Remember Martha Payne, the Scottish 9-year-old whose blog documenting her pathetic school lunches shamed local pols into allowing kids unlimited fruits and vegetables? Well, they decided they weren’t going to be pushed around by a little girl anymore, and sent word that she was no longer allowed to take photographs of her food.

What they didn’t count on was being pushed around by a little girl and her legions of internet fans, including Jamie Oliver. So now the council is photographing its words, then eating them. Martha’s blog, Never Seconds, lives on.

On Thursday, Martha explained on her blog that she was no longer allowed to photograph her lunches, because her blog had been generating too much media coverage:

This morning in maths I got taken out of class by my head teacher and taken to her office. I was told that I could not take any more photos of my school dinners because of a headline in a newspaper today.

I only write my blog not newspapers and I am sad I am no longer allowed to take photos.

Her dad clarified that this was the work of the Argyll and Bute council, not the school. A statement from the council said that press attention had “led catering staff to fear for their jobs” — not lose them or anything, just fear for them. Sounds legit. By god, if someone feels an emotion, it’s time to QUASH FREE SPEECH.

But Martha’s blog was bigger than the council’s territory. She made changes on the home front — besides the “unlimited fruit and veg” thing, she reported a “special visitor at school who wears a white coat and hair net,” who checked what kids were eating and what they were throwing away. (I assume this was an effort to eliminate waste, but it could have been a spy from the council trying to prove that kids don’t need sufficient lunch. I wouldn’t put anything past these people.) But she also raised money for a charity called Mary’s Meals, which feeds needy kids internationally – in fact, rage-donations from pissed-off fans skyrocketed her fundraising to $35,000 (!!!) after the shutdown. And she collected photos of school lunches from around the world, some of which are pretty encouraging …

Photo by Lainey.

… and some of which are from America:

Photo by Miranda.

Those fans and others were outraged when the council tried to hide by banning Martha from taking photographs. Twitter exploded, including a bazillion retweets of this message of support from Jamie Oliver:

Stay strong Martha, RT this to show your support #neverseconds bit.ly/LXzJcI Jx

—
Jamie Oliver (@jamieoliver) June 15, 2012

Wired’s story on the shutdown also included contact info for the Argyll and Bute council, so even politicians too senile to use Twitter undoubtedly got an earful. (And I’m not saying the Argyll and Bute council is dumb, but its criticism of this blog by a single small child documenting what she herself ate for lunch was that “the photographic images uploaded appear to only represent a fraction of the choices available to pupils.” No way, really?)

Result: The council has realized that it should maybe quit bullying a little kid out in public. One of the council leaders announced, “There’s no place for censorship in Argyll and Bute Council and there never has been and there never will be [except for a little while yesterday before Jamie Oliver stuck his nose in].” Martha gets to take all the pictures she wants.

Blog on, Martha. The internet has your back.

Martha learns cooking from celebrity chef Nick Nairn. (Photo courtesy of Never Seconds.)

Martha Payne had some sad-ass lunches at her school in Scotland — unsatisfying food that sometimes had more hair than vegetables. So the 9-year-old decided to start a blog with photos and vital statistics about her meals. Almost immediately, the blog got international attention, including from prominent school lunch busybody Jamie Oliver. Result? Martha’s dad just met with the local council, and it announced that kids could have unlimited salad, fruit, and bread.

For each of her lunches, Martha rated taste, healthiness, and pieces of hair (usually zero but not always). But she only managed five ratings before the media attention started making the school self-conscious:

Today was very different at lunchtime. Dad had already told me beforehand that some people from the Council were coming to lunch with a reporter from our local paper. There was also a new system for ordering food which I’ll explain when I understand it more. I didn’t see the visitors having lunch but I saw them hovering about and watching us getting served.

For the first time ever I have seen at lunch cherry tomatoes, radishes, carrot and cucumber shreddings.

You can see vegetables getting more prominent on Martha’s plate over the course of the blog. Here’s her lunch from the day when the council officially announced unlimited fruits and vegetables:

Health rating 9/10, bitchezzz!

In the U.S., people mainly worry that schoolkids eat too much lunch, not too little. But there are really a lot of intersecting issues — quantity, quality, even efficiency (my sense from the blog is that Martha is getting rushed through the lunch queue assembly-line-style, with little chance to choose her food). Schools do a lot of ugly calculations, weighing kids’ health against cost and expediency. But apparently, making that public is sometimes all it takes to force a change.

