How School Lunch Became the Latest Political Battleground,2014

How School Lunch Became the Latest Political Battleground
The new york time

Sarah Anne Ward for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop Stylist: Maeve Sheridan.
The lunch ladies loved Marshall Matz. For more than 30 years, he worked the halls and back rooms of Washington for the 55,000 dues-paying members of the School Nutrition Association, the men and still mostly women who run America’s school-lunch programs. They weren’t his firm’s biggest clients — that would have been companies like General Mills or Kraft — but Matz, wry and impish even in his late 60s, lavished the lunch ladies with the kind of respect they didn’t always get in school cafeterias. Many of the association’s members considered him a dear colleague. “He would tell everybody: ‘You are a much better lobbyist than I am. You are how we get things done,’ ” said Dorothy Caldwell, who served a term as the association’s president in the early 1990s. “And people liked that.”

Matz often told the lunch ladies they were front-line warriors in the battle for better eating, and they liked that too. Every school day, they dished out more than 30 million lunches, all of which were subsidized by taxpayers. They also served about 13 million subsidized breakfasts. Many students got more than half their daily calories at school. Few workers, inside the government or out, did more to shape the health of children.

So when Michelle Obama started Let’s Move!, her campaign against child obesity, in 2010, the members of the School Nutrition Association were her natural allies. The average weight of the American child had been climbing at an alarming rate since the 1980s, and now one in three American kids was obese or overweight. One recent study found that by 2030 more than half the adult population would be dangerously overweight, leading to millions of cases of diabetes, stroke and heart disease. Researchers at the Institute of Medicine, meanwhile, were finishing new recommendations to bring school meals into compliance with national dietary guidelines, and Congress was about to reauthorize the school-lunch program. This gave the White House an opening. If there was a war to fight against childhood obesity, then school cafeterias would be a perfect place to wage it.
That year, the Obama administration got behind the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, an ambitious bill that would impose strict new nutrition standards on all food sold in public schools. A generation raised on Lunchables and Pizza Hut, the bill’s authors believed, could learn to love whole-wheat pasta and roasted cauliflower. Kids would be more energetic, better able to focus in class and above all less likely to be obese. But to pass the bill, the White House needed to enlist not only Democrats and Republicans in Congress but also a host of overlapping and competing interest groups: the manufacturers who supplied food to schools, the nutrition experts who wanted it to be more healthful and the lunch ladies who would have to get children to eat it.

Few people understood how to accomplish those trade-offs better than Marshall Matz, in part because he embodied them. He spent his early career advising Senator George McGovern, a Democrat who led efforts in the 1970s and 1980s to defend and expand federal nutrition programs. Matz worked for major food interests, but he still considered himself a nutrition advocate. He advised the Obama campaign on agricultural issues and even helped one of the School Nutrition Association’s former presidents get a post in the new administration. He prized his access to the White House but believed deeply, his friends in Washington told me, that bipartisanship in Congress was what allowed the school-lunch program to endure.
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To Matz, it seemed clear that a bargain could be struck. He advised the lunch ladies — a term that almost nobody in Washington uses in public and almost everyone uses in private — to support the legislation, even though it did not provide as much money as they wanted. Under pressure to show concern about child obesity, food companies backed it, too: With $4.5 billion in new funding over the next 10 years, the bill did provide plenty of new business, and their lobbyists could always massage the details later. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act became law in 2010, with overwhelming support in Congress.

But as the government began turning the broad guidelines into specific rules — specific rules with specific consequences for specific players — life became more difficult. What began as a war on obesity turned into war among onetime allies. Republicans now attack the new rules as a nanny-state intrusion by the finger-wagging first lady. Food companies, arguing that the new standards are too severe, have spent millions of dollars lobbying to slow or change them. Some students have voted with their forks, refusing to eat meals they say taste terrible.

Last summer, the School Nutrition Association dumped Matz. In the small world of Washington food lobbyists, the decision provoked unending gossip and speculation. Matz said little about the sudden turn, even to friends. “I was not happy,” Dorothy Caldwell recalled. Several longtime members pressed the association’s professional staff for more information with little luck, and the answer soon became clear to them: The lunch ladies were taking sides, too.

