In 2012, First lady, Michelle Obama introduced new rules for public schools aimed at reducing obesity. This was a mandate deployed by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Michelle announced in January. 32 million children are forced to participate.
The first 15 years of the program had a budget of $11 billion as it doubled the amounts of fruits and vegetables that are served to students. Milk must be served and must be low fat and limits were set on trans fats as well as salt intake.
Almost immediately, this food police program met with major issues and essentially student and parent protests.
Then there were school employee layoffs.
Hundreds of school districts in the country have made layoffs and reduced hours for cafeteria workers due to First Lady Michelle Obama’s lunch rules, a new survey has found.
Participation in the school lunch program is down, food waste is up, and 80 percent of districts have taken steps to offset financial losses as a result of the healthy rules, according to a survey released Tuesday of more than 1,000 school districts by the Student Nutritional Association (SNA).
Enter the trash cans…
– A new study confirms what many parents and school lunch officials already know: students in the National School Lunch Program are trashing their government-mandated fruits and vegetables.
University of Vermont researchers used digital photography to analyze hundreds of school lunch trays at two northeast elementary schools on 21 visits before and after increased school food regulations championed by first lady Michelle Obama went into effect in 2012, CBS News reports.
Those regulations limit calories, fat, sugar, sodium, whole grain and other elements of school lunches, as well as mandate that all students take a fruit or vegetable, whether they eat it or not.
Researchers discovered “that while children placed more fruits and vegetables on their trays – as required by the USDA mandates put in place in 2012 – they consumed fewer of them,” according to the news site.
“The amount of food wasted increased by 56 percent, the researchers found.”
The findings contradict an often cited study by the Harvard School of Public Health in 2014 that found the opposite – that students ate more fruits and vegetables – although that study also noted more fruits and vegetables in the trash.
The Harvard study noted “high levels of fruit and vegetable waste continued to be a problem – students discarded roughly 60-75 percent of the vegetables and 40 percent of the fruit on their trays. The authors say that schools must focus on improving food quality and palatability to reduce waste,” according to the Harvard Gazette.
There’s a distinct difference between the Harvard study and the recently released University of Vermont study: the latter backs up anecdotal evidence from school districts across the country, while the Harvard study contradicts it.
“We was this as a great opportunity to access the policy change and ask a really important question, which was, ‘Does requiring a child to select a fruit or vegetable under the updated national school lunch program guidelines that came into effect in 2012 correspond with increased fruit and vegetable consumption?” lead author Sarah Amin told CBS News. “The answer was clearly no.”
Amin and her team also pointed out that schools can’t simply force students to take a fruit or vegetable and expect them to eat them if they don’t address the numerous other factors that affect their decisions about nutrition and food.
“Public health practitioners should also consider strategies extending to the home because more frequent exposure to (fruits and vegetables) at home may result in children consuming a variety of (fruits and vegetables) at school,” according to the report.
“Our research findings, that children selected more (fruits and vegetables) but consumed less and wasted more after the new regulations were in place, support the importance of public health practitioners addressing the environmental, home, and personal factors that encourage children’s (fruit and vegetable) consumption.
“While these data from one geographic area may not be generalizable to other regions, we based the measures of consumptions and waste on validated, objective measures,” the report continues. “Furthermore, the findings are consistent with those from other parts of the country where requiring a child to select a (fruit or vegetable) also corresponded with decreased consumption and increased food waste.”
The latest school food study comes about a month before Congress is expected to vote on reauthorizing Michelle Obama’s school food restrictions, and seems to support the call by the School Nutrition Association and its thousands of members in school lunch rooms calling on lawmakers to relax the regulations to reduce waste and increase student participation.
Previous research on the school lunch program found school food waste increased by about $1 billion because of the federal regulations. The Government Accountability Office estimates that about 1.2 million fewer students than before the restrictions went into effect.
