Chopped Challenge: Ruby Red Grapefruit; Vidalia Onions; Flank Steak; Spinach (Raw or Cooked); Honey

An interesting story I spotted a little while ago, lets see what you folks think!

How School Lunch Became the Latest Political Battleground
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE OCT. 7, 2014

The lunch ladies loved Marshall Matz. For more than 30 years, he worked the halls and back rooms of Washington for the 55,000 dues-paying members of the School Nutrition Association, the men and still mostly women who run America’s school-lunch programs. They weren’t his firm’s biggest clients — that would have been companies like General Mills or Kraft — but Matz, wry and impish even in his late 60s, lavished the lunch ladies with the kind of respect they didn’t always get in school cafeterias.

Many of the association’s members considered him a dear colleague. “He would tell everybody: ‘You are a much better lobbyist than I am. You are how we get things done,’ ” said Dorothy Caldwell, who served a term as the association’s president in the early 1990s. “And people liked that.”

Matz often told the lunch ladies they were front-line warriors in the battle for better eating, and they liked that too.

Every school day, they dished out more than 30 million lunches, all of which were subsidized by taxpayers. They also served about 13 million subsidized breakfasts. Many students got more than half their daily calories at school. Few workers, inside the government or out, did more to shape the health of children.

So when Michelle Obama started Let’s Move!, her campaign against child obesity, in 2010, the members of the School Nutrition Association were her natural allies. The average weight of the American child had been climbing at an alarming rate since the 1980s, and now one in three American kids was obese or overweight. One recent study found that by 2030 more than half the adult population would be dangerously overweight, leading to millions of cases of diabetes, stroke and heart disease. Researchers at the Institute of Medicine, meanwhile, were finishing new recommendations to bring school meals into compliance with national dietary guidelines, and Congress was about to reauthorize the school-lunch program. This gave the White House an opening. If there was a war to fight against childhood obesity, then school cafeterias would be a perfect place to wage it.

That year, the Obama administration got behind the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, an ambitious bill that would impose strict new nutrition standards on all food sold in public schools. A generation raised on Lunchables and Pizza Hut, the bill’s authors believed, could learn to love whole-wheat pasta and roasted cauliflower. Kids would be more energetic, better able to focus in class and above all less likely to be obese. But to pass the bill, the White House needed to enlist not only Democrats and Republicans in Congress but also a host of overlapping and competing interest groups: the manufacturers who supplied food to schools, the nutrition experts who wanted it to be more healthful and the lunch ladies who would have to get children to eat it.

Few people understood how to accomplish those trade-offs better than Marshall Matz, in part because he embodied them. He spent his early career advising Senator George McGovern, a Democrat who led efforts in the 1970s and 1980s to defend and expand federal nutrition programs. Matz worked for major food interests, but he still considered himself a nutrition advocate. He advised the Obama campaign on agricultural issues and even helped one of the School Nutrition Association’s former presidents get a post in the new administration. He prized his access to the White House but believed deeply, his friends in Washington told me, that bipartisanship in Congress was what allowed the school-lunch program to endure.

To Matz, it seemed clear that a bargain could be struck. He advised the lunch ladies — a term that almost nobody in Washington uses in public and almost everyone uses in private — to support the legislation, even though it did not provide as much money as they wanted. Under pressure to show concern about child obesity, food companies backed it, too: With $4.5 billion in new funding over the next 10 years, the bill did provide plenty of new business, and their lobbyists could always massage the details later. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act became law in 2010, with overwhelming support in Congress.

But as the government began turning the broad guidelines into specific rules — specific rules with specific consequences for specific players — life became more difficult. What began as a war on obesity turned into war among onetime allies. Republicans now attack the new rules as a nanny-state intrusion by the finger-wagging first lady. Food companies, arguing that the new standards are too severe, have spent millions of dollars lobbying to slow or change them. Some students have voted with their forks, refusing to eat meals they say taste terrible.

Last summer, the School Nutrition Association dumped Matz. In the small world of Washington food lobbyists, the decision provoked unending gossip and speculation. Matz said little about the sudden turn, even to friends. “I was not happy,” Dorothy Caldwell recalled. Several longtime members pressed the association’s professional staff for more information with little luck, and the answer soon became clear to them: The lunch ladies were taking sides, too.

Today the School Nutrition Association is Washington’s loudest and most public critic of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. Even as they claim to support the act, the lunch ladies have become the shock troops in a sometimes absurdly complex battle to roll back the Obama’s administration’s anti-obesity agenda. Some Democrats in Congress fear that if Republicans win control of the Senate this fall, Obama’s reform will be gutted within a year — and with it, the government’s single-best weapon against childhood obesity. “It’s a war of attrition at this point,” one congressional aide told me. “Right now we’re in that phase where you’re fighting a rear-guard action to hold on to as much territory as you can.”

The federal school-lunch program has always invited martial metaphors, and not without reason: It was the U.S. military that first advanced the national-security implications of a healthful lunch. In the spring of 1945, at the dawn of the Cold War, Gen. Lewis B. Hershey, a former school principal who joined the armed forces before World War I, went in front of the House Agriculture Committee to deliver a stern warning. Hershey headed the Selective Service System — the draft — and he told the lawmakers that as many as 40 percent of rejected draftees had been turned away owing to poor diets. “Whether we are going to have war or not, I do think that we have got to have health if we are going to survive,” he testified.

Within a year, a majority of lawmakers from both parties had voted for the National School Lunch Act. The act declared it “the policy of Congress, as a measure of national security, to safeguard the health and well-being of the nation’s children.” In the way of many programs inspired by the Department of Defense, the School Lunch Program grew in large part because it offered something to everyone. Over the coming decades, the Department of Agriculture would send billions of dollars to states and school districts to help cover the costs of school meals and spend billions more to purchase surplus farm products for the schools. The program was expanded significantly under Richard Nixon, who sought to ensure that poor children got their school lunches free, and by the mid-1970s it fed 25 million kids.

Jimmy Carter made minor cuts to school-lunch subsidies in his last year in office, and Ronald Reagan, arguing that government shouldn’t subsidize meals for children who could afford to pay, made even deeper cuts. His administration also modified the dietary requirements: Among other changes, some condiments could be credited as vegetables. Opponents of the cuts quickly pointed out that, under the regulations, even ketchup could qualify — an observation that led to considerable derision in the press.

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From: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/m.....azine&_r=0