Today the School Nutrition Association is Washington’s loudest and most public critic of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. Even as they claim to support the act, the lunch ladies have become the shock troops in a sometimes absurdly complex battle to roll back the Obama’s administration’s anti-obesity agenda. Some Democrats in Congress fear that if Republicans win control of the Senate this fall, Obama’s reform will be gutted within a year — and with it, the government’s single-best weapon against childhood obesity. “It’s a war of attrition at this point,” one congressional aide told me. “Right now we’re in that phase where you’re fighting a rear-guard action to hold on to as much territory as you can.”

The federal school-lunch program has always invited martial metaphors, and not without reason: It was the U.S. military that first advanced the national-security implications of a healthful lunch. In the spring of 1945, at the dawn of the Cold War, Gen. Lewis B. Hershey, a former school principal who joined the armed forces before World War I, went in front of the House Agriculture Committee to deliver a stern warning. Hershey headed the Selective Service System — the draft — and he told the lawmakers that as many as 40 percent of rejected draftees had been turned away owing to poor diets. “Whether we are going to have war or not, I do think that we have got to have health if we are going to survive,” he testified.
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Within a year, a majority of lawmakers from both parties had voted for the National School Lunch Act. The act declared it “the policy of Congress, as a measure of national security, to safeguard the health and well-being of the nation’s children.” In the way of many programs inspired by the Department of Defense, the School Lunch Program grew in large part because it offered something to everyone. Over the coming decades, the Department of Agriculture would send billions of dollars to states and school districts to help cover the costs of school meals and spend billions more to purchase surplus farm products for the schools. The program was expanded significantly under Richard Nixon, who sought to ensure that poor children got their school lunches free, and by the mid-1970s it fed 25 million kids.

Jimmy Carter made minor cuts to school-lunch subsidies in his last year in office, and Ronald Reagan, arguing that government shouldn’t subsidize meals for children who could afford to pay, made even deeper cuts. His administration also modified the dietary requirements: Among other changes, some condiments could be credited as vegetables. Opponents of the cuts quickly pointed out that, under the regulations, even ketchup could qualify — an observation that led to considerable derision in the press.

The condiment rule did not last, nor did Reagan’s cuts. But they did help accelerate a major transformation in how schools provided food. Most districts require food service to earn enough revenue to cover expenses, including labor. The average school-nutrition director is not unlike the chief executive of a medium-size catering business, but with a school for a landlord and a menu regulated by the government. With lower subsidies, the lunch ladies needed cheaper calories, and they turned to the increasingly efficient processed-food industry to find them. School cafeterias also began to rely more on revenue from so-called competitive foods — snacks and lunches that are not regulated by federal guidelines and “compete” with the regular school lunch on cafeteria à la carte lines. Some districts even struck deals with McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and other fast-food chains to sell versions of their commercial products directly to school kitchens.

The kids loved it — and so, more or less, did the lunch ladies. The food industry made their programs hum, made it possible to serve hundreds or thousands of meals, often without working kitchens, in lunch periods as short as 25 minutes. Big food companies became partners in every way: Most held associate memberships in the School Nutrition Association and helped finance it with industry advertising and membership fees.

Nutritionists were less happy with the status quo. Instead of exposing children to a variety of foods, school lunches tended to indulge their cravings. There were plenty of white rolls and French fries but not many leafy dark greens or whole grains. Even after many school-food companies made strides in reducing fat and salt in their products, the average school lunch in 2009 still contained 1,375 milligrams of sodium, almost twice as much as federal dietary guidelines recommend for a single meal. Worst of all, competitive foods — most often desserts, salty snacks and pizza — were adding an extra 277 calories a day to the diets of the children who bought them.
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In one sense, the school-lunch program was all too successful. No longer was the military having trouble finding well-fed young American men and women. By 2009, according to the Department of Defense, more recruits were being turned away for obesity than for any other medical reason. The recruits, as a letter signed by dozens of retired generals and admirals put it, were “too fat to fight.”

The first shot in the Cafeteria Wars was fired in January 2011. That was when, under the terms of the new law, a team of dietitians, economists and nutritionists at the Department of Agriculture released the revised meal pattern for school breakfasts and lunches. The rules outlined just what schools — and, by extension, their suppliers — would have to do to continue receiving government subsidies. Both groups were struck by just how aggressive the new rules were. Within a few years, schools would need to switch all of their breads and pastas to whole-grain varieties. Within a decade, the average salt content of a high-school lunch would have to be cut by roughly half. When the school year began in fall 2012, lunches would have to offer twice as many fruits and vegetables, and students would be required to take at least half of them. At the same time, plates had to have fewer “starchy vegetables,” obvious code words for French fries.

