Sarah Anne Ward for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop Stylist: Maeve Sheridan.
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.
Photo
Credit Sarah Anne Ward for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop Stylist: Maeve Sheridan.
The condiment rule did not last, nor did Reagan’s cuts. But they did
help accelerate a major transformation in how schools provided food.
Most districts require food service to earn enough revenue to cover
expenses, including labor. The average school-nutrition director is not
unlike the chief executive of a medium-size catering business, but with a
school for a landlord and a menu regulated by the government. With
lower subsidies, the lunch ladies needed cheaper calories, and they
turned to the increasingly efficient processed-food industry to find
them. School cafeterias also began to rely more on revenue from
so-called competitive foods — snacks and lunches that are not regulated
by federal guidelines and “compete” with the regular school lunch on
cafeteria à la carte lines. Some districts even struck deals with
McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and other fast-food chains to sell versions of
their commercial products directly to school kitchens.
The kids loved it — and so, more or less, did the lunch ladies. The
food industry made their programs hum, made it possible to serve
hundreds or thousands of meals, often without working kitchens, in lunch
periods as short as 25 minutes. Big food companies became partners in
every way: Most held associate memberships in the School Nutrition
Association and helped finance it with industry advertising and
membership fees.
Nutritionists were less happy with the status quo. Instead of
exposing children to a variety of foods, school lunches tended to
indulge their cravings. There were plenty of white rolls and French
fries but not many leafy dark greens or whole grains. Even after many
school-food companies made strides in reducing fat and salt in their
products, the average school lunch in 2009 still contained 1,375
milligrams of sodium, almost twice as much as federal dietary guidelines
recommend for a single meal. Worst of all, competitive foods — most
often desserts, salty snacks and pizza — were adding an extra 277
calories a day to the diets of the children who bought them.
In one sense, the school-lunch program was all too successful. No
longer was the military having trouble finding well-fed young American
men and women. By 2009, according to the Department of Defense, more
recruits were being turned away for obesity than for any other medical
reason. The recruits, as a letter signed by dozens of retired generals
and admirals put it, were “too fat to fight.”
The first shot in the Cafeteria Wars was fired in January 2011. That
was when, under the terms of the new law, a team of dietitians,
economists and nutritionists at the Department of Agriculture released
the revised meal pattern for school breakfasts and lunches. The rules
outlined just what schools — and, by extension, their suppliers — would
have to do to continue receiving government subsidies. Both groups were
struck by just how aggressive the new rules were. Within a few years,
schools would need to switch all of their breads and pastas to
whole-grain varieties. Within a decade, the average salt content of a
high-school lunch would have to be cut by roughly half. When the school
year began in fall 2012, lunches would have to offer twice as many
fruits and vegetables, and students would be required to take at least
half of them. At the same time, plates had to have fewer “starchy
vegetables,” obvious code words for French fries.
The starchy-vegetable lobby was quick to take offense. “We didn’t
find favor with efforts to paint certain vegetables as, for unspecified
reasons, less healthy than other vegetables,” was how Kraig R. Naasz,
the head of the American Frozen Food Institute, which represents about
500 makers of frozen foods and vegetables, explained it. The potato and
frozen-food lobbies mobilized, orchestrating waves of letters from
lawmakers to Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, that extolled the
potato’s low cost and high potassium content. When Vilsack went before
the Senate to discuss his budget request for the year, Senator Susan
Collins of Maine, a state that is one of the country’s largest producers
of spuds, marched into the hearing holding a potato in one hand and a
head of iceberg lettuce — no one’s idea of a nutrient-dense vegetable —
in the other. “My question, Mr. Secretary,” Collins asked, “is: What
does the department have against potatoes?”
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Dr. LZC October 13, 2014
If at all possible, make your child’s lunch and snack (they need
both), and make sure they have water to drink. As they get older, they
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Is it possible that efforts to reset the nation’s palate fail because
we try to change everything at the same time? What if we phased in the…
poslug October 13, 2014
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This, meanwhile, was a minor skirmish compared with the battle over
pizza sauce. Pizza is one of the school-food companies’ most popular
products; schools purchase more than $450 million worth every year.
Under the old rules, companies could market pizza slices as a product
combining grains, protein and a full serving of vegetables. This was
possible thanks to a longstanding loophole: Rather than count the two
tablespoons of tomato paste on a serving of pizza as two tablespoons of
tomato paste, they could count it as eight tablespoons of tomatoes, the
theory being that at some point before being processed, the two
tablespoons had existed in the form of several whole tomatoes.
