But, whatever the legislation’s flaws, the U.S.D.A.’s own research indicated that kids were generating about as much waste five years after the law was passed as they were before. A small 2015 study showed that, after the law was implemented, kids were eating significantly more fruit and more of their school-provided meals over all, and throwing less food away. And, despite overreliance on ultra-processed foods, school cooks still managed to nourish kids as well or even slightly better, on average, than parents who prepared their kids’ lunches at home. Lauren Au, a nutrition professor at the University of California, Davis, co-authored a 2019 paper showing that kids who eat school-provided breakfast every day consume modestly more fruits and vegetables, dairy, whole grains, calcium, and dietary fibre than kids who eat school breakfast less frequently or not at all; school lunches provided better returns on dairy and calcium. “It’s extremely frustrating when you have R.F.K., Jr., saying that school lunches are poison, because it stigmatizes eating school meals,” Au said.
Juliana Cohen, a professor of nutrition and director of the Center for Health Innovation, Research, and Policy at Merrimack College, told me that lunches brought from home tend to benefit from a nutritional “halo effect.” “Typically,” she said, “you have your sandwich, which is ultra-processed bread and ultra-processed deli meat. And then you have a fresh fruit or vegetable”—which may or may not be organic—“and then you have something crunchy, which is usually prepackaged, usually ultra-processed.” The MAHA Mom social-media landscape is filled with ideas for healthy bring-from-home lunches, but no amount of parental ingenuity can completely rescue families from the totalizing industrial food systems that schools are also forced to navigate.
For years, Cohen has studied consumption patterns of school-provided meals across the country, working with cafeteria staff and a team of researchers to weigh and log what kids leave behind on their lunch trays, down to the last chicken-nugget shard or mushy apple core. Cohen and other researchers have identified many subtle fixes that improve kids’ eating habits. If a cafeteria staff has the time, personnel, and cutting boards to pre-slice their apples, the apples become more enticing to the youngest kids and to kids of any age who wear braces. A salad bar is superior to individual servings of salad, because kids like autonomy wherever they can find it. A few years ago, Aimee Haag’s schools, in Minnesota, installed bulk milk dispensers in their cafeterias, “because the kids like to serve themselves and be in charge,” she told me. “It’s cold, awesome milk from nearby, consumption has gone up, we’re not throwing away the cartons, we don’t have these leaky, smelly bags of old milk.”
All of these interventions cost money—and even the most prominent advocates of improved child nutrition and farm-to-school programs may not grasp the economic realities of public-school kitchens. In “A School Lunch Revolution,” Waters explains, “My colleagues and I started this book by challenging ourselves to make menus and cook dishes that fell within the guidelines of the U.S.D.A.’s school lunch reimbursement program.” For the 2023-24 school year, she notes, the reimbursement rate was four dollars and twenty-five cents for lunch and about half that for breakfast. But those figures are a per-student average of a meal program’s entire budget: not just food but staff salaries, equipment maintenance, trays, cutlery, and napkins. In actuality, schools have about two bucks per lunch. “When you are buying locally and seasonally, food is inherently more affordable,” Waters writes. But not that affordable.
In addition to disappearing the U.S.D.A. programs, the Trump Administration will also oversee deep slashes to the SNAP food-assistance program, as laid out in the Big Beautiful Bill. The SNAP cuts will mean that fewer children will be automatically eligible to receive free breakfast and lunch at school, and fewer schools will be able to continue offering universal free-meal programs. MAHA’s stated commitment to improving child nutrition and the Administration’s antipathy toward social services are apparently incompatible. “This is where the contradiction is,” Christopher Bosso, a professor of public policy and political science at Northeastern University, said. “If you’re truly going to carry out the values of what MAHA professes, the question is how it can be done in a conservative administration that is, by its very nature, not inclined toward regulation and not inclined to spend money on government programs.”
On the first Friday morning in September, at the Academy School, in Brattleboro, Vermont, Sterling, the food-service director, showed me around the kitchen. “A stump speech of mine is that dishwashers are the most important piece of equipment,” he said. “They dictate how much scratch cooking you can do, how many dishes and trays you can clean up.” Until recently, Academy, a public school that enrolls more than three hundred elementary-age students, had a single dishwashing machine that could handle one large sheet pan at a time. “That’s someone’s whole job at the end of the day,” Sterling said.
A giant pot of macaroni and cheese was burbling on the stovetop, tended by one of three stoic kitchen staff. Parents of young children revere mac and cheese as a dinner item both mindless and magic: boil the water, pour the shells, dump in the radioactive-orange powder, and shortly it all disappears. But the degree of difficulty is much higher for cooks who have to produce hundreds or even thousands of servings per day of something that’s ideally cheap, delicious, local, and adherent to U.S.D.A. nutrition requirements—while also anticipating revamped nutrition rules that may make their jobs harder or easier, that may land tomorrow or never land at all.
