Childhood obesity, which has presented itself as one of the fastest-growing and most devastating health trends in the last 30 years, has spurred a multitude of preventative efforts from US policymakers and health organizations. One of the most prominent among them is a national program spearheaded by none other than Michelle Obama herself. Known as the Let’s Move! program, the First Lady’s stand against childhood obesity encourages increased physical activity and mandates healthier lunches for schoolchildren. Under the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which aims to improve nutrition provided by school lunch programs, school food must meet standards for lower sodium, less fat, and more percentage of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains than in previous years in order to be served.
Many schools implemented the new standards successfully. However, since its implementation, the program has also received severe backlash from a number of students and school systems, who tout the costliness, smaller portions, and general unpopularity of the new lunches as evidence of the program’s failure. In particular, students across the nation have expressed their disgust with the new food regulations via tweets tagged #ThanksMichelleObama.
Students’ protests have been compounded by complaints from school systems that “healthy” school lunches have reduced lunch sales by 10%, even as costs of healthier food increase school lunch production costs and thus pose more of a burden to schools’ limited budgets. To make things worse, even students who do continue to buy lunch often throw large portions of food away; Ella Mae Fenlong, one NYC school’s Food Service Director, notes, “If we cut up 20 pounds of cucumber, we guess that 17 pounds gets thrown away.”
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In response, some Republicans have proposed a school lunch waiver that will grant schools a reprieve from what they term the “costly and restrictive” nature of the healthy lunch programs. If schools can prove that they have lost money in lunch sales over the course of six months, the waiver’s proponents argue that their losses should be accepted as proof that the healthy lunch programs are simply unsustainable in some schools. In turn, Michelle Obama has lobbied hard against the waiver and what White House nutrition policy adviser Sam Kass terms as the “undermin[ing] of science and the health of kids.” One possible compromise to the situation appears to be increased flexibility of the USDA’s nutrition standards, but such a solution lends itself to considerable ambiguity concerning which standards should be relaxed and which should not.
Although eating healthy is a crucial part of the larger goal to reduce childhood obesity, it looks as though it may be some time before such national programs can develop to a point where healthy school lunches can be accepted by students and not compromise the limited budgets of public school systems across the nation.
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