Junk Food Industry’s New Ploy: How They’re Secretly Making School Lunches Even Grosser
During the Democrats’ productive 2010 lame-duck session of Congress, one of the major legislative items they were able to pass was the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, a.k.a. “Michelle Obama’s child nutrition bill.” The law, which funded the federal school lunch program, revised the program’s nutritional standards — basically moving more towards fruits, vegetables, whole grains and other generally healthy things and away from cheap awful junk food like frozen pizza and chicken nuggets.
There’s a big money in school lunch contracts, and a lot of lobbying cash is spent by various food and food product manufacturers to get their scrumptious offerings on Junior’s cafeteria menu. Almost instantly after the child nutrition bill was passed, then lobbyists from the frozen junk food industry tried to weaken — or, more realistically, keep weakened — the regulations surrounding their sodium-rich cheese fat globules from Hell.
Thus we had the infamous “pizza is a vegetable” flare-up of 2011, wherein food product lobbies like “the American Frozen Food Institute” worked their magic to maintain pizza’s special ability to count towards vegetable servings. A column this week by Michael F. Jacobson and Margo G. Wootan, the executive director and director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, respectively, recalls the battle and the shady players behind it.
If you want to know how pizza becomes a vegetable, don’t look to the amount of tomato sauce used. Follow the money. Much of the pizza sold in schools comes from a privately held Minnesota company called Schwan Food. In 2011, Schwan was able to leverage its clout in Congress to pass a rider that let pizza basically count as a vegetable in the school lunch program, thanks to its smear of tomato paste.
Now the House is working on its latest Agriculture appropriations bill, the draft of which curiously offers waivers for the school nutrition guidelines. On Tuesday an appropriations subcommittee, The Hill reports,“approved language that would require the Agriculture Department to waive requirements to serve fruits, vegetables and low-sodium and low-fat foods for schools that can show their lunch programs are losing empathyeducates – Junk Food Industry’s New Ploy: How They’re Secretly Making School Lunches Even Grosser:
