A Lot On Their Plates
Research looks at how to make school nutrition healthier, more cost-effective
By Becky Beyers
Sept. 24: Teriyaki chicken and edamame; fresh broccoli; banana; fresh veggies; salad greens; whole-wheat French bread.
Sound like a typical school-lunch menu? It’s what St. Paul School District students ate that day, and is the kind of lunch that nutritionists and economists say more students should be eating nationwide every day.
But many of them don’t, for a variety of reasons. CFANS scientists are part of several efforts to figure out what the barriers are to providing good food on school lunch trays, how to overcome those barriers and how to duplicate school nutrition program successes on a larger scale.
Many factors have brought school lunches to researchers’ attention this year:
- The obesity epidemic is increasingly affecting children; more than a third of American kids are now overweight or obese. Because so many of them eat five to 10 meals (lunch and breakfast) a week at school, school lunches are a prime opportunity to instill healthy eating habits.
- This fall, the federal Child Nutrition Act is up for renewal. Every five years, the government sets school-nutrition policy, including reimbursement rates and dietary guidelines.
- Tough economic times mean more students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches at school; that means school nutrition directors must stretch their limited funds even further. A 2008 U.S. Department of Agriculture study found that federal funds covered only 82 percent of schools’ lunch costs.
Economics of eating at school
School lunches overall have dramatically improved in the last 15 years or so, says Ben Senauer, professor in the Department of Applied Economics. “Is there still room for improvement? Yes,” he says. “Does improvement require more funding? Yes.”
Senauer studies how school lunches are funded, including a current project that looks at whether funding is adequate to meet nutritional guidelines. “People used to ask, ‘why are economists studying this?’ Well, the answer is that the school lunch program is driven by economics. Budgets drive everything they do.”