“If you’re willing to spend some money, you can have a well-balanced meal,” said a senior from Portland, Oregon, in her school newspaper.

“A lot of the food is oily. It doesn’t look good,” said a sophomore at California’s Oakland Tech, as quoted in her high school paper.

There’s little argument, from any corner, that school food needs to be better—more nutritious, more thoughtfully produced, tastier, and yet still accessible to the 32 million kids served by the National School Lunch program. High school journalists from across the country, whose stories I’ve quoted above, explored the issue this year as part of the first Healthy and Sustainable School Food Journalism Awards, sponsored by the Earth Day Network, the Epstein-Roth Foundation, the UC-Berkeley School of Journalism, and the Edible Schoolyard Project.

Most of the young journalists hit on the crux of the matter. Serving a healthy lunch to millions of schoolchildren, every day, is a highly regulated—and woefully underfunded—endeavor. Schools, no matter how good their intentions, face a number of barriers when trying to improve their food; not merely cost but operational issues, such as complex government reimbursements for food purchases, and infrastructure issues, such as outdated and outgrown kitchens.

But there’s good news at last on the school food front. Despite these hurdles, many schools are finding innovative ways to make school food healthier and more sustainable wherever they can. And parents, kids, and local farms and businesses can work with school districts to help make it happen.

Last fall, the Los Angeles Unified School District, which serves 650,000 meals a day, adopted a Good Food Purchasing Policy, designed to encourage the purchase of more nutritious, local, sustainable, and fairly produced foods. (NRDC helped design these groundbreaking criteria, the first of their kind.)  When a major food buyer adopts guidelines like these, it not only helps ensure that kids have access to healthier foods in school—it also helps support local farmers and producers who run sustainable operations, which are less polluting than factory farms and chemically-intensive industrial agriculture.

Los Angeles Unified schools, as of February, have also stopped serving meat in the cafeteria on Mondays, in an effort to encourage kids to eat more plant-based proteins. And PS 244 in Flushing, New York, recently became the first public school in New York City, if not the country, to serve an entirely vegetarian menu. Going meatless will not only improve students’ health by reducing the risk of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes—it’s also good for the environment. The meat industry worldwide generates nearly 20 percent of man-made global warming pollution. According to the Environmental Working Group, if everyone in the country skipped eating meat and cheese once a week for a year, we would reduce global warming pollution by the equivalent of taking 7 million cars off the road.

Chicago public schools have made great strides in serving better meat in cafeterias. The majority of Chicago schools now offer freshly cooked chicken drumsticks, from birds raised without antibiotics on Amish farms in Indiana. Serving freshly cooked rather than reheated food is in itself a major improvement for Chicago schools. And by making large purchases from farmers who raise antibiotic-free chicken, the school system is helping preserve the effectiveness of medically important antibiotics. The vast majority of poultry and livestock operations regularly dose healthy animals with antibiotics, making these potentially life-saving drugs less effective when they’re truly needed, by humans or animals.

St. Paul, Minnesota, started a similar program to buy antibiotic-free chicken before Chicago’s—it could prove to be a model for other school districts, large and small, to bring healthier foods to school children, as well as help preserve essential medicines.

Connecting schools with suppliers of antibiotic-free meat makes good business sense, too. Suppliers of antibiotic-free poultry usually sell more popular cuts, like chicken breast, to grocery stores and restaurants at a good markup, but are often left looking for buyers for less popular cuts like drumsticks. A chicken drumstick just happens to be the exact portion size of protein required by federal school food nutrition standards. So caterer Chartwells-Thompson, which supplies food for about two-thirds of Chicago city schools, was able to meet nutritional guidelines with fresh, antibiotic-free chicken legs while paying just “a couple of pennies more per portion,” they told the Chicago Tribune, than they would for processed chicken nuggets.

In New York City, NRDC is working directly with the New York City Schools to advise them on sustainable purchasing practices. This work is tied to the larger efforts of the newly created Urban School Food Alliance—a group of six of the largest school districts in the nation that are looking to use their joint purchasing power to bring down the costs of sustainable foods.  These schools serve almost 3 million meals per day –more than 800,000 in New York City alone — so the opportunity to boost sustainable foods in the nation’s schools is enormous.

Since 2004, New York City public schools have been offering more nutritious menus for students, including fresh fruit at breakfast and lunch. Recently, the City has started introducing more whole grains, as per the government’s new nutrition standards for school food, replacing white bread with whole wheat bread, and offering whole grain pasta; it has also installed more than 1,000 salad bars in city schools. About 14 percent of city school foods come from local produce and dairy vendors, including organic yogurt from Stonyfield Farms.

Getting healthier food into school cafeterias is a massive but necessary undertaking. Improving school food is essential to kids’ health, as well an important part of the larger battle to fix our dysfunctional food system. The new nutritional standards being phased in this year by the USDA are a good start, cutting back on fat and salt and increasing portions of whole grains, fruits and vegetables. But schools, aided and prodded by parents and kids alike, need to find ways to make these standards work in their own cafeterias.

Try reaching out to your school’s food service manager to get a better idea of the challenges they face in improving school lunches, and where you might find opportunities for improvement. Pay a visit to your school cafeteria and find out for yourself what’s being served to your kids. There might be a salad bar, but can the first graders reach it? What exactly is in those hot dogs? Is the first ingredient in that dipping sauce high fructose corn syrup? Advocacy group PEACHSF has a solid, practical collection of how-to guides for parents on school lunch reform. You can also check out the Renegade Lunch Lady, Ann Cooper, whom I met at the TED-X Manhattan conference earlier this year, and her Lunch Box toolkit.