The starchy-vegetable lobby was quick to take offense. “We didn’t find favor with efforts to paint certain vegetables as, for unspecified reasons, less healthy than other vegetables,” was how Kraig R. Naasz, the head of the American Frozen Food Institute, which represents about 500 makers of frozen foods and vegetables, explained it. The potato and frozen-food lobbies mobilized, orchestrating waves of letters from lawmakers to Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, that extolled the potato’s low cost and high potassium content. When Vilsack went before the Senate to discuss his budget request for the year, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a state that is one of the country’s largest producers of spuds, marched into the hearing holding a potato in one hand and a head of iceberg lettuce — no one’s idea of a nutrient-dense vegetable — in the other. “My question, Mr. Secretary,” Collins asked, “is: What does the department have against potatoes?”

This, meanwhile, was a minor skirmish compared with the battle over pizza sauce. Pizza is one of the school-food companies’ most popular products; schools purchase more than $450 million worth every year. Under the old rules, companies could market pizza slices as a product combining grains, protein and a full serving of vegetables. This was possible thanks to a longstanding loophole: Rather than count the two tablespoons of tomato paste on a serving of pizza as two tablespoons of tomato paste, they could count it as eight tablespoons of tomatoes, the theory being that at some point before being processed, the two tablespoons had existed in the form of several whole tomatoes.
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The new rule counted two tablespoons of tomato paste as two tablespoons of tomato paste, no more — a change that got the full attention of the Schwan Food Company, a privately held frozen-food behemoth based in Minnesota, with 14,000 employees and roughly $3 billion in annual sales. Schwan manufactures a reported 70 percent of all pizza sold in American schools. Publicly, Schwan emphasized its ahead-of-the-curve efforts to create more healthful slices meeting the new requirements, with whole-grain crusts and low-fat cheese. Less publicly, in comments to the U.S.D.A., the company laid out a series of objections, ranging from the sentimental to the scientific. “Many of the products made with tomato paste appeal to children and help sustain participation in the school-meal program,” the company warned, while also maintaining that the final sodium reductions would be “impossible to achieve without significant technological advances.” (The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, among others, agreed with the salt assessment.) Moreover, if sodium were aggressively reduced in school lunches without corresponding changes in home and restaurant meals, Schwan suggested, students would find their school lunches bland and tasteless.

The White House wanted Vilsack to hold firm. They viewed objections to the tomato rule as classic special-interest pleading. The lunch ladies, meanwhile, had filed 11 pages of comments asking for a delay or reconsideration of many of the new rules, and officially they agreed with Schwan about the tomato paste. Marshall Matz found himself, not for the last time, in the middle. The administration, particularly the agriculture secretary, was annoyed by the comments — hadn’t the lunch ladies endorsed the bill? — and Matz counseled caution. But when the lunch ladies’ president sent a letter to the White House pledging to work closely with Vilsack, many in the industry were furious. They viewed it as an apology, perhaps engineered by Matz in an effort to soothe the administration’s ruffled feathers. Some felt that Matz was letting his personal beliefs, and desire to stay close to the White House, override the proper interests of the association. Gary Vonck, a senior executive at one of the country’s largest brokerages for school-lunch products and longtime industry adviser to the School Nutrition Association, told me that “there were a lot of times when people disagreed with him.”

In food circles, OFW Law, the boutique law and lobbying firm where Matz is a partner, is known for its bipartisan roster of lobbyists and its long list of food-industry clients, some with competing interests on legislative or regulatory matters. Matz was not only lobbying for the lunch ladies, who wanted to abolish the mandatory fruit-and-vegetable requirement, but he also was general counsel to the fresh-produce trade association, which loved the requirement. Even allies told me Matz could be vague about which client he was representing in any given meeting. Vonck said, “I think Marshall maybe misunderstood what his role was as it relates to S.N.A.”
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That summer, more than a dozen food companies, including Schwan and one of its bigger rivals, ConAgra, recruited their own lunch ladies. They enlisted dozens of school-nutrition directors to join a new group, which they called the Coalition for Sustainable School Meals Programs. To run the new group, they hired a former S.N.A. official named Barry Sackin.

