USDA official addresses new school meals
nutrition standards at Kentucky school

USDA Food and Nutrition Service Administrator Audrey Rowe recently ate lunch with students at Elkhorn Middle School in Frankfort, Ky., where she outlined the agency’s final rule on the new school meals nutrition standards for faculty and staff.
“Elkhorn Middle School is an example of success in finding creative ways to offer healthier and more nutritious meals to its students,” said Rowe. “They’re ahead of the curve in implementing the new meal standards and are proving it can be done on a tight budget.”

Rowe toured Elkhorn to see how Franklin County Public Schools participates in a local school buying cooperative to purchase healthier-choice meal items from local producers. Some of the offerings for students include whole grain sandwich bread and buns, spinach and romaine lettuce for salads, light and reduced-fat cheeses, and burgers made from soy protein.

The healthier meal requirements – the first significant change in school meals in 15 years – are a key component of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which was championed by First Lady Michelle Obama as part of her Let’s Move! campaign and signed in to law by President Obama. The final standards make the same kinds of practical changes that many parents are already encouraging at home, including:
• Ensuring students are offered both fruits and vegetables every day of the week;
• Substantially increasing offerings of whole grain-rich foods;
• Offering only fat-free or low-fat milk varieties;
• Limiting calories based on the age of children being served to ensure proper portion size; and
• Increasing the focus on reducing the amounts of saturated fat, trans fats and sodium.

USDA built the new rule around recommendations from a panel of experts convened by the Institute of Medicine — a gold standard for evidence-based health analysis. The standards were also updated with key changes from the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans — the Federal government’s benchmark for nutrition — and aimed to foster the kind of healthy changes at school that many parents are already trying to encourage at home, such as making sure that kids are offered both fruits and vegetables each day, more whole grains, and portion sizes and calorie counts designed to maintain a healthy weight.

The new standards are just one of five major components of the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act, now implemented or under development, that will work together to reform school nutrition. In addition to the updated meal standards, unprecedented improvements to come include:

• The ability to take nutrition standards beyond the lunch line: For the first time ever, foods and beverages sold in vending machines and other venues on school campuses will also contribute to a healthy diet;
• Increased funding for schools — an additional 6 cents a meal is the first real increase in 30 years — tied to strong performance in serving improved meals;
• Common-sense pricing standards for schools to ensure that revenues from non-Federal sources keep pace with the Federal commitment to healthy school meals and properly align with costs; and
• Training and technical assistance to help schools achieve and monitor compliance.

USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) oversees the administration of 15 nutrition assistance programs, including the child nutrition programs that touch the lives of one in four Americans over the course of a year. These programs work in concert to form a national safety net against hunger.

Visit www.fns.usda.gov for information about FNS and nutrition assistance
programs.

From the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service