The largest restaurant chain in America isn’t McDonald’s.
It’s public schools.
95,000 locations, 30 million students, and 7.5 billion meals a year.
And, right now, the administration that says it wants to fix children’s food is asking those schools to do more with significantly less.
Bloomberg Businessweek’s Deena Shanker published one of the most important food policy pieces of the year this week, and it deserves to be read in full.
The short version: the USDA is expected to publish new regulations this spring requiring schools to serve more scratch-cooked food, less sugar, more protein, and fewer ultraprocessed options.
At the same time, in the same 15 months, it cut $660 million from the program that helped schools buy food from nearby farms.
It distributed zero equipment grants in 2025 after more than a decade of tens of millions per year.
It defunded the Culinary Institute of Child Nutrition, which trained school staff to actually cook fresh food that children would eat.
The proposed 2027 budget eliminates equipment grants entirely.
Schools receive $4.70 per free lunch. That has to cover the meal, the labor, the equipment, and all overhead. Nearly 70% of school meal program directors say it isn’t enough.
One director in South Dakota is feeding 25,000 students across 35 schools — 24 of which do not have full kitchens.
Her words: “We’re managing pennies all the way through.”
Here’s what I keep thinking about as someone who works in this space:
The children eating those lunches are not abstractions.
They are the people who will be in my client intake forms in fifteen years — bloated, fatigued, hormonally disrupted, inflamed, asking why nothing they try is working.
The gut microbiome of a child is established in the first years of life and shaped continuously by what they eat.
Ultraprocessed school lunches don’t just cause childhood obesity.
They dysregulate the gut-liver axis, drive chronic low-grade inflammation, impair bile production and digestive enzyme activity, and ultimately set the terrain — the internal environment the body will operate from for decades.
A generation raised on boiled-in-bag macaroni and cheese isn’t just nutritionally depleted.
It is building a foundation of compromised terrain that no amount of adult-level optimization will fully undo.
This is why food quality in schools is not a policy talking point.
It is a public health emergency with a thirty-year lag.
MAHA says it wants real food in schools.
I genuinely believe some of the people saying it mean it.
But, the farmers who grow that real food have been defunded.
The programs that trained staff to cook it have been eliminated.
The equipment grants that made scratch cooking physically possible are being zeroed out.
So, the central contradiction here is the same one I keep writing about.
You cannot mandate better food without funding the infrastructure to produce it.
You cannot ask schools to scratch-cook without ovens, training, and staff.
You certainly cannot build a healthier generation of children on rhetoric alone.
Children’s health is not a budget line item to be optimized.
It is the foundation that everything else is built on.
Full article by Deena Shanker, Bloomberg Businessweek, April 22, 2026
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