I hope Martha enjoys her unlimited salads (and her brownie, which she said was “better than Dad’s”). And I hope the school council enjoys the taste of crow.

What will you see when NPR’s Tiny Desk Kitchen takes you inside a school lunch burger patty? Some pretty startling colors — blue copper gluconate, red cyanocobalamin — and some 10-dollar names like thiamine mononitrate and pyridoxine hydrochloride.

And then there’s the stuff that tries to cover up the burger’s artificiality. Caramel color, for instance, makes the burger look like it’s been grilled when it really hasn’t. Yeast makes the meat taste more meaty, and the spices, flavorings, and sweeteners (!?) aren’t just there to enhance the flavor of the meat. They’re there to mask the bitterness of the added “enrichment” chemicals.

In the video, NPR host Allison Aubrey talks to a food scientist, who tries to justify this hideous progeny of a real hamburger and a Flintstones vitamin. For kids who don’t get enough nutritious food at home, the scientist points out, sneaking extra nutrients and protein into their school lunch might be the way to keep them healthy. But that doesn’t explain the disodium inosinate, an MSG-like “flavor enhancer.”

Fairfax County schools, source of the particular burger Aubrey dissected, is phasing them out in favor of something a little closer to natural. But some of the same ingredients crop up in processed foods you might buy at the store. Unlike kids in school, though, you can choose not to purchase them.

Students in the culinary program at Jasper Place High School in Edmonton, Canada (yes, Canada apparently has culinary programs in high school) probably think farm-to-table restaurants are a pretty cute idea. Oh, you have a farm on your roof? You must be so proud. We have a farm ON OUR ACTUAL TABLE.

The students are raising 100 tilapia, which they’ll cook for college credit in the spring. Not only that, but one of the tilapia tanks hosts a hydroponic herb and vegetable farm on top, fed with fish-waste-fertilized water. Not only that, but the plants do double duty as filters, cleaning the water that gets put back into the tank — and the fish eat leftover vegetables and cuttings. NOT ONLY THAT, but oh yeah the school does have a rooftop garden too. Basically, the only way a high school could be more sustainable is if they ran the AC off lust-sweat and teenage angst.

Oh wait, I guess there’s one other way they could get more sustainable. The students have been inspired to find a way to make their fish-rearing system run on renewable energy:

And there could be more related projects on the way. [Teacher Dustin] Bajer says students are thinking big — Moby Dick big.

Some have talked about putting bicycle-powered generators in the school’s cafe to charge their cellphones and laptops. So why not produce energy to make their food?

“There’s a fitness centre here. There are spin classes. How many generators could we get going? Could we basically produce enough electricity to at least offset the costs of the lights for the aquaponics system?” asks Bajer.

“Then it’s off the grid.”

The fish don’t just provide plant food, protein, cooking credit, and a crash course in where food comes from — they’re also being used as the basis for lessons outside of the culinary program. Chemistry students are researching the ecosystem, and biology students are trying to get the fish to breed. (Actually, the article doesn’t say they’re biology students — it could just be that kids think it’s funny to try to make fish bone.)

The only potential wrench in the works is a one-eyed tilapia named Winky. The students aren’t sure they’ll be able to eat that one.

There are 32 million reasons why the United States Department of Agriculture’s new school meal standards [PDF] are good news. That’s the number of children who participate in the National School Breakfast and Lunch programs in the U.S. and who will soon be served far more nutritious — and hopefully delicious — school meals.

Announced by First Lady Michelle Obama, who was instrumental in getting the new rules written by ensuring that the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act passed in 2010, the updated meal standards are a huge improvement, in spite of last minute meddling by Congress. The standards are based on 2009 Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommendations and they include:

• Doubling the amount of fruits and vegetables offered;
• Increasing the variety of vegetables served to include dark greens, red/orange, and legumes;
• Increasing offerings of whole grain-rich foods — half the grains must be whole grain-rich by July and all must be whole grain-rich by start of the school year in 2014;
• Offering only fat-free or low-fat milk varieties (flavored must be fat-free);
• Limiting calories based on the age of children being served, to ensure proper portion size; and
• Reducing the amounts of saturated fat, trans fats, and sodium.

The total cost of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act will be $3.2 billion over five years (down from $6.8 billion in the USDA’s proposed rule). Since it does cost more to serve healthier meals, the increased costs have been covered by program changes and funding provisions such as:

• Eliminating the meat/meat substitute requirement at breakfast;
• Lengthening the timeline for adding fruit to breakfast;
• Providing an additional 6-cent federal reimbursement per meal for lunches that meet the new standards;
• Ensuring that a la carte offerings are no longer subsidized by school meals (in some schools, this means that a la carte food prices will rise); and
• Allowing students to opt for smaller servings of fruits and vegetables to help eliminate “plate waste.”

Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, who has led the fight to improve school food over the past decade, was happy with the final standards. “These are the first-ever school meal standards for whole grains, trans fat, and sodium,” said Wootan. “The only disappointments I have are the ones Congress forced on the USDA — continuing to count pizza as a vegetable and allowing French fries to be served every day.”

So what does this all mean for America’s children?

As a long-time school food reformer who has watched countless children consume high-calorie, low-nutrition school meals that I wouldn’t serve to my dog, I believe that this is a giant step forward. Just the fact that every student who purchases a school lunch will soon have to take a fruit and/or vegetable as a component of their meal is revolutionary. And in one fell swoop, the USDA has eliminated full fat and 2 percent milk from school meals — high-fat beverages that our increasingly overweight children don’t need. The USDA has provided a sample before and after elementary school menu.

Next on the horizon, thanks to the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, is the USDA proposed rule for school a la carte or competitive foods, scheduled to be released in the next few months. If Congress doesn’t meddle again and the USDA proposes science-based standards for these foods sold outside the meal programs, our nation’s schools could become places where mostly healthy choices reign. What a refreshing thought — that our schools could actually model the nutrition habits that our government recommends in the Dietary Guidelines — rather than continually contradicting them and undermining parents.

But a la carte/competitive foods like sugary drinks, chips, ice cream, and candy are big business for Big Food and Beverage. So expect more deep-pocketed lobbying of Congress by their friends in the food industry in an attempt to maintain the status quo (e.g., their profits) at the expense of our children’s health.

School lunch in Seattle has come a long way since I was a public school student. In the ’90s, lunch was only a dollar, and the cafeteria served up square, rubbery pizza, scoops of mushy spaghetti, and Belgian waffles (everyone’s favorite!). Fast-forward more than a decade: Elementary school lunch now costs $2.75, and for several years the Seattle School District has inched toward healthier offerings.

For most of public-school history, cafeteria food was something to be endured and then forgotten immediately upon graduating. But in recent years, many parents, health advocates, and doctors have targeted school lunch as one of the aspects of our food system most in need of scrutiny and reform. Since then, many of us have come to see bland, processed-food-heavy cafeteria cuisine less as a necessary evil and more as evidence of the way in which our government’s love affair with Big Ag takes a toll on public health. Not that revamping school lunch has proven easy: Public school districts struggle with extremely limited budgets, and the byzantine logistics of preparing and distributing food for thousands of children are especially tough to change.

So far, the most visible school-food makeovers have taken place in famously progressive towns like Boulder, Colo., and Berkeley, Calif. Most people won’t be surprised to learn that Seattle, with its rising foodie culture, is going the same route by enlisting the help of experienced restaurant chefs in overhauling its school lunches. But the Seattle School District’s size sets it apart from those liberal college towns, making its ambitions more challenging, and — if it succeeds — its tactics especially worth examining by other large school districts hoping to follow suit.

Wendy Weyer, Seattle Schools’ Child Nutrition Services director, says the district has a history of thinking outside the tray, especially when it comes to healthier ingredients like whole grains. “When I came here seven years ago,” she says, “we were serving brown rice when nobody else was.”

In the spring of 2010, the drive toward healthy school lunch in Seattle got an additional boost with a grant from the Centers for Disease Control. The goal was to form a partnership with local chefs to revamp the cafeteria menu. Soon, the district connected with Tom Douglas, a beloved Seattle chef whose company operates 12 highly regarded restaurants in the city.

“We were thrilled [about the partnership],” said Pamela Hinckley, CEO of Tom Douglas Restaurants (TDR). “We have so many employees with families in the public school system.”

“We want hot sauce!”

Seattle Schools staff and TDR volunteers serve new menu creations at a family night.

Hinckley and TDR chef Eric Tanaka worked closely with Weyer and Randall Guzzardo, operations manager for the Seattle School District’s central kitchen, learning the ins and outs of the district’s food-preparation and distribution system, as well as the federal pricing and nutrition guidelines. Then they set up student focus groups designed to discover what kids do and don’t like about school food, and also what they like to eat at home.

Although fish products often inspire wrinkled noses among schoolchildren, Weyer was surprised to hear a number of kids mention steamed white fish as a favorite home-cooked food. In response, the team developed a new recipe for a homemade provencal sauce over white baked fish. The district tested the dish out at a series of “family nights” held this fall, each at a different school in the district. “We had kids coming back for two or three servings [of fish],” Weyer said.

Misconceptions about what kids will and won’t eat can get in the way of creative menu changes. “A lot of people assume kids want bland food, but we found exactly the opposite,” Hinckley said. “On my notes from [the focus groups], in big scrawl, it says, ‘We want hot sauce!’”

The ideal vs. the reality

Once they’d identified meals that were both healthy and appealing to kids, the next step was finding ways to mass-produce them within the practical constraints of the public-school system.

The district plans to serve a yogurt parfait — one of its new menu offerings — this month. (Photo by USDA.)

“A lot of people want to approach [school-lunch reform] from the utopian outside and say, ‘Let’s just grow a garden and that will solve everything!’” Hinckley said. “But there’s so much more to working within the system.” For instance: Federal and state funds provide Seattle Schools with about $3 per student meal, but that amount must also cover labor costs. The district ends up with about $1.10 for the actual food — an amount Hinckley called “pathetic.”

Then there’s the fact that all food is prepared in a central commissary at district headquarters before being shipped out to 88 individual school kitchens (many of which resemble “a closet with a refrigerator and an oven,” Weyer said). The Berkeley school district implemented reforms through one central kitchen, but that district serves less than 10,000 students; over 47,000 kids attend public schools in Seattle, which means Weyer and Guzzardo’s team is responsible for producing 20,000 lunches a day — no simple task. “When you expand a recipe, the flavor changes,” Guzzardo says.

The central commissary works as a compromise between the higher labor cost of having a full-functioning kitchen at every school, and serving only frozen and reheated meals shipped from afar. But it does present a barrier to serving truly fresh food daily in every school.

“The food that’s created has to withstand being made two days early,” Hinckley says. “Food deteriorates in flavor, freshness, and aroma. That’s why school [food] smells funky! You don’t get onions sizzling, you get the smell of bags opening.”

Jazzing up the basics

Some ideas for new dishes — like a Thai spring roll — had to be altered to fit the infrastructure at hand. “So we’ll look at a different way we can do it — maybe a cold noodle dish,” says Guzzardo.

Weyer said that while the central kitchen makes baked goods and salad from scratch, most of the protein on the menu comes precooked. So the team jazzes it up with homemade ingredients like green tomatillo sauce on a prepared enchilada. To make pasta, Guzzardo uses fresh onions, garlic, basil, and parsley with commodity ground beef, and he’ll substitute half the canned pasta sauce for fresh diced tomatoes. “We’ve cut down the sodium by about 50 percent from what it was six years ago,” he said. “We’re constantly trying to innovate within the framework of what we can do.”

The district plans to move into 2012 serving a new taste-tested dish — like the enchiladas, the noodles, or a chicken and butternut squash curry with Israeli couscous — about once a week, as the production schedule allows. Although the grant money will run out in March, Weyer said the district hopes to work with TDR to phase more new recipes into the menu. And while TDR employees have donated their time, Hinckley is enthusiastic about keeping the collaboration going; her dream is to issue a call to all restaurants in Seattle in hopes of pairing one chef with every school in the district.

“None of this is going to happen overnight,” said Guzzardo. “But more of [these changes have] been going on over the last few years than people know. Our desire is for kids to get a better meal. No underlying glory is being sought, because there’s not a lot of glory in this.”

