Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Covering the Cost of School Lunch Programs

I found this report on balancing nutrition, participation, and costs in the national school lunch program interesting. At the beginning of the article are listed the following key points:
  • Schools face the dual constraints of meeting nutrition requirements and covering costs.
  • The free-meal subsidy covers most of the per meal cost, but the price paid by most paying students covers only half of the per meal cost.
  • School foodservice managers say that to appeal to students and raise revenues, they need to offer less nutritious a la carte foods and vending snacks.
I wonder why the editors left this item of the list:
A clear way to increase revenues relative to costs is to get more students to join the lunch line. Following the lead of successful schools, an important change is to offer freshly made, healthful meals that students help to choose and that they have time to enjoy. Whether this is accomplished by completely revamping the program, by making it more efficient, or by raising prices charged to paying students, schools have shown that providing quality, nutritional meals can be done, and it can lead to higher participation rather than lower.
If you just read the key points, the implication is that schools have to offer less nutritious food in order to raise revenues. Why didn't they highlight offering freshly made, healthful foods? Maybe they didn't read the last paragraph.

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