School Nutrition Association members break ranks over nutrition standards

WASHINGTON — Internal discord at the School Nutrition Association (SNA) heated up recently as an open letter was forwarded to the SNA Board and leadership asking them to end their campaign to waive school nutrition standards. 86 SNA members from around the nation signed the letter.

The open letter comes as the SNA’s leadership vowed to continue its fight to weaken and roll back provisions of the 2010 Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act in its recently released 2015 position paper.  Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, described the SNA’s position paper asks on her popular blog Food Politics:

The SNA has just issued a Position Paper on school meals. It calls for more funding for school meals (good idea). But then it insists on some very bad ideas:

Stop requiring fruits and vegetables to be served with every meal.
Don’t require so much whole grain.
Back off on lower sodium.
Allow any junk food to be part of the reimbursable meal.
Allow any junk food to be sold in competition with school meals.

In other words, return to the junk food school environment that flourished before the Institute of Medicine wrote two reports on improving the nutritional quality of school meals, Michelle Obama instituted Let’s Move!, Congress passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 authorizing USDA to set nutritional standards, USDA wrote those standards, and most schools in the United States went right ahead and implemented them.

In response to the open letter being circulated, SNA had issued an urgent email alert to all members, warning them not to sign on to the open letter as “this letter will try to discredit the Association and limit SNA’s efforts to advocate on your behalf for any kind of flexibility under the new standards.”