The government wanted children to eat less pizza, Sackin told me not long ago. “How do you go after the pizza companies without attacking them?” he asked. “You limit the tomato sauce,” he said, in the manner of a man describing an aggression that would not stand. In May, Sackin flew to Washington to testify before the House education committee, which oversees the school-foods program. The rules would drive up lunch prices, he said. And to what end? School meals were already the most healthful meals that many children ate. The long-term sodium reductions would be expensive, and children wouldn’t necessarily eat the lower-salt food.

Sackin and the coalition reasoned that if the U.S.D.A. wouldn’t bend, Congress could force it to. Republican lawmakers, who now controlled the House, were beginning to view the Obama-led nutrition effort as a new and pernicious form of big government. (Representative Robert Aderholt, a genteel Alabama Republican who is now chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that controls Vilsack’s funding, told me, “The overall concept of Washington trying to get into the business of trying to regulate on a local level, on a state level — I fundamentally think that’s not the best approach.”) And agribusiness had plenty of allies in both parties. At a hearing later that summer, Representative Collin Peterson, a centrist Democrat from Minnesota whose district is home to Schwan’s headquarters, demanded that a U.S.D.A. official explain the scientific basis for the tomato rule. If the agency didn’t back down, Peterson threatened, he would insert a rider into their budget, blocking implementation. Even Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a popular Democrat on the agriculture committee and a leading supporter of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, became involved. In June, she sent a letter to Vilsack raising questions about the sodium and tomato standards. Parts of it matched Schwan’s earlier comments word for word. Klobuchar’s intervention helped persuade other Democrats, along with the administration, that the tomato rule was a lost cause. In November, when lawmakers began developing a final budget deal with Obama, the language included a rider to block implementation of the tomato and the potato rules.

One last battle remained. The Reagan administration had become a laughingstock years before when it appeared to propose allowing schools to count ketchup as a vegetable. Now, as the vote approached, Margo Wootan, the director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, began peddling an irresistible talking point: Congress, she said, was proposing to classify pizza as a vegetable.
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The phrase made its way into an Associated Press article and then into newspapers around the country. It came too late to beat the potato-and-tomato lobby, but when lawmakers finally approved the budget with the rider in mid-November, editorial pages and late-night comics were merciless. That evening, after the vote, when Wootan and Naasz appeared on “NBC Nightly News,” the correspondent openly mocked Congress for siding with pizza makers. (Some in Congress may have begun having second thoughts as well. When I spoke to Klobuchar recently, she seemed to regret sending the letter to Vilsack. “I did not want the rule changed legislatively,” Klobuchar said. Her primary concern at the time was the rule’s impact on Minnesota’s farmers, who had been hard hit in the recession. But, she said, “I would not send a letter like this again or take this position again.”)

Kraig Naasz, the frozen-food advocate, was also impressed. “I’m supposed to explain in seven to 10 seconds how many ounces of tomato paste should get credited when it comes as a paste,” Naasz told me. “And Margo gets to say, ‘Congress thinks pizza is a vegetable.’ ” Shortly after the vote, Naasz ran into Wootan at a nutrition meeting. “Good sound bite,” he told her.

The rest of the law took effect in July 2012, as school cafeterias around the country were preparing for the new school year. After two years of debate, the lunch ladies were about to find out what their own customers thought. Some School Nutrition Association members — those who had chosen to get a head start on the new calorie and vegetable requirements — were optimistic. One cheery news release came from Kansas City. “Few, if any, students in the Hickman Mills C-1 will even notice” the new rules, a school district there announced. “And that’s a good thing!”

But when school started, many students did notice. Within weeks, social media filled with photos of skimpy meals and sullen teenagers, some using the hashtag #ThanksMichelleObama and #BrownBagginIt. In Wisconsin and New Jersey, students staged lunchroom strikes. At Wallace County High School in Kansas, students filmed a four-minute parody video called “We Are Hungry,” set to the tune of the popular song “We Are Young,” that has been viewed more than 1.4 million times. The students made no special efforts to promote the video, says Linda O’Connor, the English teacher at Wallace who wrote the lyrics, but “before we knew it, we saw our story as the top story of Drudge Report.”

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