Raising awareness of where our food comes from, and how it’s made, as these award-winning high school journalists have done, is also an essential part of improving school lunches and helping kids eat healthier. As the contest’s third-place winner, Aditi Busgeeth, of Houston’s Alief Taylor High, said: “Sustainability is truly within reach, and school lunches are a progressive first step toward a healthier and environmentally aware generation of Americans.”

This post originally appeared on the NRDC Switchboard.

Photo credit: Shutterstock.

The post High School Journalists Tackle School Lunch, and More Good News about School Food appeared first on Civil Eats.

This is a welcome departure for an agency better known for paralysis than prevention. Perhaps this bold New Year’s announcement means the FDA is kicking off a new focus on shielding Americans from harm. Or perhaps the agency will simply fall back into its familiar pattern of delay.

For as welcome as the new food safety programs are, the FDA is still plagued with problems. It moves at a glacial pace in the face of pressing health hazards, like its three-decade-long refusal to act on its own findings that the use of antibiotics in livestock feed threatens human health. It takes a “see no evil” approach to detecting toxins in food and consumer products, like its habit of testing only 0.00002 percent of fruits and vegetables for pesticide residues. And it fails to follow consistent or transparent guidelines for determining what is safe, like its decision to set much weaker standards for oil contamination in seafood after the BP disaster than it did after the Exxon Valdez spill.

These are chronic and persistent challenges, yet the agency includes many talented professionals dedicated to keeping Americans safe. These staffers could help steer the agency toward a greater emphasis on precaution, independent science, and public accountability.

Meanwhile, some outside pressure may quicken the pace of change. Traditionally the agency has not received the kind of public scrutiny the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Interior, and other agencies have. Then in 2011, NRDC filed the first-ever lawsuit urging the FDA to address the misuse of antibiotics in livestock feed. A year later, a federal court ordered the agency to finally act on this known health hazard. With that case and several other legal actions, NRDC has put the FDA on notice that we are watching the agency closely and will hold it accountable as necessary.

It’s time to fix the FDA. If the agency addresses the following three threats to public health in 2013, we will know the FDA is serious about ending its paralysis and protecting the American people.

1.  End the Misuse of Antibiotics in Industrial Livestock
Eighty percent of all the antibiotics sold in America are used in livestock, not humans. This practice causes bacteria resistant to antibiotics, or “superbugs,” to thrive. These superbugs don’t stay on the farm. They can spread to humans and can lead to infections that are difficult or impossible to treat. Back in 1977, the FDA concluded that feeding antibiotics to farm animals was a threat to human health, and yet it did next to nothing to stop it over the next three decades. NRDC helped break the logjam: we took the FDA to court and won—twice. FDA has appealed the decisions and has proposed voluntary guidelines that leave action up to industry. The Court of Appeals will decide the issue, but the FDA shouldn’t need outside prodding to step forward and take decisive and meaningful action on this serious public health issue that is making essential medicines less effective. It should take binding action to stop the practice of feeding animals antibiotics at low levels day after day that kills only the weakest germs, leaving behind only the ones that are hardest to kill.

2. Stop the Use of Triclosan
Triclosan is a chemical additive in antibacterial soaps. Back in 1978, the FDA was considering banning triclosan from soaps because it was no more effective at fighting germs than traditional soap, and it was linked to problems with the brain, liver, and spleen. And yet the agency did nothing to limit its use. Over 30 years later, more science has emerged that triclosan interferes with hormones essential for development of the brain and reproductive systems. It has become so widespread that has been found in 75 percent of Americans over the age of six. The agency says that in light of safety concern, it was reviewing all available evidence and would share its triclosan findings in the winter of 2012. The year ended with no new findings from FDA. This was after it missed its summer of 2011 deadline. 2013 must be the year the agency issues its new findings—more than three decades after it released its original findings. But that is not enough. It must act on those findings and ban the use of this ineffective and hazardous additive in consumer products.

3. Protect Against Chemical Contamination of Food
The FDA’s new food safety programs begin to address the bacterial contamination in food. But that is not the only threat to America’s food supply: chemicals from pesticides and food additives also pose a significant risk to people’s hormone function, reproductive health, and brain development. The FDA has consistently failed to shield Americans from these harms. Right now, for instance, it only tests for illegal pesticides on about half a dozen bananas a year. Yet even with its limited testing, the FDA routinely finds unacceptable levels of pesticide residues on food, suggesting people are being exposed to toxic chemicals on produce. People are also exposed to steady doses of BPA—a chemical added to canned foods and other containers. BPA alters the development of the brain, prostate, and breast tissue. For the past five years, the FDA has been reviewing the safety of BPA in the food supply. Previous safety assessments have been summarily dismissed by outside scientific experts, and the agency was sent back to the drawing board. Perhaps in 2013, the FDA will finally release a scientifically robust assessment of BPA in food packaging. Meantime, it should also dramatically expand its testing programs for other known chemical hazards in the food we eat and hold companies accountable when they violate standards.

This post originally appeared on the NRDC Switchboard.

The post 3 Steps the FDA Can Take in 2013 to Show It Is Protecting Americans from Harm appeared first on Civil Eats.