By JENNIFER WILKINS
First published: Sunday, September 3, 2006

Want a challenge? Put two bucks and change in your pocket and go buy lunch. Try to find a nutritious, satisfying meal that is balanced in vitamins and minerals, low in saturated fat and high in fiber.

“Impossible!” I can hear you thinking.

Indeed, anyone would be hard pressed to find such a lunch for so little. Yet this is the kind of financial wizardry food service directors are expected to perform again as a new school year begins.

Schools in the National School Lunch program receive federal and state reimbursements and surplus commodities. They receive $2.40 in federal subsidy for a free lunch, $2 for a reduced-price lunch and 23 cents for every full price lunch. State rates vary New York schools receive 6.5 cents for each free and full price lunch served and 21 cents for every reduced price lunch. The commodities contribution is valued at about 17 cents.

All together, schools have on average a little more than $2 to cover the costs of each lunch served. These costs include labor, overhead, supplies, repairs and food. In most cases, less than $1 is available for food after all other costs are factored in.

The “tyranny of the bottom line,” as Hunter College sociologist and food service historian Janet Poppendieck describes it, drives food service directors to cut labor expenses and to sell foods such as burgers and pizza a la carte in competition with the federally subsidized and nutritionally regulated lunch.

According to school food consultant Kate Adamick, however, cafeterias can improve the nutritional quality of school lunches and save money by changing some common practices. A school Adamick works with received free nearly $40,000 in commodity chickens and then paid nearly half their value to have them processed into chicken “fingers,” “pop corn” and “nuggets.” By serving baked chicken instead (and avoiding the fat, high fructose corn syrup, and salt added in processing), the savings could be spent on more fruits and vegetables.

Increasingly, food service directors, including Ann Cooper, director of nutrition services in the Berkeley Unified School District and author of “Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children,” believe that school food should be more than wholesome, nutritious and an opportunity to develop sound dietary habits. They believe it also should be a part of the child’s education. With increasing expectations being placed on schools, we need to ask if two bucks and change is enough.

For Cooper, the answer is no. She figures that providing lunch that’s worthy of being served to a school child one that provides fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, dairy and healthy protein sources will cost a minimum of $4. Is this too much?

According to Florence Reed, nutrition program coordinator for the state Office for the Aging, meals served to older citizens in group settings cost from $5.06 to $8.98 each. Why should our society place less value on the lunch destined for a child who is learning, growing and forming eating habits that will impact her lifetime risk of diet-related diseases than on the midday meal served to our deserving elders?

The federal government invests $7.6 billion annually in the school lunch program to serve 29 million children less than what we spend in one month on the war in Iraq. With 17 percent of American children overweight, and many developing high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes, their health is a national priority.

The increases in federal and state reimbursements needed to provide wholesome meals to schoolchildren and eliminate the need for competitive foods pale in comparison to ballooning health care costs from diet-related diseases.

Jennifer Wilkins is a Food and Society Policy Fellow at Cornell University. Her e-mail address is jlw15@cornell.edu.