Federal-Level Milk Sops And The Need For National School Lunch Program Reform

Last week I had the opportunity to visit two school cafeterias while tagging along with Jen on a work-related outing. Both places we saw were doing fantastic stuff with school meals (which includes breakfast, lunch and after-school and mid-afternoon snacks), and it was inspiring how cash-strapped districts are doing the best they can to serve high-quality meals to students.

We hear a lot about the virtues of home cooking and avoiding processed foods, and a lot of it starts to feel fatiguing, if not annoyingly preachy, but it's important to remember that knowing how to cook for yourself and eating healthy foods is the first and best thing we can all do to keep ourselves healthy. (Better to do this than have the mayor of New York City arbitrarily decide which food additives are OK to consume. We shouldn't have to have the city health department banning food additives. We should know, or want to know, what to eat ourselves. That should be uncontroversial, but people seem to get confused about this.)

A large part of education in general involves modeling good behavior, and school cafeterias have the power to serve as a good model for healthy eating. School lunches aren't going anywhere and it's important to show kids what a balanced meal means, especially at an early age. School systems have done a great deal of good recently making simple and obvious choices like not selling soda pop or eliminating chocolate milk. The second part of that is developing high-quality, good-tasting food, which is easier said than done, but no less obvious.

The actual food schools serve has emerged as an important issue for those concerned about nutrition and childhood obesity. And although it's always a mistake to use your own outdated, imperfect memories of how school is to inform your current views of education, you probably remember the tater tots and chocolate milk that you got as a kid. You probably remember more fondly the prepackaged pies and soda pop that your weekly lunch allowance afforded you. I remember the stuff served in cafeterias being generally disgusting, and by high school I either took my lunch or microwaved burritos at 7-Eleven — or skimped in general to give myself extra money to use at the record store that weekend.

One thing about the school lunch experience that hasn't changed for anyone is the standard-issue half-pint carton of milk. If you peruse the National School Lunch Program website, it seems that a standard-issue carton of milk has been part of school lunches since the National School Lunch Act was approved by Congress back in 1946. Which basically means that everyone your parents' age and under has been served a carton of milk with their school lunches. And if you go to a school cafeteria today you'll see the same little cartons of milk — federal regulations call for six ounces for smaller kids and eight ounces for older students.

And while I do believe that it's always a mistake to use your own outdated, imperfect memories of how school is to inform your current views of education, one thing about school lunches can be extrapolated across the board: Simply, drinking milk is disgusting.

I suppose the images of milk at the dinner table on shows like the Brady Bunch or Leave It To Beaver are supposed to telegraph a societal standard of drinking milk, but I can think of few, if any, personal examples of children I knew who were forced to drink it. (Interesting: I just Googled "Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving," and it appears that each member of the smiling happy family getting ready to devour that big turkey in Freedom From Want has full glasses of water in front of them, not milk.)

I'll allow that maybe at some point parents believed that drinking several glasses of milk a day — no matter how icky it was — was "healthy," but they also served "healthy" and "nutritious" food that we know now to be kind of unhealthy — I'm thinking of liver in particular. I like liver fine — you can do cool stuff with liver — but I can't imagine getting a giant pan-fried slab of it each week.

Even if milk is healthy, let's admit that it's disgusting to drink and work on ways to replace the calcium in milk, which as far as I can tell is the only benefit of consuming milk in liquid form. Here's a good Harvard School of Public Health article about calcium and milk, and here's a list (.pdf) from the USDA of calcium-rich foods. The worst-case scenario if you eliminate full frothy glasses of milk is that you will need to replace approximately one-third of your recommended daily allowance of calcium. The good news is that potatoes-au-gratin tastes awesome (and in all seriousness, leafy greens are good for you and eating cheese is that much more delicious than drinking milk).

Here's why all this matters. Schools across the country depend on the federal National School Lunch Program to reimburse the significant costs of feeding children each day. Take a look at this fact sheet (.pdf) — in 2009, 31 million children took advantage of school meals that the federal government helped subsidize. And while the regulations tend to provide general guidelines for nutrition in the meals, one thing stands out — "A reimbursable lunch must include at least three menu items. One of those menu items must be an entree, and one must be fluid milk as a beverage" (see page 26 of this .pdf, for example). Notice that it doesn't say what the entree has to be, only that you have to serve fluid milk with it. Even if schools do some "alternate menu planning," they still must offer fluid milk with the meals (page 33).

In general I don't mind the federal government attaching strings to federal assistance. There are many examples of this — No Child Left Behind instituted conditions to receiving federal education funding and the National Minimum Drinking Age Act famously restricted federal highway funds for states that didn't raise their drinking age. It's federal money; Congress has a right to say how it should be used. But in this day and age, the USDA's milk requirement seems ridiculous.

Here is another thing you might not have realized: Those little cartons of milk account for one-quarter of food costs for schools. A USA Today article outlines the breakdown:

School cafeterias get up to $2.47 a student from the U.S. government to serve lunch. After expenses such as labor, transportation, utilities and equipment, schools are left with a little more than $1 to put food on a tray. Costs typically include 25 cents for a carton of milk, about 25 cents for fruit and additional money if they also serve vegetables. About 50 cents is left for an entrée. Many students pay for at least a portion of their lunch, and as the student contribution rises, the part covered by the government drops, which leaves schools to cover the difference.

Even when food costs go up, schools are still on the hook for covering milk costs. I thought the administrator we talked to last week said that milk accounted for half of his cafeteria's food costs, but even if a carton is one-quarter of food costs, that is a significant and disturbing number. Especially for something that is as disgusting to drink as milk.

I suppose we could blame the dairy lobby, but it's not like drinking milk suddenly appeared out of nowhere. That said, discouraging children from getting substantial calories from beverages has to have long-term benefits, and drinking more water seems like a healthier choice for everyone. But then we'd have to go back to that onerous federal mandate that every meal feature a serving of fluid milk.

And don't think I didn't ask the logical next question — fluid milk has to be served at the table in a carton; it can't be dumped into a side dish or converted to fresh mozzarella or served as yogurt (yogurt is actually considered a meat — see page 31 of the regulations in the link above) or really anything that might make milk more palatable. And unless Congress acts to change this, that carton of milk will stay on the trays of your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, probably outlasting even tater tots (sooner rather than later, apparently).

So when you think about how difficult it is to battle childhood obesity, increasing rates of diabetes and a general lack of healthy eating habits, remember that that stupid carton of milk that the federal government mandates be included on every cafeteria tray accounts for at least one-quarter of school food costs. Let that sink in. I'll repeat it, because it totally shocked me: That stupid carton of milk that the federal government mandates be included on every cafeteria tray accounts for at least one-quarter of school food costs.

Nutritionists, chefs, educators, parents and many, many others are spending a great amount of time and effort teaching children to eat better. Think about what we could do without that carton of milk. And while the federal government has no problem enforcing milk regulations, for some reason it still dithers on fully funding the 30 percent of special education costs that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act promised, funding that could probably actually do a lot to "fix" education in the United States. But that's a different issue for a different day.

Posted: November 15th, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Feed, For Reals No For Serious | Tags: , , , , , , ,
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