Weyer said she also hopes menu changes will help eliminate some stigmas attached to the school meal program. “In some schools, if you didn’t bring lunch from home that [means] you must be poor,” she said. But upgraded offerings could convince more “kids who haven’t been a part of our program to try a school lunch.”

1.  Food prices have gone up, and more people need help feeding their families

The fact that 46 million people — about a seventh of the U.S. population — now receive food stamps (i.e. help from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)) should be enough to tell us that something is wrong with America’s food system. But thanks to the way public food assistance is now set up, the problem is all but invisible to the rest of us.

Why are so many Americans using food stamps? Beyond our collective economic woes, a large part of the problem lies in the cost of food itself, which rose considerably in the last few years. Then there’s the speculation market, which drives up the cost of commodity crops. Ethanol doesn’t help, either.

2. The food we can afford could make us sick (or even kill us)

2011 saw the largest Class 1 (i.e. potentially lethal) meat recall in history, involving 36 million pounds of Cargill turkey tainted with multi-drug resistant Salmonella.

The listeria outbreak in cantaloupes was also the deadliest U.S. foodborne illness outbreak in 100 years.

Germany’s E. coli outbreak over the summer was also the deadliest on record — anywhere.

What happened to last winter’s Food Safety Modernization Act — the much-debated legislation that might have updated the regulations that would stop outbreaks like these? Well, to make a long story short, it was never funded. Who’s hungry now?

3. GMOs aren’t going anywhere

“Superweeds,” resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, raise red flags.Photo: Lost in FogTake a deep breath: 2011 began with the approval of GMO alfalfa (which could permanently change the organic milk industry for the worse). Less than two weeks later, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) defied a court order and partially deregulated GMO sugar beets without completing an environmental impact assessment.

Meanwhile, concern about “superweeds,” which are resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, raised red flags beyond the foodie and environmentalist communities; now big business is also worried. And our six-legged friends have outsmarted Monsanto too; an insect called the corn rootworm has become resistant to the company’s Bt corn (which is supposed to be engineered to produce its own pesticides).

GMO business got especially fishy this year, as well: GMO salmon may also be inching toward commercial approval. The “frankenfish” appeared to be fast-tracked for Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval during the first half of 2010, which would have made it the first genetically engineered animal food on the market. But in June, the House of Representatives blocked the FDA from spending money to approve the salmon. This seemed like a good sign, but in October, the USDA gave Aquabounty, the company looking to produce the salmon, a research grant — meaning this fish is far from out of the picture.

4. Pesticides: Also here to stay for now

Methyl iodide, a known carcinogen, has been approved for use in California strawberry fields.Eaters may have plenty of evidence to suggest that agriculture should involve fewer pesticides (example: this recent piece about the weed killer atrazine in the rural water supply), but big agribusiness vehemently disagrees. 

Last December’s approval of methyl iodide (a known carcinogen) for use in strawberry fields in California has many advocates concerned about farmworkers, nearby communities, and water tables. Small bright spot: It has yet to be adopted widely, so many in the state are still working to make the short- and long-term consequences known. Some advocates are even calling for an end to all fumigants.

In May, we covered the fight in Congress to restrict the EPA’s ability to regulate pesticides — specifically when it comes to spraying near streams and waterways — and the issue has yet to be put to sleep.

Meanwhile, there is now clear evidence linking a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids to recent honeybee die-offs, but top USDA scientists still refuse to recommend a ban. To make matters worse, honeybees aren’t the only type of bee that’s disappearing: Bumblebees are going missing, too.

5. Extreme weather is messing with our food

A Vermont corn field, flooded after Hurricane Irene.Photo: putneypicsBetween the drought in the Southwest, which wreaked havoc on farms and ranches in both the U.S. and Mexico, and Hurricane Irene, which hit the East Coast at the worst possible moment (peak harvest for farmers in New York state and elsewhere), 2011 was a terrible weather year. The result? Fewer pumpkins for Halloween, and a costlier Thanksgiving, to start with. But this year was also a reminder of the ways a shifting climate could make food production especially unpredictable in the future.

