The High Cost of the Free School Lunch : Nutrition: A consumer group charges there’s too much fat in federally subsidized lunches.

It’s said there is no such thing as a free lunch, but 10.3 million needy school children get one anyway, thanks to the federal government.

The problem is that consumer groups, nutrition experts and assorted legislators don’t think that the lunch the kids get is free enough--free of enough fat, salt and sugar, to be exact.

The consumer group Public Voice for Food and Health Policy has accused the school-lunch program of providing far too many fat-laden meals to the 24 million elementary and high-school students who eat school lunches.

Public Voice’s 1990 survey of 163 middle school lunchrooms, as well as data gathered this year, show that children are getting nearly 40% of their calories from fat, despite recommendations from most health organizations that fat should provide no more than 30%.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, recently chimed in with a call for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to establish nutritional guidelines for children, and to provide information about the nutritional composition of school lunches.

“Kids are always complaining about the mystery meat they have to eat; we should tell them what’s in it,” Leahy says.

Even U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Edward Madigan admitted recently that school lunches can be too high in fat due to lack of training on the part of cafeteria cooks.

“I’ve visited schools where they tell me that what they’re making has only 30% fat, but I know by looking at it that it’s closer to 60%,” Madigan said following a recent program celebrating National School Lunch Week.

On the other hand, Sheila Terry, head of Maryland’s school-lunch program, warns that all the hysteria over low-fat eating has produced “some menus without enough calories for children’s proper development.”

Terry contends that some of the suggested low-fat lunches, with such items as skinless chicken and steamed vegetables, may be fine for adults who are dieting, but they fail to meet the Recommended Daily Allowance for one-third of a child’s daily calories.

This is particularly important for the 12 million children who, because of their families’ low incomes, receive free or discounted lunches.

She also cautions that kids “have to have food they want to eat,” or all this highly touted nutrition will remain on the plate rather than in their stomachs.

To show how children can have their cake and eat healthfully, too, the USDA recently hosted a tasting at the Cannon House Office Building of some of the new low-fat, low-salt recipes being tried in school-lunch programs across the country.

Participants, including Madigan, nibbled seafood gumbo, chicken tacos, turkey chili with beans, sweet potato spice bars, apple-cinnamon muffins and lasagna with low-fat ground beef.

Afterward Madigan said the selection was much better than the “mush” he was served when he was a schoolboy. He admitted, though, that his favorites were “all the sweet ones,” with his least favorite a raspberry soup from Vermont. “But don’t tell Sen. Leahy,” he added.

New recipes are only half the story, however. Individual school-meal programs have to balance government and consumer pressure for more healthful meals with the equally compelling reality of bare-bones budgets, undertrained staff and declining government-surplus commodities.

Some of these problems could be solved with more federally funded nutrition training for food-service workers, says Madigan.

Staffers who don’t know how to prepare appetizing low-fat, low-salt meals cannot be expected to produce menus that meet recommended dietary guidelines. And without federal assistance, many financially strapped school districts are unable to train their workers.

Congress has earmarked a 50% increase--to $15 million--for nutrition training in 1993, including new videos and menu plans for the 92,000 schools participating in the school-lunch program. “By 1994,” Madigan says, “every food-service worker will be receiving proper training.”

Although $15 million will be an improvement, it is still far from the $25 million budget the federal Nutrition Education Training Program enjoyed 10 years ago. President Reagan slashed that to $5 million in 1981, the same year his administration also tried to redefine ketchup as a vegetable.

Consumer-action groups say training is fine, but it isn’t enough. A coalition of 18 consumer and health groups sent Madigan a letter recently, urging him to mandate disclosure of nutrition information on school-lunch menus so that parents and children can see how much fat, protein, cholesterol and sodium are in each day’s choices.

Among the groups signing the letter were the American Heart Assn., the American Cancer Society, the National PTA, Public Voice and the Center for Science in the Public Interest.