The latest assault on hungry people from the Trump administration attacks school lunches. All those kids whose families can't provide nutritious meals at home any more because they no longer qualify for nutrition assistance can be fed with total garbage at school.
In what looks like a completely gratuitous insult to Michelle Obama, the nutrition regulations she worked to get established for school meal programs are being tossed, so schools can cut the amount of fruit and vegetables that are now required to be provided and replace them with pastries, pizza, burgers, and fries. Potatoes will be an option for schools to use as their daily vegetable offering for lunches. This follows other program changes made last year that weaken the nutrition standards for school means for grains, dairy, and sodium to make meals saltier, fattier, and more processed. Those changes include potatoes being added as a replacement "fruit" in weekly breakfast menus.
Colin Schwartz, deputy director of legislative affairs for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told The Washington Post that these proposed rules "would create a huge loophole in school nutrition guidelines, paving the way for children to choose pizza, burgers, french fries and other foods high in calories, saturated fat, or sodium in place of balanced school meals every day." The National Potato Council chief executive Kam Quarles countered "potatoes are a nutrient dense vegetable, which contain more potassium than a banana and 30 percent of the daily value of vitamin C along with 3 grams of protein, fiber, and carbohydrates that school children need to perform their best at school." Never mind that they're also the perfect vehicle for turning into greasy, over-salted fries that are saturated with sweetened ketchup (which is well on its way to becoming a vegetable again, I'm sure).
Meanwhile, low-income children who qualify for free or reduced-price school meals are more likely to be obese and to get the bulk of their daily calories at school. The reality, from a study actually just published by the USDA last year following the changes made under Obama is that the "updated nutrition standards for school meals have had a positive and significant influence on nutritional quality." It also found that participation in meal programs increased in schools with the highest standards and food waste remained basically the same. So Trumpian arguments that kids were throwing out the good-for-them food are bogus.
But, hey, they're showing those Obamas, which seems to be the only point.