Will MAHA ban pizza? It's not a healthy lunch if kids won't eat it

School lunches use too much processed food, leading to obesity and childhood disease, complains a report from the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) commission. They imagine kids eating locally grown fruit and vegetables and "farm-fresh food" in the cafeteria, instead of chicken nuggets, corn dogs and pizza.

New MAHA guidelines could take the pizza slices out of the mouths of hungry schoolchildren, writes Nicholas Florko in The Atlantic. That would be very, very unpopular.

"In the early 2010s, when the Los Angeles Unified School District overhauled its lunch offerings — an effort that included removing pizza from the menu — schools reported that massive amounts of food were landing in the trash," he writes. "The district later brought back pizza, and pepperoni pizza is now the district’s most popular item."

Thirty-one percent of vegetables end up in the garbage, a federal study of more than 100 school cafeterias found. Pizza was the food most likely to be eaten, along with breaded and fried chicken patties and nuggets.

“I can make a fancy little sweet-potato black-bean bowl, but I don’t think my kids are going to eat it,” says Tanya Edwards, director of nutrition at Channelview High near Houston.

Twice a week, Domino's delivers freshly baked pizza to the school as part of the company's “Smart Slice” initiative, writes Florko. The school pizzas are made to federal nutrition guidelines. For example, Smart Slice pepperoni pizza is "made with mostly whole-wheat flour, low-fat cheese, and pepperoni that has half as much sodium than typical Domino’s pepperoni." Students love it. MAHA does not.

“While some of these products may technically meet outdated federal guidelines, they are still heavily engineered, nutritionally weak, and designed for corporate profit, not for the health of our kids,” wrote Vianca N. Rodriguez Feliciano, press secretary for Health and Human Services, in an email.

"Other common cafeteria offerings — such as mini corndogs, mozzarella sticks, and chicken tenders — are also now more nutritious than in decades past," writes Florko. "On average, school meals are now the healthiest things kids eat in a day," say researchers.

That said, few cafeterias are serving chickpea, kale and avocado wraps with Dijon mustard vinaigrette to add a bold, tangy flavor.

Banning pizza may be politically impossible, writes Florko. In 2023, a proposed ban on chocolate milk was abandoned after parents and students pressured Congress to lean on regulators.

My nutritionist stepdaughter designed school meals after Michelle Obama's push for tighter regulations went into effect. Each day's meals had to be perfectly balanced, according to rigid nutrition guidelines, while staying within budget and being easy to prepare and serve. She tried to design tasty meals that kids would eat, not just pick out the chicken nuggets and dump the veg in the garbage. Oh, and the meals were supposed to reflect students' cultures too. It was very difficult.