6. The American meat industry is still run by a small handful of huge companies

An aerial view of a CAFO.Photo: Kestrel AerialFor a while it seemed that one of the more positive food policy developments of 2011 might have come in the way of important changes to the Grain Inspection, Packers & Stockyard Administration (GIPSA) — a wonky set of rules that essentially set the terms for competition in the meat industry. Then, in November, we reported that the USDA removed all parts of the rule that would have upset the current — highly consolidated — meat industry. Whereas new rules would have truly leveled the playing field for small producers, business as usual will mean that four companies still control 90 percent of all beef processing, while an equally small handful of companies control 70 percent of all pork processing, and nearly 60 percent of poultry processing.

On a related note: Remember how California voters opted for more humane standards for egg producers a few years back? Well, this year, Idaho lawmakers have been easing their regulations to make way for what they hope will be a wave of companies moving in from California to build confined animal feeding operations (CAFOS) when the rules go into effect. Thanks a lot, Idaho.

7. Fracking is bad for farming

Photo: Not an AlternativeOne of the most well-known results of hydraulic fracturing, the process of drilling for natural gas known as “fracking,” is the wastewater that appears as a by-product. But not everyone knows about how that wastewater affects farms. In May, we ran a story about the impact fracking has on ranching: Cows in upstate New York were getting sick and dying after coming into contact with chlorine, barium, magnesium, and other radioactive elements. But that’s not where it ends; earlier in the year, wastewater actually flooded a series of farms in Pennsylvania.

8. BPA is lurking

BPA was banned from use in baby bottles in California, but it still lurks in other products.On the bright side, the endocrine disruptor bisphenol-A was banned from use in baby bottles in California this fall. But national efforts to get it out of canned food (even the FDA itself detected it in can liners) haven’t happened yet.

The FDA is dragging its feet, but the National Institutes of Health recently initiated a $30 million research program to examine the growing risks and make a final call on BPA’s safety. Then, in September, we reported on a fishy government study that purported to debunk the entire BPA threat all together. And predictably, corporations are behaving irresponsibly even when apprised of the danger. For example, in the spring, we reported that Coca-Cola shareholders voted by a 3-to-1 margin to continue using BPA in the lining of its soft-drink cans.

9. School lunch: still in bad shape

We reported on the Republican attack on school lunch that began last summer, when the Obama administration proposed new USDA guidelines for school lunches that would have replaced French fries with healthier options like whole grains, orange and green veggies, and low-fat milk.

Then, just last month, thanks to a concerted effort by Big Food lobbyists, Congress unveiled a final plan that rejected the proposed changes and allowed pizza to be counted as a vegetable.

Meanwhile, new facts surfaced that contradict a common assumption — namely, that including big food processing companies in the school-lunch chain is always a better deal. In fact, doing so may cost nearly as much as cooking from scratch and do much more harm to local communities.

10. The next Farm Bill probably won’t change the food system

The Farm Bill — that giant piece of legislation that gets updated every five years and impacts everything from food stamps to farm funding to crop insurance — came awfully close to getting crafted in a hurry this fall as part of the debt-slashing congressional supercommittee process. The supercommittee ultimately failed, putting an end the so-called Secret Farm Bill.

And while we can now look forward to a more traditional, transparent congressional process, it looks like the draft Farm Bill that was drawn up in November will still provide the framework for this year’s process. This is unfortunate news because the draft bill included significant cuts to conservation programs (despite a great deal of opposition) while dishing out large subsidies to industrial-sized commodity growers (just in a slightly different form). We’re still hoping for a miracle, but it’s looking like the very bill food reformers have put so much hope into for the last five years might turn out to be business as usual, or worse.

If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably feeling like a real Debbie Downer. Don’t worry; 2011 was full of good news, too. Go read about it now!

Photo: USDA

Komisar looked at two less-examined aspects of the school lunch program. The first is the practice of taking up to $1 billion of “surplus” fruits, vegetables, and meats that the USDA supplies to the program and, rather than cooking them into healthy meals, turning them into high-fat processed foods. The second is the surprisingly inefficient economics of outsourcing cafeteria services to private companies like Sodexo or Aramark.

As for the first practice, about $1 billion of surplus foods like apples, potatoes, and chicken are transferred from the USDA to schools for free every year. Only most schools don’t prepare the foods in their own kitchens — they pay processing companies, as Komisar says, “to turn these healthy ingredients into fried chicken nuggets, fruit pastries, pizza, and the like.”

And, of course, french fries.

