What Does the Senate’s New School Lunch Bill Mean for Your Kid?

You may be wondering about all of the recent talk about school lunches. After years of neglect for this important contributor to the diet of American children, school lunch is currently all the rage. First Lady Michelle Obama is highlighting it in her Let’s Move campaign to address childhood obesity and chefs from Jamie Oliver to Ann Cooper are bringing their culinary skills to the nation’s lunchrooms to try to transform them.

This month, the US Senate took an important step of their own to revamp school lunch and many other children’s nutrition programs this school year by reauthorizing the Child Nutrition Act that was set to expire on September 30th. The $4.5 billion bill is aptly titled the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act and its dual goal is to increase the numbers of families served by nutrition programs and make the foods that they are served in these programs healthier. Nutrition advocates have long complained that federally funded lunch programs didn’t meet the government’s own nutrition guidelines.

The bill will provides for retraining of some cafeteria workers and a better system to alert schools of recalls of contaminated food. Programs covered by the legislation include school, summer and afterschool meal programs, WIC and child-care settings.  The American Dietetic Association calls the bill “a key step in addressing the health concerns of our nation’s children, including hunger, childhood obesity and poor diet quality.”

The good news for families is that the meals provided under these programs will have to meet national nutrition standards. This means that cafeteria favorites like pizza may be made healthier by using low-fat cheese, vegetables and whole grains, milk served will be low fat and fruit and vegetables will take their rightful prominent place as the focus of meals, not just as side dishes.

These are changes we should all be making at home as well, so schools and families are working together.

School vending machines, which are often used to fund extracurricular activities, will also have to fall in line, and may be prohibited from selling candy bars and sugary sodas.  To help schools cover the cost of healthier foods and incentivize them to do the right thing, the bill provides for the first increase in the reimbursement rate federally sponsored school meals for schools that meet the new nutrition standards.

Bottom line: Whether your child buys lunch or snacks at school, this new bill will help improve the nutrition and health of millions of kids and that is something that we should all be supporting.