School Lunch Menu is About More Than Taste, Price

When asked to picture a typical school lunch, most of us think of sad-looking chicken nuggets or soggy french fries. For many of the millions of public school students, that’s not far off mark. To transform what’s on kids’ plates, parents, teachers and administrators have been working for years, battling entrenched industry interests and paltry school budgets. Now advocates have a powerful tool to help them: a new procurement policy that helps put core values at the center of school food purchasing.

On May 24, the San Francisco Unified School District Board of Trustees is poised to pass the Good Food Purchasing policy to help usher in a new era for school meals, expanding on and codifying the transformational work already under way. The district would be, after Los Angeles Unified, only the second in the nation to do so.

Read the rest of my Op-Ed on the Good Food Purchasing Policy in the San Francisco Chronicle.