The new rule counted two tablespoons of tomato paste as two
tablespoons of tomato paste, no more — a change that got the full
attention of the Schwan Food Company, a privately held frozen-food
behemoth based in Minnesota, with 14,000 employees and roughly $3
billion in annual sales. Schwan manufactures a reported 70 percent of
all pizza sold in American schools. Publicly, Schwan emphasized its
ahead-of-the-curve efforts to create more healthful slices meeting the
new requirements, with whole-grain crusts and low-fat cheese. Less
publicly, in comments to the U.S.D.A., the company laid out a series of
objections, ranging from the sentimental to the scientific. “Many of the
products made with tomato paste appeal to children and help sustain
participation in the school-meal program,” the company warned, while
also maintaining that the final sodium reductions would be “impossible
to achieve without significant technological advances.” (The Academy of
Nutrition and Dietetics, among others, agreed with the salt assessment.)
Moreover, if sodium were aggressively reduced in school lunches without
corresponding changes in home and restaurant meals, Schwan suggested,
students would find their school lunches bland and tasteless.
The White House wanted Vilsack to hold firm. They viewed objections
to the tomato rule as classic special-interest pleading. The lunch
ladies, meanwhile, had filed 11 pages of comments asking for a delay or
reconsideration of many of the new rules, and officially they agreed
with Schwan about the tomato paste. Marshall Matz found himself, not for
the last time, in the middle. The administration, particularly the
agriculture secretary, was annoyed by the comments — hadn’t the lunch
ladies endorsed the bill? — and Matz counseled caution. But when the
lunch ladies’ president sent a letter to the White House pledging to
work closely with Vilsack, many in the industry were furious. They
viewed it as an apology, perhaps engineered by Matz in an effort to
soothe the administration’s ruffled feathers. Some felt that Matz was
letting his personal beliefs, and desire to stay close to the White
House, override the proper interests of the association. Gary Vonck, a
senior executive at one of the country’s largest brokerages for
school-lunch products and longtime industry adviser to the School
Nutrition Association, told me that “there were a lot of times when
people disagreed with him.”
In food circles, OFW Law, the boutique law and lobbying firm where
Matz is a partner, is known for its bipartisan roster of lobbyists and
its long list of food-industry clients, some with competing interests on
legislative or regulatory matters. Matz was not only lobbying for the
lunch ladies, who wanted to abolish the mandatory fruit-and-vegetable
requirement, but he also was general counsel to the fresh-produce trade
association, which loved the requirement. Even allies told me Matz could
be vague about which client he was representing in any given meeting.
Vonck said, “I think Marshall maybe misunderstood what his role was as
it relates to S.N.A.”
That summer, more than a dozen food companies, including Schwan and
one of its bigger rivals, ConAgra, recruited their own lunch ladies.
They enlisted dozens of school-nutrition directors to join a new group,
which they called the Coalition for Sustainable School Meals Programs.
To run the new group, they hired a former S.N.A. official named Barry
Sackin.
The government wanted children to eat less pizza, Sackin told me not
long ago. “How do you go after the pizza companies without attacking
them?” he asked. “You limit the tomato sauce,” he said, in the manner of
a man describing an aggression that would not stand. In May, Sackin
flew to Washington to testify before the House education committee,
which oversees the school-foods program. The rules would drive up lunch
prices, he said. And to what end? School meals were already the most
healthful meals that many children ate. The long-term sodium reductions
would be expensive, and children wouldn’t necessarily eat the lower-salt
food.
Photo
Credit Sarah Anne Ward for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop Stylist: Maeve Sheridan.
Sackin and the coalition reasoned that if the U.S.D.A. wouldn’t bend,
Congress could force it to. Republican lawmakers, who now controlled
the House, were beginning to view the Obama-led nutrition effort as a
new and pernicious form of big government. (Representative Robert
Aderholt, a genteel Alabama Republican who is now chairman of the
appropriations subcommittee that controls Vilsack’s funding, told me,
“The overall concept of Washington trying to get into the business of
trying to regulate on a local level, on a state level — I fundamentally
think that’s not the best approach.”) And agribusiness had plenty of
allies in both parties. At a hearing later that summer, Representative
Collin Peterson, a centrist Democrat from Minnesota whose district is
home to Schwan’s headquarters, demanded that a U.S.D.A. official explain
the scientific basis for the tomato rule. If the agency didn’t back
down, Peterson threatened, he would insert a rider into their budget,
blocking implementation. Even Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a
popular Democrat on the agriculture committee and a leading supporter of
the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, became involved. In June, she sent a
letter to Vilsack raising questions about the sodium and tomato
standards. Parts of it matched Schwan’s earlier comments word for word.
