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MALVERN, Pa. — In a social media era rife with mouthwatering food content, kids will no longer settle for a drab school meal.
"I don't have a TikTok account, but they're telling me, 'Hey, I saw this on TikTok. Can you make this? Can we do this?'" said Nichole Taylor, supervisor of food and nutrition services at the Great Valley School District in Malvern, Pennsylvania.
"I would have never asked my lunch lady to make something special for me. I would've just ate what they told me," she said, adding that the students are "very engaged."
Taylor has been working to refresh the suburban Philadelphia district's meal program since she took over a year and a half ago, trying to balance a desire to cook more fresh food from scratch with budget constraints and a lack of skilled labor.
But now, districts like Taylor's and others across the U.S. are waiting to see whether it will become even more expensive to prepare a meal.
That's because in January, the Trump administration overhauled the national dietary guidelines. Announced by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., they follow the Make America Healthy Again blueprint, urging Americans to avoid highly processed foods and prioritize "high-quality, nutrient-dense" protein at every meal. Those guidelines form the basis of federal nutrition standards that schools participating in federal meal programs must follow.
Yet many districts rely on processed, premade foods to feed their students, and protein is already the most expensive ingredient on the cafeteria plate, school nutrition experts say.
This year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's reimbursement rate for schools in the contiguous 48 states is about $4.60 per meal for a student who is eligible for a free lunch, according to the School Nutrition Association (SNA). The rate is $4.20 for students eligible for a reduced-price lunch and $0.44 for students who pay full price, SNA said.
Federal and state funding are the largest revenue streams in Taylor's district, and they help pay for everything from staff wages and kitchen equipment to food and utility costs. She said she supports the nutritional goals of the new federal standards but wonders how they'll affect schools already struggling to operate.
"We want to follow the guidelines, because we are that voice that says, 'No, you can eat healthy and still eat really well,'" Taylor said. "But we also have to be realistic and say we need the funding for it."
At the same time, the Trump administration has cut funding programs that allowed schools to buy local food from farmers.
How dietary guidelines can affect schools
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said at a press conference for the updated guidelines in January that she was particularly interested in how they could improve child nutrition.
"Right now, that is going to be the single most important, from my perspective, move forward — is the school lunches and making sure that we're getting the right amount, the best amount and the most nutrient-dense foods into the schools," Rollins said.
Yet some in the medical community have objected to the new food pyramid, specifically the placement of saturated fat sources such as red meat and full-fat dairy at the top. "It does go against decades and decades of evidence and research," Stanford University nutrition expert Christopher Gardner told NPR this year. Gardner was a member of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.
Exactly how the government's new dietary guidelines will impact schools is unclear. The Department of Agriculture (USDA) said it is still working to update the nutrition standards it requires of institutions taking part in the National School Lunch Program, which fed 30 million children last year, and the School Breakfast Program. The department said in an email that the new guidelines are a "pivotal step to Make America Healthy Again through real, nutrient-dense foods" and that the guidelines' release "kicks off a multi-year effort" to update the rules of the department's nutrition programs through a formal rule-making process, which will include public comment.
Mara Fleishman, CEO of the Chef Ann Foundation, which works to help schools cook more meals from scratch, applauded the move away from highly processed foods but said the shift wouldn't be easy.
"The conundrum is that often animal protein in school food is one of the most highly processed components," she said. Fleishman used chicken nuggets as an example, which she said appear in some form in just about every school district in the United States.
"The primary chicken nuggets that are served come cooked frozen. So you get it cooked, you put it in your freezer, take it out, put it in the retherm [ovens], put it on the line. And it's got about 35 ingredients in it," she said.
Fleishman said districts that want to cook chicken strips from scratch could make them fresh using six or seven ingredients. "But it's hard, because you go from buying a chicken nugget, which is totally contained," to having to consider the financial, labor and waste implications of cooking it from scratch, she said.
USDA cut funding that helped schools buy local food
At the same time as the Trump administration is urging Americans to eat more "real" food, it has cut funding that enabled schools to buy from local farmers.
In March of last year, the School Nutrition Association reported that the USDA ended the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program (LFS), erasing an estimated $660 million in funding. LFS provided money that schools could use to buy "unprocessed or minimally processed foods, such as meat, poultry, fruit, vegetables, seafood, and dairy" from local or regional producers, according to the program's website.
"That was a big loss," said Stephanie Dillard, SNA president and the nutrition director of an Alabama school district, "because we lost the money we could spend on local farmers."
The USDA said in an emailed statement that the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program — as well as the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program (LFPA), which supports feeding programs such as food banks — are being "sunsetted at the end of their performance periods."
