After a long-fought battle with state and federal officials, a Londonderry High School pulled out of the National School Lunch Program after watching the failure of the restrictive school lunch regulations supported by First Lady Michelle Obama and federal officials. .
We can call it a win for food freedom, but the students can just get back to having meals they actually want to eat and school administrators no longer have to watch uneaten lunches piled up in the trash.
In a stomach-upsetting episode of government retribution, we see how one school district bravely took on Washington.
The 5, 000-student school district pulled it’s high school out of the national program - forgoing federal aid but freeing itself to create its own menu. That prompted a state and federal officials to classify the school, which prepares meals for the entire district, as a “food processing” plant and thus subject to a host of regulations and strict inspections. According to the superintendant, the district would have had to hire new staff or build a new facility to prepare meals under this new classification.
Last week, a compromise was reached and the high school will not be classified as a plant. The district will have to beef up tracking and accounting everything to ensure that subsidized food isn't served in the high school, but the district won't have to hire staff or build a new facility.
Fox News reports on this win:
"With a little support from the news agencies, especially Fox, and some help from our two senators and a couple of congressmen, the USDA has backed off, " said Londonderry Schools Business Administrator Peter Curro.
The problem, according to state and federal officials, was that food for the high school and meals for the district’s five other schools – which continue to participate in the subsidized program – were all stored and prepared in the high school’s kitchen...
