Told you so... lunch guidelines lead to less "from scratch" foods

I was not surprised to read this headline, "City Ends School Lunch Program That Used Professional Chefs" about a program in NYC that pairs 30 schools with chefs cooking from scratch:"A well-regarded program that recruited professional chefs to help the New York City Department of Education provide fresher, healthier food in public schools is being discontinued because it does not meet new federal nutrition standards"I hate to be right on this one, but this NYT story plays out my fears with the stricter school lunch nutrition guidelines. Here is my post from March that foretold the future about the new school rules. (I kid a little, but it is all too predictable in a tragic way.) Here's a little of what I said.I’m all for a variety of great-tasting, wholesome foods going to our kids. Hey, if we can use local produce, even better. An area (of the then-proposed school nutrition document) I found disheartening is that the stricter guidelines, with tighter calorie and fat and sodium content will push schools to rely on more and more processed foods. In our effort to micromanage micronutrients, I fear we will be serving processed foods that taste horrible.Hey, if some industrial food giant can make a pre-packaged, pre-processed food product that has the exact number of grams of X, Y and Z, it will make menu planning, and compliance paperwork that much easier! And, if they can make the product cheap, they can even make a nice little profit to boot. The report made several references to “more processed” foods (though they also seemed to think schools might do more “from scratch” and didn’t explain the inconsistencies, or provide funding for more kitchen equipment etc.)Ironically, the very efforts to make school lunches more "healthy," which is most often translated to less fat, salt and corn syrup, in our current reductionist food culture, is backfiring and I fear will make school lunches less palatable, more processed and less filling. "Jean Moreland, a parent at P.S. 84 in Manhattan and co-president of the PTA, said: “It baffles me, that in a city where our mayor is so concerned with the size of our sodas, he is O.K. with feeding our children fatty and processed foods rather than the much healthier WITS options.” The thing is, the WITS options probably are yummy, and "healthy" but may have a little more fat than the whole wheat pizza shingle with low sodium and low fat cheese and a shmear of tomato sauce so that it doesn't exceed a calorie or fat or sodium maximum. I'm not sure you can have it both ways. Real cooking and joyful balanced food needs real ingredients, and gasp, that might include some olive oil and/or butter, and maybe even some gorgeous much-maligned full fat cheese.The forest is lost in the trees, and common sense is out the window. A school lunch director at a recent workshop bemoaned the new rules. She feared the food would not fill up her kids, many of whom could only count on this meal per day. She also fretted that the extreme fat, protein and soon sodium restrictions would make her task almost impossible and she predicted that most schools would head for the processed options to comply with the rules. Maybe we should just give them all whole grain low-fat Lunchables wrapped in a lettuce leaf for the fresh veggie serving and call it a day...