Katie Wilson
SALT LAKE CITY — The Agriculture Department has completed the implementation of all the school meal rules scheduled to date under the 2010 Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act and all the rules can be defended, Katie Wilson, the Agriculture deputy undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services, said here in an interview during the School Nutrition Association’s annual meeting last week.

“We have come a long way in the last three years — the industry members will tell you they have come a long way,” Wilson said as companies participating in SNA’s trade show displayed food items that meet the new guidelines of less sodium, sugar, and fat and more low-fat dairy and meat, whole-wheat bread and pasta, and fruits and vegetables.

“Everything has been pushed through except for the sodium targets,” and the next sodium target is not until 2017, Wilson noted. Congress has ordered USDA not to proceed with lower sodium targets until the science shows the targets are justifiable. The lowest sodium target is scheduled for 2023.

There has been “a lot of incorrect information” about sodium targets provided to school food service directors, she said.

SNA, which represents school food service directors and the companies that make school foods, has asked Congress to force USDA to allow flexibility in some of the new standards as part of reauthorization of child nutrition programs this year. Wilson countered that, while USDA officials including Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack understand that with change comes challenges, “They have their voice, we have a different voice.”

USDA, she said, is “trying to get out positive stories, positive information” about the acceptance of the meals and their impact on children’s health.

Wilson, who was a school food service director in Wisconsin and executive director of the National Food Service Management Institute (NFSMI) at Mississippi State University before she succeeded Janey Thornton as deputy undersecretary earlier this year, said she was “so pleased by the depth of the number of products” as she toured the trade show.

Southern students and school food service administrators have said that whole-wheat biscuits don’t taste good, but Wilson said she had tried several “wonderful” whole-wheat biscuits at the trade show. The food companies had done research with students’ “sensory perception” of the biscuits, she said.

Wilson also said she understands the frustration with whole-wheat pasta, but said once school food service administrators learn to cook it differently, they can work with it. Wilson said that when she ran a school kitchen, her staff used to cook the white pasta the day before and refrigerate it – but that is not possible with whole-wheat pasta.

(A spokesman for Barilla, which makes whole-wheat pasta, said that it can be cooked partially the morning it is served and then finished near lunch time, but that the staff needs to be aware it will continue cooking in a steam table.)

Wilson acknowledged that the number of students participating in school lunch programs has decreased, but said the drop started before the new meal rules were imposed. USDA studies show that more than one million students have stopped eating school lunch while more than 30 million still eat it.

Wilson said no one is certain why the drop has occurred. Some students have said they don’t like the current food offerings and that the calorie counts are too low, but other students praise them.

Wilson said the rule forbidding schools to use higher federal reimbursements for students getting free or reduced-price meals to subsidize the prices for middle-class students may be a factor, but no one knows for sure. Congress imposed that rule because it was concerned the schools were not charging middle-class students, who are supposed to be only lightly subsidized, the proper prices.

Wilson noted that school lunch participation numbers are starting to come up, although an SNA spokeswoman said that may be because of the larger number of students qualifying for free lunch under community eligibility programs rather than middle-class children paying for their lunch.

USDA has allowed school districts to ask for waivers from the 100 percent whole-grain rich standard, but Wilson noted only 1,700 school districts asked for the waiver out of 95,000 school districts nationwide. An SNA spokeswoman said many school food service directors found the process of requesting a waiver to be too much paperwork, and that the schedule for ordering the alternative products would mean delays.

The new rules say that a school can serve an a la carte item as the entrée of the regular school lunch the same day and the day after but not otherwise, and SNA has asked that they be allowed to serve it other times. But Wilson said that would not be a good idea because the nutrient analysis for the regular meals is conducted over a week-long period and the a la carte item might be higher in sodium, fat, and calories than the regular school foods.

Some of the issues with which school food service directors are coping are local, not federal, Wilson noted. USDA has placed no restrictions on high fructose corn syrup or on the packaging of school foods, she noted. Length and timing of the lunch hour are also local issues, she said.

Wilson said she believes that the new professional standards required for school food service administrators and their staffs will result in more training.

USDA has been conducting “peer to peer” workshops, pairing school food service administrators having trouble meeting the standards with school food service administrators from schools of the same size that have had more success.

For this “Team Up” effort, “the feedback has been phenomenal,” Wilson said.

Noting that when she was SNA president, she wrote a letter to the members urging them to have the “courage to do what is right” in terms of nutrition, Wilson said that the future of school meals “comes down to the creativity and the attitude of the people that are trying to do it.”

“I am just trying to encourage people to keep pushing forward,” she concluded.