Free Republic

Michelle Obama will be ceding the title of first lady to Melania Trump next month, but she may hold for some time the other distinction she earned during her time in the White House: America's best known advocate for healthy food. The non-profit organization she helped create as first lady, Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA), where she is honorary chair, will continue its work convincing food companies to improve nutrition content and labeling of products, the group said. "Michelle Obama has been a tremendous leader in this space," said Larry Soler, president and chief executive of the group. "That...

The threat Donald Trump poses to President Obama’s legacy was well established from his earliest days on the campaign trail, when the businessman promised that he would abolish several of Obama's core policies. But the president is not the only Obama whose achievements President-elect Trump could roll back. The incoming president also could undo the substantial public health and nutrition changes accomplished with the urging of Michelle Obama. The first lady has spent the past eight years championing anti-obesity initiatives, pushing an aggressive policy and public-outreach agenda that has played a part in changing how millions of Americans, particularly schoolchildren,...

Government-funded school meals are driving the obesity epidemic, a new study warns. Millions of low-income families rely on subsidized breakfast and lunches at public school to feed their children. But a landmark paper has concluded these fat- and meat-heavy dishes are putting children at risk of being overweight. It is a damning indictment of Michelle Obama's years-long meal program.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Students might notice some changes in the cafeteria when they go back to school in a few weeks. The USDA will announce rules today that require schools to get rid of unhealthy snacks and eliminate students’ exposure to junk food, ABC News has exclusively learned. Rhode Island already complies, having phased in these healthy guidelines about seven years ago, before they were official rules. "We're proud of what we're doing in Rhode Island,” said Elliot Krieger, spokesman for the state Department of Education. “We've been a leading state on this and it's great that our students have...

Children whose parents want them to live a vegan lifestyle — or a stone-age or fruitarian one for that matter — will have to bring their own food to school, a Berlin court ruled on Wednesday. While it might seem that veganism has become the dominant form of nutrition in certain neighborhoods of Berlin — and no meat-based restaurant’s opening is likely to set off a police operation — Berlin judges still bracket the diet with fads such as fruitarianism and raw foodism. On Wednesday, Berlin’s administrative court stated that schools are not obliged to bow to the dietary diversity...

At Monday night's school board meeting, members voted to opt-out of the National School Lunch Program. The federally-funded program gives money to school districts who follow strict guidelines on what foods have to be served and the portion sizes of those foods. "I don't buy lunch because I prefer the choices I can have from home, and the choices here don't look very appetizing to me," senior Emily Graziano said. "I see the food, too, and it's not high quality. That's one of the reasons why I pack my lunch," sophomore Evan Portman said. The high school will lose the...

They say it's broccoli, and they say the hell with it. But Big Brother is watching you, kids: The federal government is taking steps to fine schools that do not comply with first lady Michelle Obama’s school lunch rules. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service issued a proposed rule Monday to codify parts of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which was championed by Mrs. Obama. The regulation would punish schools and state departments with fines for “egregious or persistent disregard” for the lunch rules that imposed sodium and calorie limits and banned white grains.It can't happen...

The federal government is taking steps to fine schools that do not comply with first lady Michelle Obama’s school lunch rules. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service issued a proposed rule Monday to codify parts of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which was championed by Mrs. Obama. The regulation would punish schools and state departments with fines for “egregious or persistent disregard” for the lunch rules that imposed sodium and calorie limits and banned white grains. A West Virginia preschool teacher was threatened with fines for violating the rules by rewarding her students with candy for good

Michelle Obama got the wind taken out of her sails recently when some photos surfaced that expose her school lunch plan for the disaster it is. When 13 year-old Tanner Glenney received his lunch from his Texas middle school cafeteria on taco day, he was shocked by what he saw. He took pictures to show his mother Shelley, and she was enraged to see that there was barely a teaspoon of meat inside her son’s taco. “I first thought it had to be a mistake or the kids were messing around,” Shelley Glenney said. “And then when he told me...

Nathan Greenberg believes he runs a school district, but government bureaucrats look at his Londonderry, N.H., operation and see …. a food processing plant? That’s the strange dilemma the 5,000-student district finds itself in after deciding at the end of the last school year to pull the high school out of the unpopular National School Lunch Program. While the district’s elementary and middle schools remain in the program, which sets portion and nutrition guidelines for students, provides low cost staples and subsidizes meals of low-income pupils, it proved immensely unpopular at the high school. “We saw the [federally-mandated] food going...

Montana’s Bozeman High School is proving schools can serve students nutritious meals they’ll love without Michelle Obama’s guiding hand. Last year, Bozeman school board members voted 5-3 to pull the high school out of the National School Lunch Program because federal regulations on calories, fat, sugar, sodium, whole grains and other nutritional elements championed by the first lady were driving students off campus for lunch, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle reports.

REEDSPORT — The Reedsport School District again is able to provide free meals to every student for the 2015-2016 school year, a program that began last year. A controversy in the North Bend School District, with which Reedsport cooperates to get bulk pricing on food items, should not affect that program. “We're a school-wide free-lunch program,” said first-year Superintendent Brian Gander. “That's based on our local incidence of poverty. We started that last year.” Gander said the district would have 65 percent of students eligible for free and reduced lunch, if that program were still in effect. The current program...

Here’s a good rule of thumb: Never start a food fight with high school students. Students at Farmington High School in Connecticut are boycotting their school lunch program this week, accusing the campus food service provider of serving low-quality meals and embarrassing students who can’t afford them. Over 500 people have joined a student Facebook group calling for a boycott of Chartwells, the food-service company that replaced the district’s in-house meal program in 2012. The page is full of photos of moldy food allegedly served in the cafeteria, along with some other fairly gross testimonials.

(CNSNews.com) - The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 changed the nutrition requirements for school lunches and breakfasts, but the U.S. Agriculture Department says the law also gives schools the flexibility to prepare meals that are "familiar to kids from culturally diverse backgrounds."Blogging at the USDA website on Wednesday, Dr. Katie Wilson, deputy undersecretary for for food, nutrition and consumer services, hailed the nation's "diversity" of people, ideas, and culture: "One of the way culture is expressed is through the foods we eat," she wrote. "Our nation's school meals should be no exception." Wilson said she recently participated in one...

In 1946, President Harry Truman signed the National School Lunch Act. Like the road to hell, it was paved with good intentions. The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) is now rife with fraud. Consider this: the NSLP currently serves 60 percent of all students in both public and private schools. We know that two-thirds of all Americans do not live at or below the 130 percent of the poverty level required for free school lunches. For every person who signs up for free and reduced lunch the school district gets extra benefits beyond the subsidy for the food itself. When...

The Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA), originally passed in 2010 and heartily endorsed by First Lady Michelle Obama, is set to expire in September unless Congress acts to renew it. You may recall some of the details of that initiative including forcing all grains to be “whole grain rich” (whatever that means) and wiping out most of the salt in foods. Given the less then spectacular reception the program has received from schools – not to mention students – the GOP is looking at scaling back or at least modifying the rules. But The Hill was quick to characterize the...

In an effort to bring teenagers back to the cafeteria, Elmbrook School District high schools are dropping out of the federal school lunch program. The district has seen a slow decline in lunch participation, by about four percent overall, since the start of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, said Cheryl Peil, Elmbrook's director of food services. The Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act is a federal bill that provides funding for multiple food programs intended to improve child nutrition. Districts who opt for the funding are required to abide by new, "common-sense standards for fat, saturated fat, sugar, and sodium,...

SYRACUSE, N.Y. – School children who qualify for free and reduced lunches can receive free summer meals at thousands of locations throughout New York. Last year, almost 360,000 children participated in the summer meals program statewide, according to Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office. Persons with disabilities, also can receive free nutritious meals and snacks at the summer meals sites. To find a free meal site near you, use this website. You can search the entire nation by clicking on "find sites."

(CNSNews.com)-- The School Nutrition Association (SNA), which represents 55,000 school nutritionists nationwide, is pointing to data published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to draw awareness to the fact that “after 30 years of steady growth in the National School Lunch Program, student participation is abruptly down in 49 states."The nutritionists attribute the drop to new nutrition standards that were instituted by USDA in 2012.Total national participation in the School Lunch Program peaked in 2010 and 2011 at 31.8 million, according to USDA. In 2012, it was 31.7 million. But in 2013, it dropped by 1 million participants, to 30.7...

There is a simple solution to ensuring that every child receives a nutritious meal: provide taxpayer-funded free lunches for all of them.During my year as an elementary school kitchen manager, kids came through my lunch line without money for all kinds of reasons: Some lost the check their parents had given them. Some had divorced parents who weren’t communicating. Others had single parents who just got busy and forgot to give them money. My school district mandates that, after three incidents in a row, kitchen supervisors take away that child’s hot lunch and replace it with a slice of cheese...