Klobuchar’s intervention helped persuade other Democrats, along with the
administration, that the tomato rule was a lost cause. In November,
when lawmakers began developing a final budget deal with Obama, the
language included a rider to block implementation of the tomato and the
potato rules.
One last battle remained. The Reagan administration had become a
laughingstock years before when it appeared to propose allowing schools
to count ketchup as a vegetable. Now, as the vote approached, Margo
Wootan, the director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in
the Public Interest, began peddling an irresistible talking point:
Congress, she said, was proposing to classify pizza as a vegetable.
The phrase made its way into an Associated Press article and then
into newspapers around the country. It came too late to beat the
potato-and-tomato lobby, but when lawmakers finally approved the budget
with the rider in mid-November, editorial pages and late-night comics
were merciless. That evening, after the vote, when Wootan and Naasz
appeared on “NBC Nightly News,” the correspondent openly mocked Congress
for siding with pizza makers. (Some in Congress may have begun having
second thoughts as well. When I spoke to Klobuchar recently, she seemed
to regret sending the letter to Vilsack. “I did not want the rule
changed legislatively,” Klobuchar said. Her primary concern at the time
was the rule’s impact on Minnesota’s farmers, who had been hard hit in
the recession. But, she said, “I would not send a letter like this again
or take this position again.”)
Kraig Naasz, the frozen-food advocate, was also impressed. “I’m
supposed to explain in seven to 10 seconds how many ounces of tomato
paste should get credited when it comes as a paste,” Naasz told me. “And
Margo gets to say, ‘Congress thinks pizza is a vegetable.’ ” Shortly
after the vote, Naasz ran into Wootan at a nutrition meeting. “Good
sound bite,” he told her.
The rest of the law took effect in July 2012, as school cafeterias
around the country were preparing for the new school year. After two
years of debate, the lunch ladies were about to find out what their own
customers thought. Some School Nutrition Association members — those who
had chosen to get a head start on the new calorie and vegetable
requirements — were optimistic. One cheery news release came from Kansas
City. “Few, if any, students in the Hickman Mills C-1 will even notice”
the new rules, a school district there announced. “And that’s a good
thing!”
But when school started, many students did notice. Within weeks,
social media filled with photos of skimpy meals and sullen teenagers,
some using the hashtag #ThanksMichelleObama and #BrownBagginIt. In
Wisconsin and New Jersey, students staged lunchroom strikes. At Wallace
County High School in Kansas, students filmed a four-minute parody video
called “We Are Hungry,” set to the tune of the popular song “We Are
Young,” that has been viewed more than 1.4 million times. The students
made no special efforts to promote the video, says Linda O’Connor, the
English teacher at Wallace who wrote the lyrics, but “before we knew it,
we saw our story as the top story of Drudge Report.”
One of the biggest factors in the poor reception was a surprise
last-minute ruling from the U.S.D.A. To ensure that the students’
calories were spread among different food groups, the administration had
imposed a weekly cap on grain and protein, allowing no more than 12
ounces of each per week at lunch. Some school-nutrition directors,
struggling to implement the caps, shrank the size of popular items like
pizza slices or hamburgers. But many students that year were refusing —
as they have since roughly the beginning of time — to take the now
larger fruit-and-vegetable servings in compensation, meaning they wound
up with significantly less food than before. Students were left hungry,
and the lunch ladies were put in a tough spot. Patricia Montague, a
longtime School Nutrition Association staff member who became its C.E.O.
last year, painted a vivid picture of cashiers being forced into the
role of food enforcers. “You have to tell a six-foot football player,
‘You didn’t take your fruit or your vegetable,’ ” she said
incredulously. He might just walk away. “And guess what? They can’t get
reimbursed for that meal, because he didn’t take the full components.”
Participation in the free-lunch program, reserved for children from
low-income families, actually climbed slightly in the first year after
Obama’s changes. But in some wealthier districts — where children could
afford to turn up their noses at the federally regulated lunch and where
schools had been doing a brisk business in snack food — business
declined significantly. Cafeteria directors complained that they were
being forced to raise prices on their best customers while offering them
less of the food they liked most. Some school districts moved to drop
out of the program, forgoing the federal subsidies in exchange for more
autonomy. That December, the administration moved to relax the cap for
the rest of the school year. But by the end of the year, roughly one
million fewer kids were participating in the National School Lunch
program, the first decrease in more than two decades.
