Obama budget doesn't thrill school lunch advocates - NYT blog

Obama budget doesn't thrill school lunch advocates - NYT blog


By KIM SEVERSON

President Obama’s budget proposal is getting mixed reviews among the people watching over the quality of public school lunches. Some say it’s too little to make any meaningful change, while others are relieved school food programs are getting anything when other agricultural programs have been cut.

The president is proposing an additional $1 billion a year for 10 years to be divided between school food programs and WIC, the program for low-income pregnant women, women who have recently given birth and children up to age 5.

The White House, in a statement, said that the bump is “aimed at improving program access, establishing high standards for the nutritional quality of food available in school, exploring new strategies for reducing hunger and improving children’s food choices, and strengthening program management.”

School lunch reform advocates quickly got out their calculators and started issuing statements.

Some, like Margo Wootan and others in the National Alliance for Nutrition and Activity, which comprises 300 organizations, are urging people involved in school nutrition to get behind the budget proposal and work with Congress to assure the group’s agenda for school food reform moves forward.

Others, who had hoped the federal government would increase by as much as $1 the $2.63 a day it pays most school districts for each lunch, said it was not enough money to provide healthier scratch cooking and more fresh produce to the lunch tray.

Quick calculations show that at best, the president’s plan might offer less than 20 cents more per school lunch.

“That’s what it costs me to put an apple on a plate,” said Ann Cooper, a school lunch reform advocate who runs the Boulder school lunch program and operates The Lunch Box Web site. “Increasing lunch allotment by less than an apple a day per kid? What is that? Whether its 9 cents or 20 cents, it’s way less than we need.”

On Feb. 8, after a planned speech by Tom Vilsack, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture regarding the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, Ms. Cooper’s foundation and several other organizations including Farm to School and Roots of Change will launch a campaign to try to rally a million parents to contact the Department of Agriculture and Congress to ask for $1 more per lunch. At 5.4 billion lunches a year, that’s quite a departure from whatever portion of the $1 billion a year the president is proposing.

And they are likely to run into other agricultural reform advocates who don’t like how the budget looks.

“The Obama Administration budget for food and agriculture is a mixed bag,” said Ferd Hoefner, policy director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, who notes that the budget cuts over $500 million in the short term and over $1 billion long term from farm conservation programs outlined in the 2008 Farm Bill.

On the other hand, the budget has $35 million in loans available to help finance groceries and pay for other programs that will get healthy food into urban and rural areas called food “deserts” and $429 million for research grants through the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative.