Week ahead: Senators to chew over school lunch regs

The Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee will meet next week to mark up legislation to reauthorize the child nutrition programs and related standards that first lady Michele Obama championed in 2010 to make school meals healthier. 

Reauthorizing the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act gives Congress the opportunity to amend two existing statutes: the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act, which created the national school lunch program, and the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, which created the national school breakfast program.

{mosads}Groups such as the School Nutrition Association, the School Superintendents Association and the Natural Rural Education Association have been lobbying Congress to roll back provisions of the law. 

They say requirements to serve 100 percent whole grains and meet targets for reducing sodium, as well as forcing students to take a half-cup of fruits or vegetables with every meal, are too burdensome. 

“I have traveled across Kansas, eating school lunches with students and meeting with nutrition directors,” Roberts said in a July statement announcing the markup. “I keep hearing one word over and over again: flexibility. To me, that means we protect the gains already achieved by many school districts and provide assistance to other districts so all students will have healthy, filling meals.”

The Obama administration says 95 percent of schools are meeting the standards, but school groups say they have caused student participation in meal programs to decline.

The groups have asked lawmakers to revert to 2010 standards that required only 50 percent of grains to be whole and to leave sodium levels where they are. Roberts is still working to finalize the reauthorization package ahead of the markup scheduled for Thursday.

Meanwhile, the American Society of International Law and the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network will host a panel discussion Wednesday to convince international leaders that the dangers of tobacco should be treated as a human rights issue. 

And elsewhere, the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere plans to hold a hearing to discuss challenges to religious freedom in the Americas.  

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