According to the New York Times:
Congress … will take up the Child Nutrition Act as soon as October…. The act, which is reauthorized every five years, provides $12 billion to pay for lunch and breakfast for 31 million schoolchildren.
Additionally,
The Department of Agriculture is expected to upgrade school food nutrition standards this year, many of which haven’t been changed for nearly 15 years. And because many Obama U.S.D.A. appointees are focusing on improving student health through better food, the department has started an aggressive effort to study reform efforts big and small.
The big question, of course, is whether these reforms will be able to bridge the divide that has troubled this program from the start. The 1946 National School Lunch Act was designed first and foremost to help the government put excess farm production to use. Instead of dumping extra beef and corn, the government would route it to schools. Hence, kids are fed heavy doses of a few types of food that tend to be overproduced thanks to government agricultural support programs.
Nutritional considerations have always been secondary, both for the program and for school systems (whose administrators sign contracts that bring vending machines filled with junk food into the schools.)
Source: Kim Severson, “Stars Are Aligning on School Lunches,” New York Times, August 18, 2009.
Source: Susan Levine, School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program (Princeton University Press, 2008).