TIME: Why It’s So Hard to Make School Lunches Healthier

Students at the Tahoe Truckee Unified School District in California dine on locally sourced fruits and vegetables, homemade pozole (a Mexican stew), and fresh tuna poke bowls. Food in the school district is free of high fructose corn syrup, artificial dyes, and additives. Most of it is cooked from scratch by a full-time kitchen staff, and, like about 29% of other districts in the country, everyone eats for free.

The district’s meals, in other words, are about as good as it gets in the U.S.—and a prime example of how to improve public-school lunch programs. They’re also exactly the type of healthy, nourishing food that U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his Make America Healthy Again movement say they want to be served across the country. In May, Kennedy promised “dramatic” changes to school lunch programs, which he called “poison” because he said they contained high levels of ultra-processed foods.

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The USDA procurement rules sometimes make it difficult for schools to access fresh, locally sourced foods, says Katie Wilson, executive director of the Urban School Food Alliance, which represents 19 of the largest school districts in the country. “It’s the procurement rules that are constraining us,” she says.

Her organization is working to change the procurement process so schools can get access to more local food. It recently ran a pilot program that pressured providers to offer antibiotic-free chicken on the USDA procurement list.

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“School meals have been really good for a long time,” says Wilson. “A lot of school districts are even way ahead of the MAHA movement, and eliminated ingredients out of our products a long time ago.”

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