Schools across the country have shut down their own kitchens in favor of facilities that can reheat and serve these processed foods. The logic was supposed to be irresistible — it combined the efficiencies of centralized food production with the simplicity of easily trained workers.   

However, as Komisar observes, turning chicken into chicken nuggets isn’t all that cheap:

The Michigan Department of Education, for example, gets free raw chicken worth $11.40 a case and sends it for processing into nuggets at $33.45 a case. The schools in San Bernardino, Calif., spend $14.75 to make French fries out of $5.95 worth of potatoes.

… Roland Zullo, a researcher at the University of Michigan, found in 2008 that Michigan schools that hired private food-service management firms spent less on labor and food but more on fees and supplies, yielding “no substantive economic savings.”

Komisar also quotes another study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation which determined that this practice transformed perfectly good ingredients into foods that “have about the same nutritional value as junk foods.”

As one principal Komisar spoke to put it, in the wake of her district switching to management company Sodexo, “the savings were paltry … You pay a little less and your kids get strawberry milk, frozen French fries, and artificial shortening.” Every day.

But what really gets me about all of this isn’t just the fact that we’re willingly shelling out serious money to turn healthy ingredients into junk, but that we’re also taking good jobs out of communities that need them:

School kitchen workers are generally unionized, with benefits; they are also typically local residents who have children in public schools and care about their well-being. Laid-off school workers become an economic drain instead of a positive force. And the rebate deals with national food manufacturers cut out local farmers and small producers like bakers, who could offer fresh, healthy food and help the local economy.

Talk about a double whammy. And this being corporate America, there’s a healthy dose of corruption to go along with it. Last year, private cafeteria companies were caught paying illegal rebates to food processors — rebates that weren’t passed on to the school districts. As then-New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo stated in a comment on a $20 million fine paid by Sodexo in New York for the practice, “This company cut sweetheart deals with suppliers and then denied taxpayer-supported schools the benefits.”

Shockingly, Komisar has discovered that these illegal rebates have crept back in the form of “prompt payment discounts” — a form of kickback that is, under USDA rules, legal.

Is it any wonder that Congress has fought the USDA’s attempt to reform school lunch in the form of the much-mocked and maligned Defense of Pizza and Potato Acts? It would be funny if not for the fact that so much money is riding on these ridiculous laws.

This battle by corporations and Congress to keep our schoolkids eating junk food comes even as the scientific evidence piles up that school is the best place to battle obesity — both through increased exercise and healthier food. In fact, this study out of Australia, published in Cochrane Library, indicates that school-based programs that try to increase activity levels among kids aged 6-12 may actually reduce obesity — which is impressive since research suggests that exercise-based interventions are not particularly effective in other age groups. And the study goes on to observe that the U.S. lags behind most other countries in adoption of such school-based interventions. Apparently, we do crony capitalism really well, and that’s about it.

There are some amazing school lunch reforms going on, thanks to movers and shakers like Ann Cooper and organizations like Food Corps. But Komisar’s article reminds us that when billions of dollars are sloshing around the system, even the best reforms can seem like small potatoes.

Related Series

• Cafeteria confidential: Behind the scenes in school kitchens

Yes, you heard that right. The first lady actually said that eating vegetables is a chore. And that playing is a preferable focus for her campaign because it’s easier.

In February 2010, when the first lady announced a campaign to “end childhood obesity within a generation,” I was immediately skeptical. I worried that “Let’s Move” signaled an over-emphasis on physical activity, a much safer political issue than eating habits, and one that Big Food gladly embraces.

But when I took a closer look, I was pleasantly surprised to see that three of the four issues areas initially identified by the campaign were food-related. (A fifth issue has since been added.) The goals or “pillars” of the campaign are: 1) improving access to healthy, affordable food; 2) providing healthy food in schools; 3) empowering parents and caregivers; 4) increasing physical activity; and 5) creating a healthy start for children.

It’s hard to argue with any of those worthy causes, and it’s important to have the first lady bring attention to issues such as food deserts, and to serve as a national spokesperson in a way we’ve not seen before. I have also given praise where praise was due, such as when the first lady recommended — as part of a checklist for daycare centers to follow — significant limits on screen time for children.

