Why is it so hard to make healthy school lunches?
Students in the Tahoe Truckee Unified School District in California eat locally sourced fruits and vegetables, homemade Mexican pozole, and fresh tuna dishes. The district’s food is free of high fructose corn syrup, artificial dyes, and additives. Most of it is cooked from scratch by a full-time kitchen staff, and like about 29% of other school districts nationwide, everyone eats for free.
In other words, the district’s meals are among the best in the United States and a great example of how to improve public school lunch programs. They also represent exactly the kind of healthy, nutritious food that U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his “Make America Healthy Again” campaign seek to provide across the country. In May, Kennedy promised “radical” changes to school lunch programs, which he called “poison” because of their high levels of ultra-processed foods.
But this success won’t be easy to replicate. The Tahoe Truckee District has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars annually since switching to “cooking from scratch” more than a decade ago, preparing food in district kitchens instead of purchasing and heating takeout. Last year, the district spent about $400,000 on its school meal program with help from the district’s general fund, an unrealistic amount for most other districts.
“Our food service program is generally non-profitable,” said Todd Rivera, assistant superintendent and business manager for the district. “Before cooking from scratch, the cost was largely nominal, but as we increased staffing and expanded the program, we started to see an increase in costs.”
School meals have changed since at least 2010—mostly for the better—when the Obama administration’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act was enacted to improve the nutritional quality of school meals and increase children’s access to healthy food. When the law’s nutrition standards took effect in 2012, they limited calories, reduced sodium and saturated fat, and increased the amount of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains required in school meals.
Many of these standards declined during the first Trump administration, even as Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue pledged to “make school lunches great again.” While many schools have added more vegetables and whole grains since 2012, nutrition experts and advocates are aiming for a much higher standard. They want more school districts to move to cooking from scratch, as the Tahoe-Truckabee School District has done, preparing school breakfasts and lunches in their own kitchens with the help of their staff.
The Challenges of Cooking From Scratch
Transitioning to cooking from scratch is difficult, expensive, and perhaps impossible for some school districts without making drastic changes. Some schools, especially those in older buildings, don’t have kitchens, making cooking from scratch unfeasible. Cooking from scratch also requires staff trained to work in a large kitchen.
Making the necessary improvements to build a proper kitchen—or even providing enough electricity or power to add appliances—is extremely expensive.
“I’ve visited school districts where I’ve asked, ‘Why don’t you get a walk-in freezer?’ and they’ve said, ‘I don’t have the electrical infrastructure to run a walk-in freezer,'” says Donna Martin, a registered dietitian who has worked in school nutrition for over 30 years, most recently in Burke County Public Schools in rural Georgia.
Tahoe Truckee School began improving its lunch program in 2006, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) required school districts participating in the National School Lunch Program to develop a healthy policy that included community input. At the time, heat and serve was the norm, says Kat Soltanmurad, the current director of food and nutrition services at the school.
A group of concerned parents began pushing the school district to serve fewer processed foods, and by the time Soltanmurad joined in 2012, she was tasked with trying to transition to cooking from scratch. Soltanmurad began testing recipes three days a week with input from parents. For example, one parent suggested a recipe for a chocolate beetroot cake that the school still serves today.
Soltanmurad says one of the most challenging steps was building a staff and finding people with culinary experience. Because the school district wasn’t hiring full-time workers at the time, it struggled to compete with restaurants, which typically offer higher salaries. “We’re competing with all the other jobs that don’t require three hours a day,” she says. The district has gradually transitioned to full-time positions that come with benefits and wages competitive with the private sector.
More schools are now turning to cooking from scratch, but the hiring costs and facility requirements are difficult for some to overcome. Prices for equipment like food warmers and refrigerators have skyrocketed since the pandemic; Sultan Murad says she recently received an $11,000 quote for a piece of equipment that cost only $2,500 in 2019.
