Congress pushes back on healthier school lunches

MARY CLARE JALONICK

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Con­gress wants to keep pizza and french fries on school lunch lines, fight­ing back against an Obama admin­is­tra­tion pro­posal to make school lunches healthier.

The final ver­sion of a spend­ing bill released late Mon­day would unravel school lunch stan­dards the Agri­cul­ture Depart­ment pro­posed ear­lier this year, which included lim­it­ing the use of pota­toes on the lunch line and delay­ing lim­its on sodium and delay­ing a require­ment to boost whole grains.

The bill also would allow tomato paste on piz­zas to be counted as a veg­etable, as it is now. USDA had wanted to pre­vent that.

Food com­pa­nies that pro­duce frozen piz­zas for schools, the salt indus­try and potato grow­ers requested the changes, and some con­ser­v­a­tives in Con­gress say the fed­eral gov­ern­ment shouldn’t be telling chil­dren what to eat.

Repub­li­cans on the House Appro­pri­a­tions Com­mit­tee said the changes would “pre­vent overly bur­den­some and costly reg­u­la­tions and to pro­vide greater flex­i­bil­ity for local school dis­tricts to improve the nutri­tional qual­ity of meals.”

School dis­tricts had said some of the USDA require­ments went too far and cost too much when bud­gets are extremely tight. Schools have long taken broad instruc­tions from the gov­ern­ment on what they can serve in fed­er­ally sub­si­dized meals that are served free or at reduced price to low-income chil­dren. But some schools have balked at gov­ern­ment attempts to tell them exactly what foods they can’t serve.

React­ing to that crit­i­cism, House Repub­li­cans had urged USDA to com­pletely rewrite the stan­dards in their ver­sion of the bill passed in June. The Sen­ate last month voted to block the potato lim­its in their ver­sion. Nei­ther ver­sion included the lan­guage on tomato paste, sodium or whole grains, which was added by House-Senate nego­tia­tors on the bill.

The school lunch pro­posal was based on 2009 rec­om­men­da­tions by the Insti­tute of Med­i­cine, the health arm of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences. Agri­cul­ture Sec­re­tary Tom Vil­sack said they were needed to reduce child­hood obe­sity and future health care costs.

Nutri­tion advo­cate Margo Wootan of the Cen­ter for Sci­ence in the Pub­lic Inter­est said Congress’s pro­posed changes will keep schools from serv­ing a wider array of veg­eta­bles. Chil­dren already get enough pizza and pota­toes, she says. It would also slow efforts to make piz­zas — a long­time standby on school lunch lines — health­ier, with whole grain crusts and lower lev­els of sodium.

“They are mak­ing sure that two of the biggest prob­lems in the school lunch pro­gram, pizza and french fries, are untouched,” she said.

A group of retired gen­er­als advo­cat­ing for health­ier school lunches also crit­i­cized the spend­ing bill. The group, called Mis­sion: Readi­ness has called poor nutri­tion in school lunches a national secu­rity issue because obe­sity is the lead­ing med­ical dis­qual­i­fier for mil­i­tary service.

“We are out­raged that Con­gress is seri­ously con­sid­er­ing lan­guage that would effec­tively cat­e­go­rize pizza as a veg­etable in the school lunch pro­gram,” Amy Daw­son Tag­gart, the direc­tor of the group, said in a let­ter to mem­bers of Con­gress before the final plan was released. “It doesn’t take an advanced degree in nutri­tion to call this a national disgrace.”

Specif­i­cally, the pro­vi­sions would:

— Block the Agri­cul­ture Depart­ment from lim­it­ing starchy veg­eta­bles, includ­ing corn and peas, to two serv­ings a week. The rule was intended to cut down on french fries, which some schools serve daily.

— Allow USDA to count two table­spoons of tomato paste as a veg­etable, as it does now. The depart­ment had attempted to require that only a half-cup of tomato paste could be con­sid­ered a veg­etable — too much to put on a pizza. Fed­er­ally sub­si­dized lunches must have a cer­tain num­ber of veg­eta­bles to be served.

— Require fur­ther study on long-term sodium reduc­tion require­ments set forth by the USDA guidelines.

— Require USDA to define “whole grains” before they reg­u­late them. The rules would require schools to use more whole grains.

Food com­pa­nies who have fought the USDA stan­dards say they were too strict and neglected the nutri­ents that pota­toes, other starchy veg­eta­bles and tomato paste do offer.

“This agree­ment ensures that nutrient-rich veg­eta­bles such as pota­toes, corn and peas will remain part of a bal­anced, healthy diet in fed­er­ally funded school meals and rec­og­nizes the sig­nif­i­cant amounts of potas­sium, fiber and vit­a­mins A and C pro­vided by tomato paste, ensur­ing that stu­dents may con­tinue to enjoy healthy meals such as pizza and pasta,” said Kraig Naasz, pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Frozen Food Institute.

The school lunch pro­vi­sions are part of a final House-Senate com­pro­mise on a $182 bil­lion mea­sure would fund the day-to-day oper­a­tions of the depart­ments of Agri­cul­ture, Com­merce, Jus­tice, Trans­porta­tion and Hous­ing and Urban Devel­op­ment. Both the House and the Sen­ate are expected to vote on the bill this week and send it to Pres­i­dent Barack Obama.

Posted by AP News on Nov 15 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.