popular characters like "Tony the Tiger" and "Ernie Keebler," the elf. Children's advocacy and health groups countered that an epidemic of childhood obesity warranted tough action.

"This influence parallels the influence of unhealthy food marketing in our children's lives," says Jeff McIntyre, director of policy for Children Now. "The real price is an obesity rate that has more than tripled in the last 30 year, alarming rises in cardiovascular diseases in younger children, and predictions of shorter life expectancies for American children for the first time in our country's history."

In October hearings before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a representative from Campbell Soup Company, which reports spending $70,000 on lobbying this year, charged that the nutritional criteria in the guidelines are "unrealistic, counterproductive, contrary to established nutrition policy" and that industry would do a better job of policing itself.

Another witness from the Association of National Advertisers, which reported spending $820,000 on lobbying this year, argued that the proposed guidelines are “backdoor regulation” by four "extremely powerful government agencies that seek to accomplish a goal indirectly that could not be reached through normal rulemaking procedures."

At the same hearing, David Vladeck, director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection for the FTC, announced that the agency was "in the midst of making significant revisions to its preliminary proposal' and that these changes would "share much in common" with new standards proposed by an industry group last summer. These changes include making the guidelines applicable to a smaller age group--children ages 2 to 11 rather than 2 to 17, and exempting seasonal advertising, such as in-store displays for Halloween.

Several weeks later, at a hearing for the renomination of FTC commissioner Jon Leibowitz, Democratic and Republican senators alike--who as reported by Sunlight counted food and media companies among their campaign donors--lobbed hostile questions about the guidelines. Leibowitz stressed the voluntary nature of the guidelines and the fact they are unenforceable.

Meanwhile, last summer, Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, R-Mo., reported the Washington Post, inserted language into a pending appropriations bill that would prohibit the FTC from completing its draft report on nutrition guidelines without first doing a cost benefit analysis. Among her donors this election cycle are PACs for the American Beverage Association, the National Restaurant Association, and PepsiCo Inc., all of which are lobbying against the guidelines. Her office did not return several calls for comment.

The FTC guidelines, which the agency is issuing in conjunction with several other agencies, were mandated in a 2009 appropriations bill. Industry rallied against the guidelines, particularly when the FTC issued a draft and opened it up for comment last April. The agency received 29,000 comments, the great majority from letter writing campaigns supporting the proposal, according to Vladeck's testimony. Industry groups, however, also are heavily represented, with most of the groups that reported lobbying on the guidelines also filing comment letters. (Unique comments can be found on the FTC's website here.)

Some of the companies went beyond in-house lobbying staff to get help from lobbying firms on the issue. For example, the Coca-Cola Company used Williams and Jensen. Pepsico got assistance from the C2 Group and Russell and Barron. Sara Lee used SNR Denton. Over all public relations were handled by Anita Dunn, formerly communications director at the Obama White House, at the firm SKDKnickerbocker Consulting.

Children's advocacy and health organizations that support the guidelines have also reported lobbying on the guidelines; however, their efforts are not as well funded. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, which sent a representative to testify at the October hearings and which was instrumental in creating the 2009 legislation mandating the guidelines, has reported spending $62,354 on lobbying this year. The American Academy of Pediatrics reported spending $205,168, and the American Dental Association, $1.9 million. Other supportive groups, such as Children Now, do not report any lobbying expenses.

Organization    Reported amount spent on lobbying in 2011      
American Advertising Federation $123,000     
American Assn of Advertising Agencies   $180,756     
American Bakers Assn    $23,339
American Beverage Assn  $700,000     
Assn of National Advertisers    $820,000     
Campbell Soup   $70,000
Cargill Inc.    $1,620,356   
Coca-Cola Co    $4,740,000   
Dean Foods      $775,000     
Dunkin' Brands  $390,000     
Entertainment Software Assn     $3,309,034   
General Mills   $660,000     
Grocery Manufacturers Assn      $2,980,000   
Kellogg Co      $639,484     
Kraft Foods     $2,090,000   
Mars Inc        $1,720,000   
McDonald's Corp $1,120,000   
National Grocers Assn   $220,000     
National Restaurant Assn        $2,119,000   
Nestle SA       $3,136,400   
PepsiCo Inc     $2,610,000   
Sara Lee Corp   $390,000     
Snack Food Assn $150,000     
Time Warner     $3,301,979   
Viacom Inc      $2,370,000   
YUM! Brands     $845,000     
TOTAL   $37,103,348  

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NYTimes: How the Food Industry Eats Your Kid's Lunch

By LUCY KOMISAR    December 3, 2011
 An increasingly cozy alliance between companies that manufacture processed foods and companies that serve the meals is making students — a captive market — fat and sick while pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. At a time of fiscal austerity, these companies are seducing school administrators with promises to cut costs through privatization. Parents who want healthier meals, meanwhile, are outgunned.

Each day, 32 million children in the United States get lunch at schools that participate in the National School Lunch Program, which uses agricultural surplus to feed children. About 21 million of these students eat free or reduced-price meals, a number that has surged since the recession. The program, which also provides breakfast, costs $13.3 billion a year.

Sadly, it is being mismanaged and exploited. About a quarter of the school nutrition program has been privatized, much of it outsourced to food service management giants like Aramark, based in Philadelphia; Sodexo, based in France; and the Chartwells division of the Compass Group, based in Britain.

They work in tandem with food manufacturers like the chicken producers Tyson and Pilgrim’s, all of which profit when good food is turned to bad.
Here’s one way it works. The Agriculture Department pays about $1 billion a year for commodities like fresh apples and sweet potatoes, chickens and turkeys. Schools get the food free; some cook it on site, but more and more pay processors to turn these healthy ingredients into fried chicken nuggets, fruit pastries, pizza and the like. Some $445 million worth of commodities are sent for processing each year, a nearly 50 percent increase since 2006.

The Agriculture Department doesn’t track spending to process the food, but school authorities do. The Michigan Department of Education, for example, gets free raw chicken worth $11.40 a case and sends it for processing into nuggets at $33.45 a case. The schools in San Bernardino, Calif., spend $14.75 to make French fries out of $5.95 worth of potatoes.

The money is ill spent. The Center for Science in the Public Interest has warned that sending food to be processed often means lower nutritional value and noted that “many schools continue to exceed the standards for fat, saturated fat and sodium.” A 2008 study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that by the time many healthier commodities reach students, “they have about the same nutritional value as junk foods.”

Monica Zimmer, a Sodexo spokeswoman, said that “much has changed” since those studies, pointing to the company’s support for “nutrition education to encourage young students to eat more fruits and vegetables.”

Roland Zullo, a researcher at the University of Michigan, found in 2008 that Michigan schools that hired private food-service management firms spent less on labor and food but more on fees and supplies, yielding “no substantive economic savings.” Alarmingly, he even found that privatization was associated with lower test scores, hypothesizing that the high-fat and high-sugar foods served by the companies might be the cause. In a later study, in 2010, Dr. Zullo found that Chartwells was able to trim costs by cutting benefits for workers in Ann Arbor schools, but that the schools didn’t end up realizing any savings.

Why is this allowed to happen? Part of it is that school authorities don’t want the trouble of overseeing real kitchens. Part of it is that the management companies are saving money by not having to pay skilled kitchen workers.
In addition, the management companies have a cozy relationship with food processers, which routinely pay the companies rebates (typically around 14 percent) in return for contracts. The rebates have generally been kept secret from schools, which are charged the full price.

Last year, Andrew M. Cuomo, then the New York State attorney general, won a $20 million settlement over Sodexo’s pocketing of such rebates. Other states are following New York and looking into the rebates; the Agriculture Department began its own inquiry in August.

With the crackdown on these rebates, food service companies have turned to another accounting trick. I found evidence that the rebate abuses are continuing, now under the name of “prompt payment discounts,” under an Agriculture Department loophole. These discounts, for payments that are often not prompt at all, are really rebates under another name. New York State requires rebates to be returned to schools, but the Sodexo settlement shows how unevenly the ban has been enforced.

The food service companies I spoke with denied any impropriety. “Our culinary philosophy, as a company, is to promote scratch cooking where possible and encourage variety and nutritionally balanced meals,” said Ayde Lyons, a Chartwells spokeswoman. “We use minimally processed foods whenever possible.”

There are economic and nutritional consequences to privatization. School kitchen workers are generally unionized, with benefits; they are also typically local residents who have children in public schools and care about their well-being. Laid-off school workers become an economic drain instead of a positive force. And the rebate deals with national food manufacturers cut out local farmers and small producers like bakers, who could offer fresh, healthy food and help the local economy.

Children pay the price. Dr. Zullo found that privately managed school cafeterias offered meals that were higher in sugar and fats and made unhealthy snack items — soda, cookies, potato chips — more readily available. The companies were also less likely to use reduced-sugar recipes. Linda Hugle, a retired school principal in Three Rivers, Ore., told me that when her district switched to Sodexo, “the savings were paltry.” She added, “You pay a little less and your kids get strawberry milk, frozen French fries and artificial shortening.”

Advocates who fight for better food face an uphill battle. Dorothy Brayley, executive director of Kids First, a nutrition advocacy group in Pawtucket, R.I., told me she encountered resistance in trying to persuade Sodexo to buy from local farmers. (Sodexo says it does buy some local produce and has opened salad bars in many schools.) Donna D. Walsh, a former school board president in Westchester County, N.Y., told me she worked with a supportive superintendent to get Aramark to stop deep-frying food and to open a salad bar. But after a new superintendent came in, she said, the company went back to profit-driven menus of pizza and bagels.

The federal government could intervene. The Agriculture Department proposed new rules this year that would set maximum calories for school meals; require more fruits, vegetables and whole grains; and limit trans fats.
Not surprisingly, the most committed foes of the rules are the same corporations that make money supplying bad food. Aramark, Sodexo and Chartwells, as well as food processing companies like ConAgra, wrote letters arguing, among other things, that children may not want to eat healthier food.

Any increase in fruit and vegetables might result in “plate waste,” wrote Sodexo. A protein requirement at breakfast, Aramark said, would hamper efforts to offer “popular breakfast items.” Their lobbying persuaded members of Congress to block a once-a-week limit on starchy vegetables and to continue to allow a few tablespoons of tomato sauce on pizza to count as a vegetable serving. Thanks to that cave-in, children will continue to get their vegetables in the form of potatoes for breakfast and pizza for lunch.

One-third of children from the ages of 6 to 19 are overweight or obese. These children could see their life expectancies shortened because of their vulnerability to diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Unfortunately, profit, not health, is the priority of the food service management companies, food processors and even elected officials. Until more parents demand reform of the school lunch system, children will continue to suffer.

Lucy Komisar is an investigative reporter and author, who received support from the Investigative Fund, a project of the Nation Institute, for the reporting of this essay.