I want to start by saying, I’m all for this. I run a company of chefs trying to help school food programs around the country move away from ultra-processed foods and cook more from scratch. This is my life. I wholeheartedly believe we should be doing everything we can to ensure that the meals we are serving students are as thoughtfully prepared, delicious, and nutritious as possible.
That said, what looks like a positive change is actually quite complicated. There are a lot of rules already in place around school meals—and those rules, even when made with the best of intentions, have not always led to the most positive outcomes. A UPF ban might help students eat better, but only if schools, and school kitchen staff, get the support they need to succeed with the changes.
“Will the list of banned UPF become so exhaustive that school food programs, already dealing with nutritional guidelines, become completely unable to prepare meals that students will want to eat every day?”
Let me give you an example of how hard it is for schools to handle shifts in guidelines—and explain why eliminating UPFs may not be as straightforward as it sounds.
When the National School Lunch Program Guidelines went into effect about a decade ago, it mandated many changes that, on paper, looked much better for kids: more fruits and vegetables, more whole grains, less sodium and saturated fat.
While some studies claimed that school diets improved, most people who experienced the change would argue that the meals also became less appetizing as school programs struggled to meet the nutritional guidelines within their allotted budgets. Kitchen workers saw many meals going into the trash (although USDA’s biggest study on the changes found while kids threw out vegetables more than any other foods, the level of waste was generally unchanged after the standards were implemented).
Also, from-scratch cooking became more difficult, because it got too complicated for schools to comply with the new rules. Before the guidelines, many school kitchen staff used to bake and cook proteins themselves. Now they had to follow intimidating guidelines, tracking the nutrition content of every dish and assessing levels of sodium, saturated fats, calories, types of vegetables, and much more. Then schools had to ensure that the rules were being followed, creating an extra administrative burden.
Most schools were already offering some prepackaged ultra-processed foods—a shift that had been happening for decades—but now many switched their operational models to bring in significantly more of those items. It was easier for giant food manufacturers to adapt to the new nutritional guidelines than it was for under-resourced school food programs to do so.
Some schools used the guidelines as a launchpad to move toward more scratch cooking, but many transitioned away from it, selling off their kitchen equipment. When new schools were built, their kitchen spaces were designed for heating up pre-packaged items rather than cooking meals. Slowly but surely, kitchen infrastructure across the country began to disappear. Fewer kitchen staff were needed, and now it is common to see school kitchen labor models that feature only one or two full-time positions, with the rest being parttime staff who work only during meals, to serve food.
Eliminating UPFs from school food would require a massive adjustment within programs as they figure out how to reconfigure menus, and kitchens and staffing too.
