Welcome to Thomas Insights — every day, we publish the latest news and analysis to keep our readers up to date on what’s happening in industry. Sign up here to get the day’s top stories delivered straight to your inbox.
With 4.9 billion school lunches served annually, the U.S.’s school food industry is more sizeable than the nation’s biggest restaurant chains. Safe to say it’s also significantly more complex, contentious, and political.
Let’s digest the history of U.S. school lunches and explore the challenges associated with getting healthy, nutritious, and delicious food through the school gates and onto your kids’ lunch plates.
A Brief History of School Dinners in the U.S
In 1894, nutrition and home economics pioneer Ellen Swallow Richards introduced the first school lunch program at Boston Latin School. Her company, the New England Kitchen, already worked to provide low-income communities with nutritious and affordable meals, and so the school lunch program served as an extension of this initiative.
It took some time for programs like Richard’s to catch on. But things certainly started to improve when, during the Great Depression, President Roosevelt allocated a budget within his New Deal for a school lunch scheme. Surplus food was taken from farmers and unemployed women were hired to cook and serve it to public school children. The initiative was a huge success, and by 1941, every state had a lunch program in place.
Fast forward five years to 1946 and the National School Lunch Act was signed into law by President Harry Truman. This legislation sought to expand access to healthy meals for undernourished children. However, in the years that followed, the rise of pre-packaged and convenience foods, coupled with the government’s desire to cut costs, resulted in the quality of school lunches plummeting across the nation.
In the 1980s, the federal budget was heavily cut, which resulted in smaller portions, more processed food, and a lack of focus on the nutritional value of food. A particularly bleak moment came in 1981 when tomato ketchup was officially classified as a vegetable. The drop in funding also led many schools to outsourcing their school lunches to private companies.
Despite these setbacks, the past decade has seen some good progress. For example, President Obama’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act saw the National School Lunch (NSLP) and Breakfast programs reauthorized in 2010. These programs, first introduced by Truman in 1946, continue to deliver nutritionally balanced, low-cost, or no-cost lunches to millions of school children every year. In 2020, NSLP participation averaged 22.6 million children each school day and total expenditures on the program amounted to $10.4 billion.
Following the outbreak of COVID-19, schools were allocated additional funding and resources so they could serve free meals to all students, but parents and caregivers are concerned this provision will be retracted for the 2022/2023 school year.
Why Is the School Food Supply Chain So Complex?
It’s not easy for school food leaders to provide cheap or free, plentiful, and nutritious school meals to their charges.
Food service directors, tasked with overseeing meal choices for school districts, must select food items from preposterously long product catalogs. It’s a time-consuming and tedious process, not least because they must be well-versed in both state and federal regulations. Alongside menu planning, these professionals have to negotiate contracts with food suppliers, recruit and manage cafeteria employees, and oversee day-to-day operations.
Additional challenges in certain districts, such as lacking resources, insufficient budgets, or a high proportion of children that qualify for free school meals, can make it especially difficult for food service directors to do their jobs effectively or drive change. Public school districts, for example, have just $1.19 to spend on each student’s lunch.
The Future of School Food
U.S. kids should consume between 35% and 40% of their daily calories at school, so it really matters that school cafeterias provide plentiful, healthy options. Hearty meals are critical to a child’s health and wellbeing, fuelling them with energy and improving concentration, which ultimately leads to better educational outcomes.
With this in mind, many industry leaders are striving to make continued positive changes. This includes launching food education programs, installing salad bars in school cafeterias, trialing new menus, and expanding free meal programs.
The Urban School Food Alliance, for example, has seen food service leaders in various urban districts band together to use their purchasing power to drive healthier and more sustainable meal options.
The Biden Administration has also taken steps to improve kids’ access to free meals. The American Families Plan committed to providing lunches throughout the summer to 29 million children — seeking to ensure food-insecure children would receive at least one good meal every day. The initiative will also invest $17 billion to “expand free meals for children in the highest poverty districts by reimbursing a higher percentage of meals.”
Image Credit: SpeedKingz / Shutterstock.com
