New USDA Report on National School Lunch Program
The USDA has released The National School Lunch Program: Background, Trends and Issues (via Marion Nestle). There’s not a lot new here if you work in the area. However, the report does provide some great material that is often difficult to find elsewhere.
The report discusses what it calls the “trilemma” of school food: the tensions between participation, nutrition, and cost and outlines, for the first time I have seen in a government report, the way that changes in policy in one area can have unintended impacts on other areas.
The report also provides an often difficult to identify history and timeline of the school lunch program as wells as a brief description of particularly complicated issues such as menu planning; USDA commodity donation programs; and eligibility determinations.
I found particularly interesting the fact that this report is one of the first I have seen that explicitly discusses policy as a factor influencing program outcomes.