The department said that it released more than half a billion dollars in funding through the two programs last year and that, as of March, $100 million remained in LFPA funding and more than $17 million remained in LFS funding for states to use.
The USDA also paused funding from the Patrick Leahy Farm to School grant program for the 2025 fiscal year, which a spokesperson said was in response to Trump's executive order targeting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in January 2025.
However, the program reopened for the 2026 fiscal year and offered up to $18 million in awards. The department said it "streamlined the Farm to School Grant application process and removed Biden-era DEI components to ensure equal treatment, not preferential treatment, of applicants." Rollins said in a statement that the grants are "one of the best ways we can deliver nutritious, high-quality meals to children, while also strengthening local agriculture."
Schools have long called for more money for meals
For years, education administrators and child nutrition advocates have been saying that school cafeterias — often called the biggest restaurants in town — operate on tight budgets due in part to inadequate reimbursements from the federal government. Federal initiatives such as the National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program provide billions of dollars in funding each year to schools across the U.S. to keep their meal programs afloat.
Reimbursement rates are adjusted annually based on the consumer price index, but school nutrition directors say that the increases are not enough and that Congress needs to revisit the reimbursement formula altogether, as meal programs become more expensive to operate.
"It all comes down to funding," said Dillard, of the SNA. "The sky would be the limit if we had the funding. We could cook all day long."
In an SNA survey released in January, nearly 95% of school nutrition directors said they were concerned about the financial sustainability of their programs three years from now.
"The current reimbursement rate isn't even quite enough for the current status quo," said Jennifer Gaddis, a University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor of civil society and community studies who studies school food systems, "let alone to do the holistic transformation that we need in order to make school meals really important engines of public health and economic vitality in our communities."
Additionally, Gaddis said, the heat-and-serve model of the past allowed schools to spend less money by hiring fewer workers for shorter shifts. Preparing meals from scratch would require workers to be present longer and kitchens to be equipped for cooking.
Many school meal programs receive state funding in addition to federal dollars, but the amounts vary. According to SNA, nine states have dedicated state funds to provide universal free school meals.
"If a kid is hungry, they're not studying"
Despite the budget and logistical constraints, more schools are finding ways to expand their efforts to cook meals from scratch.
The Chef Ann Foundation, for example, offers an online database of recipes and guides for districts that want to prepare fresher meals, as well as apprenticeships, fellowships and other programs for nutritional staff.
The Great Valley School District hired a chef in December to help source more local ingredients, expand the district's freshly prepared offerings and train staff members on new kitchen skills. Jenifer Halin, the district's new culinary coordinator, said she found frozen, precut vegetables in the cafeteria kitchen when she arrived. "And I have already transitioned everybody over to cutting fresh vegetables. It's been simple."
Taylor, the district's supervisor of food and nutrition services, has even tried to reformulate some of those meals suggested by students to meet federal nutrition standards, and she said she still hopes to cook more meals from scratch, which would mean giving more staff members full-time status and culinary training. (The cost of cheaper raw ingredients might make the overall financial math even out, she said.)
"I want to be able to offer our students our own muffins, our own French toast sticks," Taylor said, standing in Great Valley High School's walk-in freezer next to boxes of frozen chicken breasts and banana chocolate chip breakfast bars. "I want to be able to produce our own pizza, so that we're not having to buy out from other vendors."
Her efforts have not gone unnoticed by the students.
"It started with like one day randomly they had this grilled cheese and tomato bisque, and it was like ancient-grain bread, and everyone was like, 'It tasted like Panera,'" said Varun Kartick, a Great Valley High School senior.
More new dishes followed. Kartick, who doesn't eat pork or beef, said the vegetables have been fresher and the cafeteria staff often makes entrees vegetarian upon request. On a given day, he may opt for a seasonal chicken wrap or fill up a plate with pasta and vegetables.
"It's been very convenient and very nice to see that change, that we're not disgusted [by the food] or having to pack a lunch," he said. "There's an option that we can have at school."
Among the items on offer in the cafeteria that day were pizza and chicken fingers, as well as avocado toast and a salad made with Pennsylvania sweet potatoes.
Taylor said getting more students to eat breakfast and lunch at school would mean more federal reimbursements that could help her expand the district's nutrition program. But it would also ensure that — most importantly to her — more students are fed.
"If a kid is hungry, they're not studying. They can't learn. They're acting out," Taylor said. "But if you build this into part of their school day to where they feel like this is the norm for them, then you've knocked down that hurdle."
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