WASHINGTON — The feds are coming for your kids’ chocolate milk.
At least, so says the stampede of school cooks, administrators, and parents flooding the Department of Agriculture with complaints. They’re “targeting” kids, forcing them to “go thirsty,” and are being “just mean,” they’ve cried.
The anger was prompted by a February proposal from the USDA aimed at making school meals healthier by limiting the amount of added sugar and sodium in breakfasts and lunches. The USDA reimburses schools for a portion of nearly every meal they provide, which gives it some say over what foods schools offer.
No element of the February proposal has generated more vitriol than a suggestion that the agency might stop reimbursing schools for chocolate milk served to children in elementary and middle school.
Most chocolate milks have about 20 grams of sugar per carton — roughly half of which is added sugar. The American Heart Association recommends kids consume just 25 grams of added sugar in a full day. But parents, teachers, and school officials simply aren’t having it. They insist children won’t drink unflavored milk — so the proposal would rob them of necessary calcium — and force them to go thirsty.
“Leave the chocolate milk out of this,” said Michelle Wickstrom, a teacher from Green River, Wyoming.
Even some elementary school students are weighing in.
“You’re wasting white milk and money,” wrote Ben, who identified himself as a fourth grader. “Another reason you should bring back chocolate milk is because students are super MAD.”
“Kids are getting dehydrated. Everyone I know likes chocolate milk. This is why chocolate milk should stay!” wrote another fourth grader named Delilah.
Many of the USDA’s proposed changes are quite modest. Schools could still serve sugary breakfast items, like cereal bars, so long as they limit how many they serve per week. Cooks will also only have to cut sodium levels by 10 percent per year starting in 2025. The agency is also considering ways to make the chocolate milk ban more palatable, like only restricting access for elementary school children, or allowing schools to still sell the product so long as they sell a low sugar version.
But parents and school staff insist the changes will make the food taste so bad that kids won’t eat it.
“I am not saying go back to the old ways where anything seemed to go, but this is insanity,” said an anonymous commenter, who identified themself as senior food service staff. “My daughter won’t eat this mess and I work in school nutrition … It is not healthy if they are not eating it!!!”
The fight underscores the challenges facing the Biden White House as it pushes Americans — and particularly children — toward healthier diets. Updating the school meal program was one of many pledges the administration made in the federal nutrition strategy it released in September. Previous pushes to update the school meal program, including a 2010 law that set sodium and saturated fat limits for school meals, generated similar controversy, according to Dariush Mozaffarian, the dean for policy at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.
“All of the same concerns and hysteria arose around the 2010 legislation. School staff said this was impossible, industry said this can’t happen … and people said kids won’t eat the food,” said Mozaffarian. “Foods that we know are making people sick, people somehow defend — and it just wouldn’t happen for any other product.”
Mozaffarian, who supports the overarching changes to the school lunch program, suggested the milk dispute could be solved by cutting the sugar in chocolate milk in half, or offering children plain whole milk instead of the low fat options.
It’s also not the first time efforts to rein in chocolate milk drinking have caused an uproar. New York Mayor Eric Adams quickly abandoned a plan earlier last year to ban chocolate milk in schools after outrage in the press and from members of Congress.
The long simmering spat over school meals has also spotlighted the structural weaknesses of the national meal program.
While peer-reviewed research has shown that school lunches are now healthier than ever, school officials say they’re still struggling with those standards.
“We did not recover from the changes that were brought on back then,” commented Jennifer Zule, food service director at a school in Kansas. “To get where we are now has been quite the struggle!”
The USDA plans to gradually implement the new standards, but school staff say they still would be impossible to follow because they don’t have the staffing or the budgets to cook from scratch. Instead, they depend on prepackaged foods like frozen pizza for lunch and cereal bars for breakfast.
“Our school district’s nutrition department relies on retirees to fill our low paid — short shifted — positions because no one else wants them,” said one anonymous commenter. “These are not trained professionals! You are going to make these standards so strict that schools will be forced to make scratch foods to meet sodium levels. These school nutrition employees need to be paid better so we can hire staff that has the experience and is trained.”
This year the federal government reimbursed most schools between 77 cents and $4.58 per lunch meal, depending on whether students pay full price, or receive a federal subsidy. Breakfast reimbursement ranged from 50 cents to $2.67 per meal. About half of the school districts in a recent 1,230-district survey from the School Nutrition Association said those reimbursement rates were too low to cover the cost of producing a meal that met nutrition requirements.
Most school meals programs are expected to be financially self sufficient through federal and state reimbursement and the prices paid for meals, according to Diane Pratt-Heavner, a spokesperson for the group, which represents a coalition that includes servers and cooks, the dietitians who design the meals, and companies that create meals for schools.
School meal professionals also insist that they are already doing their part to push kids toward healthy foods, even with the existing structural issues. Pratt-Heavner pointed to a recent study from Tufts University analyzing the diets of nearly 21,000 children from 2003 to 2018, which showed that the nutritional quality of school lunches rapidly improved following the 2010 law, and that school meals are often the healthiest ones that kids eat.
“Most people don’t know how healthy school meals are,” said Pratt-Heavner. “When we’ve got data saying that kids are eating their healthiest meals at school, our focus should be on making sure kids continue to eat their healthiest meals at school — and on bringing the rest of society up to those standards.”
That study still found that 25% of meals eaten at school would be considered unhealthy according to two different standards created by the American Heart Association and the USDA.
“One in four failing is not great,” said Mozaffarian, the Tufts dean who authored the study. “Imagine if one in four kids were failing in a school — that wouldn’t be acceptable to the school administration.”
STAT’s coverage of the commercial determinants of health is supported by a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. Our financial supporters are not involved in any decisions about our journalism.
News Source: https://www.statnews.com/2023/03/14/chocolate-milk-school-lunches-healthier/