Fat and Politics Feed Debate : School Cafeterias Flunk Nutrition Test, Critics Say

The apple sauce had been exonerated, and inside the Los Angeles Unified School District’s food factory, the assembly lines were whipping out 160 lunch trays per minute, 85,000 meals per day.

Dispensers squirted a rich red goo of strawberries and apple sauce into the appropriate tray compartments. Workers wearing hair nets placed green salad and chalupas in other sections . Chalupas, taco shell boats filled with spiced ground beef and piled with cheese, are preferred because tacos don’t travel well in those little trays.

“Food technology,” a school nutritionist explained.

All that cheese, so rich in fat and salt, is one reason some health authorities say school cafeterias deserve a D-minus for nutrition. School meals, critics complain, are being corrupted by special-interest politics and fast-food tastes.

School nutritionists say it’s a bum rap--and, no, ketchup is not a vegetable. But, indeed, long before the Alar pesticide scare last month prompted many school districts to stop serving apple products--a ban lifted after extensive testing--debate has raged over school menus laden with items such as pizza, hot dogs, cheeseburgers and “pork choppettes.” At most schools, students can wash this stuff down with chocolate milk.

The story of school lunch is a saga of the American heartland and the American schoolyard, of America’s diet and America’s health, of the American Heart Assn. and processed American cheese.

A 1987 federal report showed that the sedentary youngsters of today generally have more weight problems than previous generations. Another study found that 25% of schoolchildren tested had unhealthy cholesterol counts. Are television and video games the only culprits?

“Our diet is so rich in fats, half of us are going to die from it,” said Dr. William Castelli, a Massachusetts heart researcher who maintains that the typical school lunch is more suitable for dogs than children. “We need to bring children into this campaign against cholesterol. When are we going to start? Shouldn’t we help them develop good habits as children?”

Politics Stirred In

Critics complain that school meals are prepped more by Washington politics and economic policies than by nutritional concerns.

“In order to take care of a few thousand dairymen, they’re loading up millions of little bodies with unnecessary fat,” said Carol Tucker Foreman, an assistant agriculture secretary in the Carter Administration and now a Washington consultant.

But school nutritionists strongly defend the meals they serve. The school lunch is nutritionally superior to the typical sack lunch prepared by parents, the nutritionists say. That was the conclusion of a 1983 study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which provides a cash reimbursement to most American schools, as well as about 25% of their foodstuffs in the form of surplus flour, cheese, grains, meat, fruits and vegetables.

This massive food distribution program reaches more than 24.2 million students. The smaller school breakfast program, targeted to low-income neighborhoods, serves 3.7 million students.

For some schoolchildren, the question is not one of a high-fiber, low-fat diet, but of food itself. Some players in the food debate believe the federal government should do more to expand food programs in poor neighborhoods, where they can be the primary source of nutrition, according to Lynn Parker of the Food Research and Action Center in Washington.

Quality Praised

The quality of government surplus foods, such as ground beef that would qualify as lean at a supermarket, is “excellent,” said Maria Balakshin, nutrition director for the California Department of Education. These foods are often funneled to processors who make prefab items such as pizza and burritos to school specifications.

Think of the job of cafeteria managers as mass parenting. Like parents, they can’t just shove tuna, fresh vegetables and nonfat milk down the kids’ throats. So they try to serve meals that, first, will be eaten and, second, will be nutritious.

Shyrl Dougherty, food service director of the Montebello Unified School District and immediate past president of the California Food Service Assn., said nutritionists have worked in recent years to reduce the fat, salt and sugar in their meals, while increasing fiber.

In many California schools, french fries now are baked instead of deep-fried, lowering the fat content. Hot dogs made of turkey are often served for the same reason. Some districts use computers to monitor fat content in their meals, and some secondary schools offer salad bars. In 1987, Los Angeles Unified implemented a plan with such aims as increasing the consumption of wheat bread over white, decreasing the consumption of chocolate milk and promoting the use of fresh fruits and vegetables.

Balakshin suggested that she is more concerned about the Alar scare than the chemical itself. Children “may be alarmed, (thinking) that it’s not good for them to eat apples,” she said. “But that’s not true. It’s very good for them to eat apples.”

Practices vary greatly from school to school and region to region. Authorities who have a national perspective say schools in health-conscious California generally have taken the lead in pushing for better nutritional standards.

School officials find themselves operating in a gray area. The National Academy of Science has recommended dietary guidelines in which fat makes up no more than 30% of an adult’s caloric intake, but there is still considerable disagreement over what levels are appropriate for children.

“We’ve asked (the federal government) and the scientific community to put together a set of dietary guidelines that apply specifically to children. Amazingly, there is none,” said Kevin Dando, a spokesman for the American School Food Service Assn.

Still, many health authorities are perplexed that USDA school lunch nutrition standards have not changed since 1946, when Congress mandated the program. The standards call for a daily requirement of a half-pint of milk, two ounces of protein and three-quarter-cup servings of two or more vegetables or fruits, as well as eight servings of bread, grain or pasta per week.

Foreman cites an example of special-interest food politics: As an official in the Carter Administration, she and many nutritionists advocated that schools shift from whole milk to low-fat milk. Over time, many schools did just that.

But in 1986, Rep. Steve Gunderson (R-Wis.) pushed through a bill requiring schools to offer whole milk as well--a move many nutritionists considered a step backward. USDA spokeswoman Maria Falcone said the agency is sometimes unfairly blamed for actions “by congressmen from states with a lot of cows.”

Dairy farmers liked Gunderson’s bill because it encouraged not merely the consumption of milk, but milk fat. A dairy farmer whose cows produce a higher percentage of milk fat gets a higher price from processors because the fat can be used for solid products such as cheese, butter, sour cream and ice cream. Because there is a surplus of milk fat, they still want to sell all the whole milk they can.

Judy Ziewacz, a lobbyist for the National Milk Producers Federation, says the debate over whole milk versus low-fat milk has been blown out proportion--a difference of three grams of fat in a half-pint serving. (According to Los Angeles school nutritionists, the difference is four grams.)

A Little Frustrated

Health crusaders have gone overboard, Ziewacz said. The American Heart Assn. has sent letters to congressmen that “make us sound like we’re drug pushers,” she said. “Like we’re standing outside the playground--’Here, kid, eat cheese and die.’ If you’re a dairy farmer, you get a little frustrated with people telling you how milk isn’t good for you.”

Another striking example of how agriculture policy influences school menus is the Dairy Termination Act of 1985. Enacted to curb the over-productive dairy industry, the law led to the slaughtering of 1.6 million cows to reduce the nation’s dairy herds.

The next year, schools were serving more hamburgers. Or probably cheeseburgers, because there was still plenty of cheese left.

Now, the law is finally withering the mountainous surplus of processed American and Cheddar cheeses that piled up in the 1980s. (Butter is still given free to schools--a fact that rankles both nutrition crusaders and margarine makers.)

The cheese surplus was so great that the Reagan Administration in the early 1980s literally gave it away, handing out truckloads in the nation’s ghettos. Some of that cheese, for better or worse, also found its way into school cafeterias.

School Lunch Act

In fact, America’s dairy policy and the school lunch have been entwined for decades. The lessons of World War II persuaded Congress to pass the National School Lunch Act in 1946 “to safeguard the health and well-being of the nation’s children.” The meals that are now widely regarded as a social program were advocated by military generals concerned that thousands of draftees had been rejected because of nutrition-related health problems.

The Reagan Administration, however, saw it as a bloated social program. Funding was cut by $1 billion, effectively slashing per-meal federal reimbursement rates. The budget-cutting finally caused an outcry when officials tried to reclassify ketchup and relish as vegetables and cookies as bread. Still unable to make ends meet, more than 2,000 schools stopped serving lunch to 2 million children, according to the Food Research and Action Center.

For many school cafeterias facing tight economic times, the solution was cheese.

The USDA had so much it decided the schools could have all they could eat, free. Normally, the department would allot a quota per district. For schools, the beauty of cheese was not merely its price, but the fact that it fulfills the meal’s protein requirements. Like a family on a tight budget, schools started serving more macaroni and cheese and less beef and chicken.

Spoiled by Cheese

Now that the supply is running low, some fear another financial crisis. “This went on for such a long period of time that schools . . . started thinking of it as an integral part of their financing,” Anita Cashman, a food services director in Utica, Mich., told the journal Education Week.

Anita King, Los Angeles Unified’s nutrition services manager, paused a moment when asked whether the cheese limits are good news or bad news. Used judiciously, she said, the virtues of cheese’s protein, calcium, vitamins and taste outweigh the evil of its fat and salt.

“All these things where people say something’s good for you or something’s bad for you--well, you have to look at the whole picture,” King said.

Sitting in her office at the district’s Newman Nutrition Center in Boyle Heights, King spoke confidently of the meals being assembled on the factory floors below. More than anything else, the pervasive influence of the fast-food industry has changed the school lunch in recent years, she said. The Los Angeles district serves about 1 million burritos a month--burritos, she hastens to add, that are nutritionally superior to those found in markets or taco joints because they are made to district specifications.

In all, the Newman food factory makes 25,000 breakfasts and 60,000 lunches per day. They are trucked to scores of schools that lack full kitchen facilities. Even so, they represent but a fraction of Los Angeles Unified’s massive operation, which serves 550,000 meals per day.

Minding the Store

At the Fletcher Drive Elementary School in the Glassell Park area, cafeteria manager Sigrid Sapone and her staff serve about 350 breakfasts and 650 lunches daily. It’s not a wealthy neighborhood and school officials say a child sometimes may try to buy five cartons of milk at the subsidized price and sneak four home to mom. This violates the law.

“They’re very serious about that. . . . You have to be an old Scrooge sometimes,” Principal Chris Christianson said with a sigh.

When it comes to school lunches, principals have a lot of clout, and Christianson has his own set of rules. Chocolate milk, for example, is forbidden. The school district allows it as kind of a sweet bribe to get children the nutrients milk provides. But Christianson believes it “makes them hyper” and he is annoyed “by this thing where we have to cater to everybody’s whims.”

Another rule of his: No raisins.

“They don’t eat them,” Christianson explained. “They throw them. They get on the ground, you step on them and they get squished into the pavement. The custodian hates them.”