Four rural districts win USDA school food awards

Rural school districts in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, and Ohio are winners of Healthy Meal Initiatives awards for improving the nutritional quality of meals served to students, said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on Monday. Vilsack announced the awards during a speech to school food directors in which he said healthy school meals could combat the rising U.S. child obesity rate.

Clear Lake (Iowa) Community School District and Sandy Valley Local School District in Magnolia, Ohio, were recognized as “lunch trailblazers” for reducing sodium and including more locally produced foods in the meals. Petersburg (Alaska) School District and Regional School Unit 89, in Stacyville, Maine, won awards for “innovation in preparation of school meals” for cooking food from scratch. The awards spotlight practices that schools use to provide meals that are consistent with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

Vilsack, who was overweight as a child, said schools bear responsibility to provide “proper nutrition” as part of educating children. “They’re not going to take into life chronic diseases that will slow them down,” he said. USDA regulations call for less salt, fat, and sugar in school meals and more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. School food directors often say it is a challenge to meet those goals with the budgets they are given.

Roughly one in five children between the ages of 2 and 19 — 14.7 million in all — were obese at the start of this decade, according to CDC data. The obesity rate has been climbing since the late 1970s, when it was around 5%. Obesity-related conditions include high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, and respiratory problems.