Nobody could agree on exactly how big a problem this was. To the
U.S.D.A., the drop-off, about 3 percent of total participation, amounted
to a growing pain. (“There’s ebb and flow every year in the system,”
Vilsack told me.) But Matz’s constituents were not so sanguine. Internal
surveys by the S.N.A. found that schools of all sizes and income levels
were struggling with higher costs, lower participation and what they
call plate waste — kids throwing away perfectly good food.
Matz was also under increasing pressure from the S.N.A.’s industry
members — the food manufacturers — who were becoming more direct about
their concerns. At an association conference in Orlando that year,
several executives grilled the S.N.A.’s chief executive, a former
grocery lobbyist named Frank DiPasquale. “They were very disappointed,”
DiPasquale recalled. “They didn’t like the fact that there was this
impression that the association was close to the White House,
particularly Marshall and myself.” DiPasquale said the industry members
repeatedly pushed him to find a new lobbyist. “I got a lot of pressure
about Marshall, more than once. And I resisted. I thought the guy was
terrific, and the value we got was terrific.”
DiPasquale left the S.N.A. in the fall of 2012, at the height of the
furor over the food rollout. Patricia Montague, then the chief operating
officer, took over as C.E.O. The board invited several other lobbying
firms to submit proposals for the association’s lobbying contract — a
clear warning to Matz, several members told me.
In March 2013, close to a thousand S.N.A. members arrived at
Washington’s JW Marriott Hotel for their annual legislative lobby week. A
major topic of discussion was the latest affront from the Healthy,
Hunger-Free Kids Act.
Photo
Credit Sarah Anne Ward for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop Stylist: Maeve Sheridan.
The previous month, the U.S.D.A. announced a new round of rules.
Called “Smart Snacks in Schools,” it would reach beyond the subsidized
meals in the regular-lunch line to regulate — for the first time — all
of the competitive foods students bought on the à la carte line, as well
as snacks bought from vending machines or school stores. Competitive
foods were mostly junk or branded fast food, but they were also a
moneymaker for many school districts. The lunch ladies, and their
industry partners, didn’t like what they saw.
The regular-lunch rules let them build meals around average weekly
nutritional and caloric requirements — some lunches could be a little
fattier or a little saltier than others as long as it all balanced out
at the end of the week. But the competitive-foods rule imposed strict
limits on individual dishes, forcing the lunch ladies to downsize or
discard popular items and forcing food companies to formulate yet more
new products. (An entree, for example, had to come in at fewer than 350
calories and with fewer than 480 milligrams of sodium. The
breaded-chicken sandwich sold at commercial Chick-fil-A franchises has
440 calories and 1,390 milligrams of sodium.) Worse still, from the
lunch ladies’ perspective, was another proposal: If they wanted to sell
some of their regular-lunch food on the à la carte line, it would in
most cases have to meet the stricter standards.
The seemingly arcane provision was there to close a potential
loophole. Without it, the U.S.D.A. and nutrition advocates feared,
schools would try to evade the rules by wedging a high-calorie food into
the reimbursable lunch on one day, then selling it on the à la carte
line for the entire rest of the year. The lunch ladies, along with the
industry, saw the provision as absurd. (“The biggest common-sense
challenge was that if I serve a product that meets the regulations, I
can’t sell it à la carte,” Vonck told me.)
As Matz gave his presentation at the Marriott that March, one member
told me, the board members fidgeted, exchanged looks and passed notes.
The Smart Snacks rules made it increasingly difficult for Matz to
massage the relationship between the lunch ladies and the White House.
He spoke to friends in the administration, seeking advice on how to
manage the growing frustration of the S.N.A.’s board. Sackin, who spent
seven years at the association’s vice president for public policy,
suggested that Matz’s ties to the administration, once an asset to the
S.N.A., had become a liability. “There was a concern that some of the
advice was as much what served the administration’s cause as it was
serving the client and what they want,” Sackin said.
Others thought that Matz was doing his best. That May, he helped
organize a meeting for industry members at the association’s
headquarters in Maryland to discuss their problems with the Obama rules,
including Smart Snacks. “The message was: Everyone has to go to the
White House, to the Hill, to the U.S.D.A., and get this delayed,” said
one person who attended. “They didn’t have a lot of time.”
