The New School Lunch Guidelines: Who do They Help? By Sabena Burkhart

     

The New School Lunch Guidelines: Who do They Help?

By Sabena Burkhart

             In May 2017, the Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced how he was moving to reform school lunch programs in hopes of rolling back Obama-era nutrition standards. And in December and January of 2019, he did just that.

                Although this isn’t extremely recent, the new standards take a while to branch off into the thousands of schools across the country. The Trump Administration reformed the Obama-era act called the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act which placed nutrition standards for schools. Under the new rules, cafeterias do not have to fret about reducing sodium, nor do they have to comply to serve whole grains. Schools can offer 1% percent chocolate and strawberry milk. These new milk guidelines put the dairy industries in a spiral and more money in their pockets. Along with the 1% fat comes with added sugar, and does the complete opposite for children then we hoped it would.

“I wouldn’t be as big as I am today without chocolate milk,” Perdue said at the time of the announcement.

So why do I care? I care because the original guidelines were put in place to provide children a healthier lunch and nutrition for students. With the new reformation, children were not the main concern- it was the wealthy pockets of food industries. Not only does this further affect kids health, but American kids consume as much as half their daily calories at school, and changing their meals can impact childhood obesity, which affects nearly 1 in 5 school age children in the United States. In fact, current trends in obesity in the United States suggest that for the first time in a very long time, the younger generations may be headed to a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

I’m not sure the goals of the country’s school lunch reformations are in our best interests. We need to prioritize health and nutrition for the younger generations. And if we do not, our future is sure to be filled with obesity, increased risk of heart disease, and cancers. If the influential people of this country lower expectations of healthy, nutritious meals then what will happen to our future generations? Future doctors? Soldiers? Presidents?

Nothing we can do will change the past, but the changes we make today can change the future. Change the nutrition guidelines for our best interests. Not the food industries.