Last week I attended a meeting of the School Food Industry Roundtable in Washington, DC, where I presented information on changes in whole grain requirements being proposed for the U.S. National School Lunch Program.  I spoke briefly, I listened for three hours – and I went away with three conclusions: (1) It’s a monumental task to write federal regulations; (2) It’s an equally daunting task for companies to reformulate products; and (3) We’ve got to do this for the kids.

Whether you believe that our federal government has too many regulations or too few, it turns out that adding new ones to the pile isn’t easy. There’s a tortuous process, with prescribed procedures for public input, and a real need – important in a democracy – to come up with a result that’s workable and meets the needs of many different groups. And then, what comes out the other end may be intentionally vague, since government agencies prefer to leave the specifics to guidelines, which are more easily changed on the fly as circumstances change – allowing them to avoid the tortuous rulemaking process again as long as possible.

In the case of school food, we want to have heathy foods that kids will actually eat, that schools can afford to serve, and that companies can realistically produce. So the rulemaking process is required to project the impacts in all these areas. Whether this has been achieved or not depends on your point of view, and each party needs to dissect new rules to figure out how they will be affected.

A half-dozen USDA employees shared space with about fifty people from food companies at the meeting, creating an interesting dynamic. Food company representatives voiced legitimate concerns about rule changes, such as:

•  Peanuts sprinkled on salads count toward requirements for healthy proteins, but the same peanuts in a peanut-butter cookie don’t.
•  Tomato paste is losing the “extra credit” it used to have for being concentrated.

The biggest concern was about timing. School food contracts go out to bid in the first few months of the year, for the school year beginning the following autumn. The new rules are now in a 90-day comment period that ends April 13, after which USDA is expected to take most of the rest of 2011 to finalize rules. Companies can’t reformulate their foods until they know the details of the new rules – and reformulation is a time-consuming and expensive process. Implementing the new school rules for the school year starting July 2012 just doesn’t allow enough time, the companies agree. You’ve taken almost seven years to update the rules, USDA – at least give us seven months to implement them.

The USDA folks simply listened, without commenting on or rebutting anything, as is appropriate. They want to learn as much as they can about any unintended consequences of the proposed rules, so they can be made as workable as possible in final rule-making.

The meeting was an equal mix of information-seeking and heated venting on the difficulties of achieving meaningful change – “Kids won’t eat a whole cup of fruit!”… “Cut down on potatoes, and they’re certainly not going to eat broccoli instead!” … “But the commodity meat USDA sends us doesn’t meet their rules for lean meat!” Still, the final audience commentator received a round of applause when he stated, “Change is not easy. But this week I heard one of our Rear Admirals say that only 25% of our kids are recruitable, because we aren’t feeding them right. We have the brainpower to do this, and we will.” (Cindy)