On Wednesday, several states, including the District of Columbia, filed a complaint against President Trump’s administration over the changes to school lunch standards they argue could deny “30 million students access to healthy nutritious meals.”
New York, California, Illinois, New Mexico, Minnesota and Vermont were the states that filed the suit against the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Agriculture Food and Nutritional Service and Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue.
In the complaint they argued that Trump administration’s Department of Agriculture (USDA) “significantly weakened” the federal standards and didn’t give the “public notice of and an opportunity to comment on the 2018 changes.”
“By gutting the whole-grain standards and halting the progress in reducing sodium, the Trump administration risks stymieing [sic] this great progress and denying 30 million students access to healthy nutritious meals,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said at a news conference on Wednesday, as The Wall Street Journal reported.
The 2012 Obama-era rule, advocated by former first lady Michelle Obama, limited sodium intake and increased whole grains served in meal at schools.
“If kids aren’t eating the food, and it’s ending up in the trash, they aren’t getting any nutrition – thus undermining the intent of the program,” Perdue said, according to a 2017 press release.
The National School Lunch Program is a federally assisted program that provides students with healthy meals during the day at little to no cost in schools, according to USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service.
“The Trump Administration has undermined key health benefits for our children — standards for salt and whole grains in school meals — with deliberate disregard for science, expert opinion, and the law,” James said in a statement.
A study from 2014 questioned the government’s assumption regarding low sodium content, however.
“There is no longer any valid basis for the current salt guidelines,” McMaster University professor and one of the study’s authors Andrew Mente said for The Washington Post. “So why are we still scaring people about salt?”
Liberal advocacy groups Center for Science in the Public Interest and Healthy School Food Maryland also filed a similar complaint against this administration’s loosened standards, TheWSJ reported.
The USDA told The Daily Caller News Foundation that it doesn’t comment on pending litigation.