The lunch ladies and the food companies urged the U.S.D.A. to
reconsider Smart Snacks, and some believed that with all the complaints
about the earlier rules, regulators might be forced to push back Smart
Snacks by another year. But in June 2013, the final rule was published
on schedule.
Four days later, Montague informed Matz that he was being replaced.
S.N.A.’s new lobbyists would be Barnes & Thornburg, a large national
law firm whose clients included the American Kennel Club and the
National Rifle Association. Montague described the switch as part of a
routine review of the association’s vendors. “We’d been working with him
for over 30 years and just wanted to see what else was out there,”
Montague told me. The association, she said, needed a lobbyist who could
“navigate the process and carry the message — not create it for us.”
Matz declined my repeated requests to speak about his time at the S.N.A.
There is little question, though, that the association’s industry
members wanted Matz gone. When a group of past S.N.A. presidents
campaigned to have Matz reinstated, Vonck sent an email to a group of
executives representing some of the biggest school-lunch purveyors,
among them Pat McCoy, who was then a vice president for sales at Schwan.
“There are a few old-timers stirring the pot on this, many who had
worked with Marshall in the distant past,” Vonck wrote. “Some have
written letters to publications trying to start an effort to have this
decision reversed. As you all know, that can’t and shouldn’t happen.”
The lunch ladies continued to battle the new rules, but now they had
increasingly vocal support from G.O.P. lawmakers. Aderholt, the Alabama
Republican, had begun hearing complaints about the new rule from one of
his constituents, a small-town school-lunch director. “It was telling
her what she could fix and what she couldn’t fix,” he said. “She was
talking about how there couldn’t even be salt on the tables.” Aderholt
attached nonbinding language to the 2013 appropriation bill asking the
U.S.D.A. to let schools apply for a waiver from the Smart Snacks
standards. Vilsack politely ignored the request. Since the budget rider
was nonbinding, he wrote, the “U.S.D.A. is respectfully unable to comply
with the directive to establish a waiver process.” Aderholt gave his
own reply in May 2014, when he marked up the administration’s new
appropriation and shared it with the committee. The new bill didn’t
request a waiver process; it required one.
The requirement would cover only one school year, Aderholt noted, and
Vilsack had already been changing many of the rules on his own. But the
administration saw it as a major escalation, both substantively and
symbolically. The committee was using the appropriations process to
override a national nutrition policy that medical experts had honed for
years. (When I asked Vilsack how significant the waiver really was, he
paused, started to answer and then paused again. The question visibly
frustrated him. “The concern is that it validates something that
shouldn’t be validated,” Vilsack finally replied. He added, “You just
don’t want to acknowledge that the system doesn’t work when it does.”)
Montague said that the lunch ladies decided to support Aderholt’s
waiver language only after the U.S.D.A. refused to budge and that it was
the congressman’s staff who approached them with the idea. But an
S.N.A. member involved in the decision told me the association had
discussed taking the appropriations route well before Aderholt even
released his bill, at the association’s 2014 legislative action meeting
in March, also at the Marriott. The members charged with drafting the
association’s legislative positions were scheduled to present the
group’s agenda on the second day of the conference. Montague had asked
to meet them in a conference room beforehand, along with the executive
board. She arrived with an unexpected guest: Pat McCoy, the Schwan
executive. McCoy proposed that the best way for the lunch ladies to get
what they wanted was to use the appropriations committee to force the
administration’s hand. “You know, it’s not just for industry, it’s for
the members,” McCoy said, according to one person who attended. “The
members are speaking out and wanting relief.”
Photo
Credit Sarah Anne Ward for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop Stylist: Maeve Sheridan.
When the association announced in May that it would endorse the
waiver, the civil war bubbling within the S.N.A.’s ranks burst into the
open. Caldwell and more than a dozen other past presidents of the
association wrote a joint letter to the appropriations committee urging
it to ignore their own organization. Conservative media sites,
meanwhile, lit up with attacks on Michelle Obama.
The first lady instructed her staff to delay the rest of Let’s Move!
She believed that a handful of lunch ladies and companies angry with the
standards were dominating the debate. To counter the S.N.A., as the
House vote approached, Obama’s staff organized a White House event
featuring school-nutrition directors who supported the new rules — their
own band of lunch ladies. There was, some lobbyists told me, a certain
sense of disbelief in the White House. Michelle Obama had championed the
lunch ladies and lavished them with praise. Now they were sabotaging
her biggest accomplishment.