And while the White House insists that food is very much still on the agenda, it’s hard to ignore the potential for politics going into an election year. (When New York University professor Marion Nestle recently dared to question the first lady’s renewed emphasis on exercise, she got set straight by White House chef and Let’s Move advisor Sam Kass; that’s how touchy this subject is.)

Exercise is fun, but it doesn’t match the science

Putting politics aside for a moment, let’s talk research, which can often get lost in the shuffle or, worse, distorted by corporate interests.

Obesity expert Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Ottawa, says the first lady’s focus on physical activity to help “end childhood obesity in a generation” is misguided. More importantly, he says, it’s not evidence-based.

He pointed me to many scientific studies showing that physical activity, while important for other reasons, has not been shown to be effective in preventing childhood obesity. (See here, here, here, and here.) On the contrary, data shows that an increase in food intake alone explains the rise in obesity in children. 

Children’s diets have changed so drastically in the last few decades, with the increase in calories, for example, due to soda and fast food so large, that moderate increases in exercise are not likely to make a difference.

As Freedhoff explains, it’s a “testament to the simple fact that it’s far more difficult to burn calories than it is to consume them.” 

To be clear, exercise does have many health benefits; it just shouldn’t be used to distract us from overconsumption and marketing of junk food. Also, lots of skinny kids suffer from diet-related health problems, including allergies.

So if science isn’t driving the exercise bandwagon, what is?

Playing it safe

After nearly two years, it’s clear that Let’s Move is steering away from anything that challenges the food industry. In fact, the campaign organizers appear eager to form corporate partnerships. For example, the first lady hailed Walmart’s so-called “healthy food initiative” as a new “nutrition charter.” Of course, Walmart hasn’t exactly kept its promises when it comes to the environment, so we have little reason to trust the company when it comes to nutrition.

Moreover, the first lady’s deafening silence over the past few months during extremely heated public battles over children’s diets gives us more proof than we ever needed that she is either unwilling or unable to take on the hard political issues.

While Mrs. Obama certainly showed leadership last year to help pass the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act to improve school food, she hasn’t followed through. The recent hostile takeover of the USDA’s school food regulations by Congress on behalf of the frozen food lobby was one such example.

From the beginning, Let’s Move has also been mostly MIA on the extremely contentious and intractable problem of junk food marketing to children.

In one exception, the first lady gave a strong speech in March 2010 to the Grocery Manufacturers Association (Big Food lobbyists) imploring food companies to clean up their act. At the time, she asked: “What does it mean when so many parents are finding that their best efforts are undermined by an avalanche of advertisements aimed at their kids?”

But her admonishments had little impact. Instead, the food industry has launched a no-holds-barred attack on an attempt by the federal government to place reasonable, science-based, voluntary restrictions on food marketing to children.

To make its case to the feds, kids’ cereal giant General Mills went so far as to argue that getting kids to eat more fruits and vegetables would hurt the nation’s economy because food costs “would increase by a staggering amount.”

The argument was based on a bogus economic study, which warned that demand for fruits and vegetables would skyrocket, resulting in almost $500 billion more spent on imported food and $30 billion less on domestically grown grain. As Donald Cohen, who recently uncovered this absurd claim, noted:

Even if the voluntary guidelines were that effective and their study was accurate, it’s audacious marketing spin to turn an overwhelmingly positive victory for public health into a big government, job killing attack on freedom.

This one-two punch comes from the very industry players with whom Mrs. Obama claimed she could “find common ground.” And it has left many advocates feeling defeated.

So when, instead of speaking out on behalf of the millions of children who will continue to be served french fries and pizza in school and get bombarded daily with Happy Meal ads, the first lady announces (as she did this week) that Let’s Move has broken a record for jumping jacks, it’s disappointing to say the least.

Here’s what Freedhoff had to say to the first lady:

I’d tell her that we should be striving to change the environment so as to make lower-calorie, less-processed food choices the default. Let’s Move may be politically palatable, but “Let’s Cook” would likely have a far greater impact on health.

Let’s Cook? Uh-oh, sounds like a job killer.

One of the greatest things among the many great things about British accents is how classy they generally make swearing sound. This works best if you're, say, Stephen Fry; it's a little less effective for Jamie Oliver and his mockney pronunciation, but it's still pretty funny to watch him cuss at McDonald's on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Oliver also has things to say about pizza, school lunches, Congress, and the cost of a beastie.