Trump's USDA celebrates Michelle's birthday by rolling back school lunch rules, again

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has taken another whack at former first lady Michelle Obama’s signature achievement: Establishing stricter nutritional standards for school breakfasts and lunches. And on her birthday.

The Trump administration has been chipping away at those Obama-era rules. First, just days after Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue assumed his role, he announced the USDA would be slowing the implementation of the aggressive sodium standards as well as Obama-era rules for whole grains and sweetened milks, citing food waste and nonparticipation as key rationales for the shift.

Then last year, the USDA moved to allow schools to substitute potatoes and other starchy vegetables for fruit with breakfast.

Now, in a third round of revisions, Friday’s proposals would allow schools to cut the amount of fruit included in breakfasts served outside of the cafeteria from one cup to a half cup. The remaining calories could be filled with sweet pastries and granola bars. For lunches, the proposals would allow schools to offer potatoes as a vegetable every day and gives them the flexibility to provide things like pizza and burgers as a la carte items that students may choose over more nutritious full meals.

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Many of these changes flout the good news about the nation’s school nutrition programs reported by last year’s USDA “School Nutrition and Meal Cost Study,” which was the first comprehensive assessment of school meals after the implementation of Michelle Obama’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.

The study showed that, after the implementation of the Obama-era healthy food changes, the Healthy Eating Index (HEI-2010), a multicomponent measure of diet quality, shot up dramatically for both school-provided breakfasts and lunches: Scores went from 49.6 out of 100 in school year 2009-2010 to 71.3 by 2014-2015.

And while Perdue has argued that healthier food offerings mean more food waste and lower participation in the programs, the USDA study revealed that there was greater participation in school meal programs at schools with the highest healthy food standards and that food waste remained relatively unchanged.

Brightmoon said:

Figures that he’d do destructive things and try to justify it . There’s this stereotype that low income blacks and Hispanics get hurt by these changes when it’s the low income whites who get zapped the most. There are a lot more of them than there are blacks and Hispanics

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I really do think it's less about hurting children (for once!) and more about money. Don't laugh, but one of the minor villains of the article is Big Potato.