DELAWARE, Ohio – Sally Rathje likes the idea of students eating more fruits and vegetables in school, but said “forced fruit” regulations imposed by the government are creating a lot of problems.



“Originally, I loved the idea of encouraging more fruit and vegetables to the kids and I thought eventually they’d just get used to it and eat it,” Rathje, the food services director for Delaware City School District, told the Delaware News.

“However, we are struggling financially because of the amount of food we have to purchase that goes to waste,” she said.

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District officials implemented “share baskets” in elementary schools to allow students to share unused fresh fruits or vegetables with their classmates, and high school leftovers are hauled off to the Pacer Pantry. But cafeteria workers are still left to deal with a mess of uneaten cooked vegetable and fruit servings that are largely dumped in the trash, and it’s eating into the district’s bottom line.

“There usually isn’t a whole lot (of fresh fruit) left at the end of the day,” Rathje said. “However, the uneaten hot vegetable and fruit servings are all thrown away.”

She told the Delaware News the new school food requirements, a ratcheting set of regulations championed by first lady Michelle Obama and imposed on schools through the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act, are self-defeating.

“If the kids don’t want to eat this food, they’re just going to throw it away or pack – and of course, if they pack, they don’t have to have a fruit or vegetable,” Rathje said.

“Just because it’s a good idea doesn’t make it a good thing,” she added. “Food costs have gone way up, and changes need to be made to lower the cost and to cut down on the amount of waste.”

That’s the same message the School Nutrition Association, a national organization representing food service directors, is sending to Congress as lawmakers prepare to review the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act for renewal this year.

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The SNA, as well as other nutrition experts, believe Michelle Obama’s school food restrictions – which also affect snacks and other foods purchased at school – are overly prescriptive, and force schools to purchase foods students won’t eat.

More than 1.2 million students, including hundreds of whole schools, have dropped out of the National School Lunch Program since the regulations went into effect. Those regulations have also increased school food waste by an estimated $1.2 billion a year.

Students who continue to eat in the cafeteria, meanwhile, have taken to posting images of their unappetizing government breakfasts and lunches and posting them to social media with the hashtag #ThanksMichelleObama.

In many schools, following or ditching the new regulations comes down to dollars and cents. Plummeting lunch revenues have convinced officials in hundreds of schools across the country that they’re better off dropping out of the National School Lunch Program and foregoing federal subsidies to serve students food they’ll actually eat. Many view it as the only way to salvage now failing lunch programs that were once self-sufficient.

In Wyoming, legislators in the Select Committee on School Finance Recalibration examined the debacle up close this summer, and the findings are telling.

“Forty-five of the 48 school district in Wyoming paid $9.6 million out of their general funds in 2013-14 to subsidize meal programs that state officials have always considered to be self-sufficient or self-funded,” the Gillette News Record reports.

“This past school year, that grew to 46 out of 48 districts that paid $9.8 million to support food services or student lunch and breakfast programs. Much of that money is generated by the state’s block grant funding for school districts, which can decide how to spend the state’s dollars set aside for education,” according to the site.

That’s 96%

In other words, taxpayers are shelling out more cash for lunches that students will no longer eat, thanks to federal food restrictions they never asked for.

And while many are calling on Congress to loosen the regulations, Michelle Obama has vowed to fight for her pet project “until the bitter end.”