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Arizona School Lunches Won’t Welcome Back Refined Grains

After certain foods made mainly of refined grains took a hiatus from the U.S. school lunch program, the Trump administration is adding them back to menus.

Under the Obama administration, items such as noodles, biscuits and tortillas were once limited due to adjusted school lunch standards that required only whole grains to be served.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently announced that only half of the grains to appear on menus will need to be whole grains. The change is believed to do away with current bureaucracy that requires schools to obtain special permission to go outside of the standards when setting menus. 


Also returning to school lunch rooms will be low-fat chocolate milk, as previous standards stated that only fat-free milk could be flavored. One final adjustment will include the removal of sodium limits, but schools must still meet reduced sodium targets. 

The representatives of local cafeteria operators and major companies such as Domino’s Pizza, Kellogg and PepsiCo, the School Nutrition Association welcomes the change they have been calling for as some school districts were unable to meet the standards due to the level of difficulty. 

While whole-grain bread and buns weren’t normally an issue, students did contest the serving of certain items that created conflicts with their cultural or religious preferences. There were also snags created for certain areas based on location, an example being the inability to find whole-grain biscuits and grits in the south, along with whole-grain tortillas in the southwest.

On the other side of the issue, the American Heart Association urged schools to stay true to the previously installed standards that went into place in 2012. With a majority of schools now following along with the standards, the Center for Science in the Public Interest is confused with the decision to now adjust standards once again. According to Colin Schwartz, the center’s deputy director of legislative affairs, the schools that hadn’t yet complied were not far away from doing so.

20 percent of schools had applied to the USDA for exemptions from the whole-grain rule during this school year, with the items most commonly having been requested in their exemptions having been pasta, tortillas, biscuits and grits 

Having served approximately 30 million children last year, the USDA school lunch program makes free and low-cost school lunches available.

The USDA has also found that food is wasted more often at schools that only serve whole grain foods and now those schools will have the ability to research alternatives. Whole grain-rich foods are defined as consisting of at least 50 percent whole grains.

How this impacts Arizona student lunches?

An Arizona official said students in the state will not see much change on their lunch trays.

“In Arizona today, the meals haven’t really changed since 2006,” Mark Frantz, the director of school nutrition programs with the Arizona Department of Education, told KTAR News 92.3 FM.

“That’s because our state was one of the first to implement a state nutrition standard called the Arizona Nutrition Standards.”

Frantz said the announcement means that each state will allow “more flexibility for schools to design their school breakfast and lunch menus.”

The Arizona Department of Education’s nutrition program is focused on the nutrition standard set in place, meaning that fresh fruits and vegetables are served with each meal.