Congress Has a Chance to Make School Meals Free & Fresh

In the span of a week, Congress introduced two major school food bills. 

First, on May 13th, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ilhan Omar reintroduced the Universal School Meals Program Act, which would make school breakfast and lunch free for all students as they were for two full school years during the Covid-19 pandemic. Currently, nine states have since passed universal school meals. 

Then, on May 20th, the Scratch Cooked Meals for Students Act was reintroduced by Representatives Jahana Hayes, Brian Fitzpatrick, and Julia Brownley, and Senator Adam Schiff. This bill would create a competitive grant program through the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to expand scratch cooking in schools.

These complementary bills present a major opportunity to improve children’s diets, which now consist of more than 60% ultraprocessed foods. 

Making school meals free reduces hunger and allows schools to focus on serving higher-quality meals

Making school meals free lets school food professionals focus on serving kids the best meals possible instead of maintaining a time-consuming and stigmatizing system of financial segregation. Passing universal meals should be a national priority for ending childhood hunger, offering financial relief to middle-class families, and improving the quality of school food.

Reducing ultraprocessed foods in school meals means changing the system

While effectively addressing hunger, making school meals free does not in and of itself address the dominance of ultraprocessed foods in schools. The Scratch Cooked Meals for Students Act would allocate $100 million over five years to schools seeking to cook more meals from scratch. This would help schools cover staff training, kitchen equipment upgrades, technical assistance, recipe development, and more. 

The approach is tried-and-true. The Scratch Cooked Meals for Students Act closely resembles Chef Ann Foundation’s Get Schools Cooking program, which provides schools with staff training, technical assistance, and grant funding to transition from serving ultraprocessed foods to serving more scratch-cooked meals.

“We built this program because getting ultraprocessed foods off menus requires changing the entire system a school district is working within,” said Chef Ann Foundation Co-Founder and CEO Mara Fleishman. “Schools can’t simply swap frozen chicken nuggets with chicken tenders made with raw chicken. To make the switch, they need to upskill employees, modernize their facilities, rework budgets, and market their healthier meals to kids accustomed to eating high-sodium, high-sugar, designed-to-be-addictive ultraprocessed products.” 

In our latest Get Schools Cooking program evaluation, we found that participating districts increased their Healthy Meal Score an average of 47% over five years. This score measures change across six domains that could indicate how healthy a district’s meals are, including increases in scratch-made menu items and increases in money being spent on purchasing fresh or whole ingredients.

Congress holds the key to scaling and accelerating school food change 

While we’re pleased to see the positive impact our programs are generating, the Chef Ann Foundation and other technical assistance providers cannot feasibly fill the gaps left by decades of underinvesting in our nation’s school food programs and the people who power them.

Passing the Scratch Cooked Meals for Students Act would be a major step toward tackling the systemic barriers preventing schools from taking ultraprocessed foods off menus. Coupled with the Universal School Meals Program Act, we have the opportunity to make school meals healthier and more accessible for the 30 million kids who rely on them. We urge Congress to pass both of these bills.

Take Action

• Tell Congress to pass the Scratch Cooked Meals for Students Act