By Renee Hickman
TUCSON, Arizona (Reuters) -First-graders at John B. Wright elementary school in Tucson bounced into the brightly lit lunchroom, chattering with friends as they grabbed trays featuring juicy mandarin oranges, cherry tomatoes and butter lettuce, all grown at nearby farms that coax fresh produce from the Sonoran Desert.
Those fruit and vegetables were supplied with the help of the federal Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program, or LFS, which was set to distribute $660 million to school systems and child care facilities in 2025, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
The USDA abruptly canceled the program in March as part of President Donald Trump’s plans to gut the federal government.
“People think it’s crappy food, it’s processed, unhealthy, they think it’s mystery meat,” said Lindsay Aguilar, who heads up the Tucson Unified School District’s nutrition program. “Parents associate it from when we were in school 23 years ago. It is completely different from what it used to be.”
The Trump administration’s mixed messages on school meals — funding cuts alongside calls for healthier, and more costly options — create a challenge for those involved with school nutrition programs, they told Reuters.
As part of his Trump-inspired campaign to “Make America Healthy Again,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has accused schools of feeding children unhealthy food laden with food dyes and additives.
“We need to stop poisoning our kids and make sure that Americans are once again the healthiest kids on the planet,” Kennedy said at an event with U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins late last month, adding that the two agencies would be “looking at” school meals.
Aguilar is skeptical. “In my opinion, if you want to make America healthy again, you have to invest in your school nutrition programs,” rather than cutting them, she said. “To me, it’s like, walk the talk.”
Kennedy did not respond to a request for an interview and a department spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 29.5% of Tucson Unified School District families received SNAP food benefits in the last 12 months, well above the national average of 19.6%. Many live in so-called food deserts, where there is little access to affordable, fresh food, and large grocery stores are far away.
That reliance on federal nutrition support stands in sharp contrast to the area’s thriving food scene. Flanked by mountain ranges, and located just 68 miles from Mexico, Tucson sits within an actual desert, studded with soaring Saguaro cacti and buzzing with wildlife.
In that landscape, with its 4,000-year-old agricultural heritage, farmers grow crops like prickly pear cactus, mesquite and chiltepin peppers that award-winning chefs serve at high-end restaurants.
But outside culinary circles, hunger haunts many homes.
Juanita Mesquita, a school district Student Success Specialist and a member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, sits with colleagues at one of the district’s Family Resource Centers, located in southwestern Tucson near Pascua Yaqui and Tohono O’odham reservations.
Mesquita works with Native students to help them graduate, and said hunger is an ever-present obstacle.
“This morning, I had a little girl saying her stomach hurt because she didn’t eat,” she said.
Roxanne Begay-James, the district’s director of Native American Student Services, said her family lives six miles away from the nearest large supermarket.
“I know in some neighborhoods here in Tucson, they have their little markets on the weekends where they can get produce and veggies and fresh baked goods. We don’t have that out here,” she said.
At Wright Elementary, Principal Brenda Encinas said a student at her school reported eating ice cream for dinner because there was no other food at home.
FREE SCHOOL MEALS
All students in the Tucson Unified School District are able to eat at no charge through the USDA’s Community Eligibility Provision, which allows the country’s highest poverty schools to provide free breakfast and lunch to their students without collecting individual applications. Aguilar makes sure those school meals are healthy, and packed with fresh produce.
In a conference room at the Shamrock Foods distribution center in Phoenix, Aguilar and close to a hundred school nutrition program staffers gathered at a meeting of the Arizona School Nutrition Association on April 30.
They shared anxieties about funding cuts and made plans to lobby state legislators to protect their school meal programs. They also grumbled about perceptions, buoyed by Kennedy, that school nutrition is poor, even dangerous.
Since 2010, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, championed by former first lady Michelle Obama and signed into law by former President Barack Obama, has required schools to serve more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fat-free or low-fat milk, and fewer foods high in sodium and trans fat.
Yet Kennedy regularly blames school food for chronic illnesses affecting American children.
Kennedy recently visited Arizona to celebrate a newly passed state law banning certain dyes and additives in school meals. Those ingredients were in just a few items in Aguilar’s district, she said, and some were already being phased out.
After lunch at Wright Elementary school, staffers gathered at the school nutrition program’s central office to try out new recipes for ranch dressing — an item Aguilar said would need to change to comply with the law. The old dressing contained titanium dioxide, one of the ingredients on the Arizona list, used to make food look whiter. The Food and Drug Administration has deemed it safe.
She said plans were in the works to change that recipe before the law was passed.
Aguilar says the relationships her district has been building with local farmers stretch back several years before the launch of LFS. The district partnered with the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona and Pivot Produce, which distributes food from Tucson area farms to buyers, to provide the schools with local produce. More menu upgrades came with the addition of LFS.
For instance, USDA requires that schools serve at least a half cup of dark green vegetables every week. A common choice is romaine lettuce, Aguilar said. But there were quality issues with the romaine the district was purchasing, so it tried using locally grown butter lettuce.
The lettuce cost more, and needed to be washed and chopped by staff, but it was fresher, she said.
“We’ve introduced this local product that does take more labor and time and love to prepare. But in the end, our staff wanted that product because they saw the difference in that quality.”
(Reporting by Renee Hickman. Editing by Emily Schmall and Claudia Parsons)
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