national school lunch program

What do apples, beef and cheese have in common? These ABCs are all favorites with children and they are all a part of the USDA Foods program thanks to collaborative partnerships between the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and American farmers and businesses.

Child Nutrition Directors are generating buzz by incorporating winning dishes from high school junior chef competitions (JCC) into school menus. And the idea of providing students an opportunity to impact school meals is spreading!

What’s new with school lunch this year? In several school districts across the nation, this question is being answered by students themselves. Collaborations between school staff and students have resulted in school cafeterias that provide a welcoming environment for eating together, while offering healthy, appealing choices for their students. With the help of Team Nutrition Training Grant funds, many states have created these changes and developed ways to include kids in menu planning, taste tests, cafeteria makeovers and more.

With millions of children now eating both breakfast and lunch at school, school meals play a crucial role in providing the nutrition foundation children need to succeed in the classroom. For some, the food they get at school may be all they have to eat in the course of a day. It’s an important fact to consider – particularly now, as kids across the country head back to school.

When thinking of summer meal programs, what comes to mind? Hot lunches and fresh produce bars? Themed menus made with fresh, local foods? Taste tests and cooking lessons? Summer meal sponsors nationwide are working hard to make sure these practices are the new norms, and the positive movement is spreading.

Just like reading, writing and arithmetic, making healthy food choices is a learned behavior. And as with those vital academic skills, schools also play an important role in helping students build a healthy foundation for their lives through sound nutrition – not just here in the U.S. but in schools around the world.

International School Meals Day, held on March 9 this year, provides a wonderful opportunity to highlight that fact by raising awareness of nutritious school meals and their importance to the health of our kids. In fact, nearly every country provides some form of school meal for about 368 million children each school day worldwide, including more than 30 million children here in the U.S. through USDA’s National School Lunch Program. And International School Meals Day brings the world a little closer, helping kids understand the importance of healthy nutrition to a healthy future.

The USDA Foods Available List is a lot like any other menu, with dozens of healthy options for state agencies to order and distribute through USDA’s nutrition assistance programs.  And every year, foods are added or removed from the list based on customer demand and market conditions. Some offerings are modified to improve nutrition content or make the product and its packaging easier to work with in the kitchen or more acceptable to kids.

The USDA Foods program is a collaboration between the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), the agency that procures the food, and the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), the agency that distributes the food. This school year, the USDA Foods team’s goal for training and conferences is to provide more opportunities to taste new and reformulated products. That way, state agencies can confidently order them and school districts can incorporate them into their menus.

How do you create a better lunch experience for students? It all started with a conversation between Ginger Davis Kranz, Principal of Webster Elementary School, and the Minneapolis Public Schools’ Director of Food Service, Bertrand Weber. In September 2016, I was fortunate enough to visit Webster Elementary School in Minneapolis and see for myself how their family-style dining works. I’d like to share Webster Principal Ginger Davis Kranz’s inspiring blog about her school’s innovative and thoughtful approach to the students’ mealtime experience.

By Ginger Davis Kranz, Principal of Webster Elementary School

What if school lunchtime was more than just a wait in line and a race to find a seat and eat, but instead was more like a traditional family meal – a time when friends gather to enjoy their food, engage in meaningful conversation, build relationships and gain important life skills? After reflecting on this question, Webster Elementary, a Minneapolis public school, made the decision to abandon the typical chaotic and impersonal lunchroom experience and create a family-style dining program.

Summer is tough to enjoy when you’re hungry. It’s a hard reality that many kids from low-income households face when school is out and the weather turns sunny. To help close the summer feeding gap, the Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer demonstration offers a new model to do just that.

Without the daily nutrition provided by the National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program, many families facing poverty are also experiencing its most difficult symptom: hunger. USDA has several tools to help solve this problem, with the newest addition being the Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer for Children demonstration project, commonly referred to as Summer EBT.

What do the military’s logistical network, peaches and peppers, and school children have in common? The first delivers the second to the third through a unique partnership between the Department of Defense (DoD) and USDA.

October is National Farm to School Month and the perfect time to celebrate the DoD Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, which connects schools with fresh and often local produce using their USDA Foods entitlement dollars. Schools order local foods from a variety of sources, and according to the 2015 USDA Farm to School Census, 29 percent of districts participating in farm to school are receiving local foods through DoD Fresh.