What USDA is rolling out today is a so-called bridge rule to help schools slowly get back to meeting basic nutrition rules over the next two school years. The rule imposes slightly stricter limits on sodium, requires more whole grain-rich items to be served (think hamburger buns and breading on chicken) and keeps allowing schools to serve 1 percent flavored milk, but it staves off any bigger changes for a few years.
The policy keeps some of the changes the Trump administration had made. For example, under the Obama administration’s rules, only non-fat flavored milks were allowed. The Trump administration allowed 1 percent flavored milks. The Biden administration is keeping that change for now. On sodium and whole grains, Biden is basically splitting the difference and moving schools closer to the old Obama era standards.
The overall goal is to help schools stabilize their nutrition programs, many of which have been losing money as food and staffing costs have soared. In the meantime, USDA is planning a total reboot of nutrition standards for school meals that will likely not take effect until the 2024-25 school year.
As part of that effort, health advocates are hoping that USDA will finally set limits for how much sugar can be served in school meals. The Obama administration’s update didn’t set a limit because the Dietary Guidelines didn’t yet include an added sugars limit. The past two iterations of federal nutrition advice, however, have recommended that Americans not get more than 10 percent of their daily calories from added sugars.
Vilsack told POLITICO the department is looking at sugar, sodium and increasing consumption of fruit and vegetables, among other things, as it works to do a more comprehensive update over the longer term.
“The link between diet, nutrition, health and educational outcomes is pretty clear,” Vilsack said. “When kids are healthy, they do well, when kids are well fed, they do well.”
Earlier this week, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the American Heart Association, and the American Public Health Association filed a citizens petition with USDA explicitly asking for an added sugars limit to align school standards with the Dietary Guidelines, which the department is required to do.
“For many children from food insecure families, the breakfast and lunch served in school may be their only nutritious meals of the day,” said Peter Lurie, president of CSPI. “While the program has been a historic success story, it needs to keep up to date with the latest science.”
The groups note that making school meals healthier is particularly important in light of the fact that diet-related diseases like obesity, diabetes and hypertension have made the country much more vulnerable to serious illness and disease during the pandemic. And the early data about children during the pandemic raise red flags about the country’s worsening health amid a stressful time. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that the monthly rate of increase in body mass index, or BMI, among children and adolescents approximately doubled during the pandemic.
But setting stricter limits on sugar or really anything else is going to have to wait a while. Supply chain constraints have hit schools particularly hard. School nutrition officials are currently having trouble sourcing food staples or even the right trays or packaging needed, which makes even serving meals difficult, forget trying to meet regulatory requirements for what percentage of whole grain products they are serving.
Virtually all schools — 96 percent — recently surveyed by the School Nutrition Association, which represents some 55,000 school food officials, said they were dealing with suppliers that are out of the menu items they need to meet the typical nutrition standards. These include whole grain-rich and low-sodium products as well as lower fat options.
The federal school meals programs, which serve nearly 30 million students each day, are operating on extremely thin margins during normal times. It’s typical to spend about $1.25 per meal. The pandemic has added enormous pressure to schools. When things initially shut down in March 2020, thousands of schools pivoted immediately to serving grab-and-go meals for families in need — a massive effort that was credited with feeding millions of families, but also cost a lot of money, in terms of extra staff and packaging.
Now, supply chain constraints are making an already shaky financial situation even worse. Food companies and distributors that supply schools usually supply other food businesses as well, so when shortages happen, low-margin school accounts are often the first to get cut.
“Because of the supply chain, you can’t get chicken products,” said Katie Wilson, executive director for the Urban School Food Alliance, a group that represents 18 of the country’s largest school districts, which together serve nearly 1 billion meals a year. That surpasses any restaurant chain or food service operation in the U.S., and probably by a long shot.
Wilson thinks government procurement rules have put schools at particular disadvantage during the pandemic. “You know, Kentucky Fried Chicken is not having any problems,” she said. “McDonald’s is not having any problems because they have business deals.”
Schools have gotten shortchanged in part because they pay so little for food. If the private sector can pay more, that’s where the product will move.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, I had distributors calling me and saying: ‘I’ve got 20 trucks that need to go out. I have two drivers and only one-and-a-half employees in the warehouse, one full time, one part time, and on those two trucks, it’s not going to be going to schools. It’s going to be going to my high-end restaurants because that’s where my profit margin is,’” Wilson said.
Widespread supply chain disruptions have led to a big push by school nutrition leaders to get Congress to extend USDA’s authority to continue waiving school nutrition requirements and a slew of other regulatory requirements for another year. USDA’s current waiver authority expires at the end of June. Extending these waivers would also mean that schools could continue serving universal free school meals another year, something the vast majority of school nutrition leaders support.
Wilson — who served as a top nutrition official at USDA during the Obama administration and backs stronger nutrition standards — said it’s essential the waivers are extended because schools are in such a tough position right now, though she acknowledged that some schools are taking advantage of the regulatory relief to serve subpar meals.
“There are pockets of people that are using the pandemic as an excuse to serve any piece of garbage they can,” she said. “Overall, though, I think people are really trying. I think even if we get waivers for next year, USDA [with this rule] is saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute, folks, it is time now to start thinking really seriously about going back to nutrition standards.’”
