NYT: How the Food Industry Eats Your Kid's Lunch

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*/How the Food Industry Eats Your Kid's Lunch/*

By LUCY KOMISAR

Published: December 3, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/opinion/sunday/school-lunches-and-the-food-ind\

ustry.html

An increasingly cozy alliance between companies that manufacture

processed foods and companies that serve the meals is making students

--- a captive market --- fat and sick while pulling in hundreds of

millions of dollars in profits. At a time of fiscal austerity, these

companies are seducing school administrators with promises to cut costs

through privatization. Parents who want healthier meals, meanwhile, are

outgunned.

Each day, 32 million children in the United States get lunch at schools

that participate in the National School Lunch Program, which uses

agricultural surplus to feed children. About 21 million of these

students eat free or reduced-price meals, a number that has surged since

the recession. The program, which also provides breakfast, costs $13.3

billion a year.

Sadly, it is being mismanaged and exploited. About a quarter of the

school nutrition program has been privatized, much of it outsourced to

food service management giants like Aramark, based in Philadelphia;

Sodexo, based in France; and the Chartwells division of the Compass

Group, based in Britain. They work in tandem with food manufacturers

like the chicken producers Tyson and Pilgrim's, all of which profit when

good food is turned to bad.

Here's one way it works. The Agriculture Department pays about $1

billion a year for commodities like fresh apples and sweet potatoes,

chickens and turkeys. Schools get the food free; some cook it on site,

but more and more pay processors to turn these healthy ingredients into

fried chicken nuggets, fruit pastries, pizza and the like. Some $445

million worth of commodities are sent for processing each year, a nearly

50 percent increase since 2006.

The Agriculture Department doesn't track spending to process the food,

but school authorities do. 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.

The money is ill spent. The Center for Science in the Public Interest

<mailto:http://www.cspinet.org/new/pdf/commodities_fact_sheet.pdf> has

warned that sending food to be processed often means lower nutritional

value and noted that " many schools continue to exceed the standards for

fat, saturated fat and sodium. " A 2008 study by the Wood

Foundation <http://rwjf.org/pr/product.jsp?id=34381> found that by the

time many healthier commodities reach students, " they have about the

same nutritional value as junk foods. " ....

Children pay the price. Dr. Zullo found that privately managed school

cafeterias offered meals that were higher in sugar and fats and made

unhealthy snack items --- soda, cookies, potato chips --- more readily

available. The companies were also less likely to use reduced-sugar

recipes. Hugle, a retired school principal in Three Rivers, Ore.,

told me that when her district switched to Sodexo, " the savings were

paltry. " She added, " You pay a little less and your kids get strawberry

milk, frozen French fries and artificial shortening. " ....