Obama administration loses effort to make school lunches healthier

The Obama administration’s push to limit the starchy vegetables and tomato paste served to millions of children at school each day was derailed by lawmakers this week, in effect enabling school cafeterias to continue offering pizza and french fries.

For nearly a year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been crafting a proposal aimed at providing more nutritious school lunches that include an array of fruits and vegetables. But the food industry and its allies in Congress have pushed back on the details, saying the proposal would be costly, partly because of vegetable prices.

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Pizza and potatoes got caught in the cross fire.

The USDA proposal, based on recommendations from the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine, would put a one-cup-per-week limit on the amount of white potatoes and other starchy vegetables served to schoolchildren.

The proposal also would have nixed the favorable treatment granted to tomato paste. Currently, an eighth of a cup of tomato paste is credited with as much nutritional value as half a cup of vegetables and thus counts as one vegetable serving. That enables foodmakers to better market their pizzas to schools.

The argument for the special consideration given to tomato paste has been that once it’s mixed with water, as often happens in making pizza sauce, more of a vegetable is created.

The USDA wants to bring tomato paste in line with how other fruit pastes and purees are treated.

Ordinarily, these types of issues would be hashed out as the USDA gathers comments from the public while finalizing the proposal. But several lawmakers made an end run around the process. They added amendments to block the two changes — on starchy vegetables and tomato paste — to agriculture spending bills moving through the Senate and House.

Late Monday, Senate and House negotiators reconciled the differences between their two spending bills and unveiled the final version, which included language to halt the potato and tomato paste changes. The Senate and House are expected to vote on that version later this week. If it passes, the USDA will be forced to drop its plans regarding potatoes and tomato paste as it presses to finalize its broader school lunch initiative by the end of the year.

Consumer advocates said the stripped-down proposal will still be an improvement over the current nutrition guidelines. But they — and USDA officials — expressed disappointment.

“While it’s unfortunate that some members of Congress continue to put special interests ahead of the health of America’s children, USDA remains committed to practical, science-based standards for school meals,” a statement from the department said.

Margo Wootan, a director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said the decision could go down as a bigger blunder than the Reagan administration’s unsuccessful effort in the 1980s to credit ketchup as a vegetable in the school lunch program.

“Given all the concern about childhood obesity, Congress should be helping schools serve healthier foods, not hurting that effort,” Wootan said.