School Lunch Plan Is Too Much to Swallow, Critics Say

Nutrient-enriched, fruit-flavored juice to drink. Gelatin fortified with powdered vitamins to eat.

Fare like this could soon become standard in school cafeterias if the federal government’s planned overhaul of the school lunch system goes into effect, a school food workers’ organization, the national Parent-Teacher Assn. and some nutritionists charged Wednesday.

The group said the government’s new requirement for minimum nutritional content would cause a bureaucratic nightmare for school systems, which serve more than 25 million federally subsidized lunches daily at 93,000 schools, and does not jibe with what actually should make up a meal.

“We don’t eat chemistry, we eat food,” said Penny McConnell, president-elect of the American School Food Service Assn. and the director of food services for Fairfax, Va., schools.

The new system would be like shopping for protein, carbohydrates and calcium at the grocery store instead of for chicken, rice and milk, she said.

But the government and other nutritionists charge that therein lies the problem: Schools are not serving well-balanced servings of chicken, rice and other healthful foods but rather fat-laden junk food that many families would not serve their pets.

Under the proposed reform--the biggest change in the program in its almost 50 years of existence--schools would be required to analyze the menus they serve each week to ensure that they meet minimum standards for nutrients, calories and fiber and do not exceed federal requirements that no more than 30% of calories come from fat and no more than 10% from saturated fat.

A Department of Agriculture report released last fall showed that meals served at 99% of participating schools did not meet the proposed nutrition guidelines, with an average of 38% of calories coming from fat and 15% from saturated fat. It also showed that the sodium content was almost twice the recommended level.

Congress mandated in 1989 that the secretary of agriculture make sure that school lunches comply with federal nutrition guidelines, but the department had failed to act until this year.

As a 90-day period of public comment on the proposed changes to the $4.7-billion food program ends today, parents and others who are conscious of nutritional values appear to be increasingly at odds with the school cafeteria.

“This is about updating an arcane standard that has not changed since 1946,” said Jim Loftus, a spokesman for the Department of Agriculture, which runs the school lunch program.

Schools would be given until 1998 to comply. After that, they would be reimbursed for meals only if they meet the standards. The federal government subsidizes all lunches to some extent and fully pays for 40% of the lunches served to low-income students.

Critics of the proposal charged that they can reach the same nutritional goals in half the time proposed by the government by improving the current system but abandoning the weekly nutritional analysis that the proposal requires.

The current system requires that schools serve a meat or meat substitute, milk, fruit and vegetables and bread. But it has no standards for nutritional and fat content.

The California Food Service Assn. said the changes would translate into $100 million each year in added staff and equipment costs statewide and warned that smaller districts would drop the national school lunch program because of the costs, denying lower-income students the free or reduced-price lunches that they now receive.

Department of Agriculture officials said that assessment reflects ignorance of their plan.

“I don’t know where they came up with this figure,” Loftus said. “If they’re assuming that this proposal requires that every single school kitchen has to have a computer to do the nutritional analysis, they are just wrong.”

School districts with limited resources would be eligible for assistance in crafting menus, officials said.