Obama began the event with a speech delivered from a lectern, a
format she usually avoids. The round table had been billed as being
closed to the press, but after her prepared remarks, Obama invited the
reporters and network cameras to stay. She wanted them in the room. A
few minutes later, the first lady of the United States attacked the
lunch ladies by name.
“Why are we even having this conversation?” Obama asked. “Especially
given the fact that it was the School Nutrition Association that worked
to pass the original changes in the nutrition standard?”
A few days later, Vilsack’s bill passed the appropriations committee
with the waiver provision intact. Almost all Democrats voted nay. It
was, some food lobbyists told me, the most partisan congressional vote
in the history of the National School Lunch Program. The White House
threatened to veto the bill if it came to the president’s desk.
The waiver vote marked a seemingly irreparable breach between the
School Nutrition Association and the Obama administration. When the
association later requested a meeting with the first lady, it did so via
news release. The White House offered Vilsack instead. The invitation
leaked immediately to Politico. When Sam Kass, the executive director of
Obama’s Let’s Move! program, asked to speak at the association’s annual
conference in Boston this summer, it refused. Kass calls the breakdown
“one of my greatest disappointments since being here.”
In Washington, the waiver battle has left the lunch ladies isolated.
More than 200 organizations have signed a letter opposing the waiver,
including the American Medical Association, the Children’s Defense Fund
and a variety of environmental groups and food-advocacy organizations —
many of them former allies. In public, the school-lunch industry has
stayed away from the waiver fight, even as it lobbies for many of the
same changes that the S.N.A. has sought. “We haven’t taken a position on
the waiver because the debate is not relevant to our work to help
schools meet the new standards and serve students good food,” Chuck
Blomberg, a Schwan spokesman, said. The administration is counting on
momentum: With each new rule that goes into effect, with every industry
dollar spent adapting, there is less incentive to go backward. “This
ship has sailed,” Kass said.
Wootan and others suggest the industry is reluctant to go into open
battle with a popular first lady and is relying on the S.N.A. to carry
its water on the Hill. “I’ve told members of Congress who are supporting
this waiver, ‘You will never actually see a district waive this,’ ”
says Tom Stenzel, the president of United Fresh, a trade association
that represents produce growers and distributors. “Do you really think
the soccer moms of America will allow this?”
But next September, when the entire Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act
will be up for reauthorization, the soccer moms of America may not get a
vote. Just a few years ago, President Obama’s school-lunch reform
seemed like a kind of armistice in Washington’s eternal culture of
influence and partisanship. Today Obama’s lunch reform, much like
Obama’s presidency, feels mired in an endless insurgency — against a
stealthy, well-financed and infinitely patient foe.
In July, I flew to Boston to attend the S.N.A.’s annual national
conference. Thousands of members filled the city’s massive convention
center near the waterfront, where the S.N.A. had organized several days
of seminars and presentations, many devoted to helping school-food
directors and cafeteria workers figure out the new regulations.
Most striking, however, was the main convention floor, a cavernous
space where dozens of food companies had set up booths to demonstrate
their products. Much like in a supermarket aisle, the prime locations
went to the biggest brands. A huge rotating display advertised ConAgra
Foods. Another, promoting AdvancePierre Foods, invited me to “Join the
Burger Revolution.” At the bottom of the main escalator, Schwan had a
small food court, handing out deli sandwiches and plates of glistening
Chinese-style food.
Here and there were vendors who saw the new Obama standards as a
market opportunity: A small company making frozen Greek yogurt desserts,
a vegetable-soup distributor. Midway toward the back of the hall,
Stenzel’s group had the conference’s first Produce Pavilion, offering
single-serve fresh-vegetable products and advice on how to store them.
Unlike the processed-food giants, few of United Fresh’s members have
national distribution, and it was hard to persuade individual companies
to make the trip to Boston, Stenzel said.
Not long afterward, the lunch ladies would tell Stenzel that his
pavilion would not be welcome at next year’s conference. The event is a
big revenue driver, and the association wants his members to rent their
own stalls instead. Stenzel wonders whether this decision had anything
to do with his group’s fight against the waiver. “You have to question
what’s behind a decision like that,” Stenzel said. He sighed. “The
pecking order in the food industry — we’re down at the bottom.”
As for what sits atop the school-food pyramid, there can be little
doubt. At the convention in Boston, a warm, welcoming aroma hung over
the convention floor, and after wandering around for a bit, I realized
it was the smell of pizza — innumerable brands and styles, on offer
around nearly every corner.
Nicholas Confessore is a political correspondent for The New York Times.