Instead of dealing with all this hassle, it’s much easier for schools to source pre-cooked food like chicken nuggets and heat them up. “This shift to cooking from scratch is a huge challenge for districts, because you’re facing an unprepared sector,” Sultan Murad adds.
How do schools get the food they cook?
Another reason schools struggle to prepare healthy lunches is that they get some of the food from the same source. School districts receive a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They can then purchase whole foods, such as ground beef and canned vegetables, from the USDA using this money and cook them in their kitchens, or transfer these whole foods from the USDA to companies that process them into meals. Even Tahoe Truckee still sends some of its chicken to a processor to produce mandarin orange chicken.
USDA purchasing rules sometimes make it difficult for schools to obtain fresh food from local sources, says Katie Wilson, executive director of the Urban School Food Alliance, which represents 19 of the nation’s largest school districts. “The purchasing rules are what’s holding us back,” she says.
Her organization is working to change the purchasing process to enable schools to get more local food. She recently launched a pilot program that pressured food providers to include antibiotic-free chicken on the USDA’s procurement list.
Wilson says food manufacturers must meet the requirements of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act to qualify, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the food is healthy. “We’re more focused on meeting the requirements than on food quality, and that’s where we need to change things,” she says. For example, every child must have a fruit or vegetable with their meal, which creates waste.
Wilson says that cleaning up food from USDA allocations is one way to help districts that can’t afford to cook from scratch. Some districts are instead turning to “quick cooking from scratch,” which involves cooking some of the food in the district and combining it with healthy, processed USDA foods. Many find it much easier to use the procurement process because the specific nutritional value of food from the industry is pre-calculated to meet USDA requirements. Otherwise, there’s a lot of work involved in ensuring meals meet the requirements.
Key Federal Obstacles to Change
Wilson, who served as deputy undersecretary for food, nutrition, and consumer services at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the Obama administration, says the Hunger-Free Kids Act has helped many school districts improve their performance. This is because it forced school districts, parents, and teachers to focus more closely on the nutritional value of their offerings.
“School meals have always been very good,” Wilson adds. “In fact, many school districts long predated the Hunger-Free Kids movement and removed certain ingredients from their products.”
However, federal changes since 2012 have weakened some of the Hunger-Free Kids Act’s standards. Megan Maroney, campaign director for federal child nutrition programs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, says the first Trump administration delayed implementation of science-based nutrition standards that would have reduced sodium and sugar in school meals. The Biden administration has reinstated some of those standards, but they are not as stringent as the original law. “There’s been a lot of discussion about the role of the state, too many regulations, and giving power back to local communities,” Maroney says. School districts will be required to restrict added sugars in breakfast and lunch by the 2027-2028 school year.
The food industry will have to reformulate some of its products to meet these standards, but for school districts to meet these standards without relying on industry, they will have to focus more on cooking from scratch—an increasingly expensive option.
This is partly due to inflation; the cost of food, equipment, and labor is constantly rising. It’s also because federal reimbursement rates for school lunches haven’t kept pace with inflation. Currently, the federal government reimburses schools just over $4 per student. Restaurants will suffer if diners pay that little for food.
“Because of reimbursement rates, most schools can’t compete with restaurant or retail food stores that start at $20 an hour,” says Bettina Applewhite, a registered dietitian who consults with school districts to help them transition to cooking from scratch.
The MAHA and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. movement has made little progress in changing school lunches so far, in part because the USDA, not the Department of Health and Human Services, administers school meals. But if the government really wants to change school lunches, it should probably start with the reimbursement rate, Maroney says.
“Eliminating ultra-processed foods will cost a lot of money,” she adds. “To do that, you need significant investments in reimbursement rates, training, culinary technical assistance, and funding.”
Sultanmurad, of Tahoe Truckee, says the investment is worth it. She says the district could just serve a lot of pizza and keep its kids happy, but that won’t be good for their health or nutrition education. Now, they learn how to nourish their bodies and eat healthy, skills they will carry with them after they graduate to become healthy adults.
