Healthier High School Lunches Get a Mixed Bag of Reviews

The reviews on healthier school lunches are in, and it seems most high school students think they are tolerable.

Many of the new federal requirements aimed at making school lunches healthier took effect in the 2012-2013 school year. Twelve months later, about 63 percent of high school students surveyed reported liking the new school lunches, at least to some extent, according to a report released this month by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a philanthropic organization whose mission is to improve public health.

"High school kids, you know they got their opinions right away," says Susan Birmingham, director of food service for Frontier Central School District in Hamburg, New York. Her district started offering healthier lunches to students several years ago.

Many high schoolers did not enjoy the more nourishing foods at first, she says, but they have come around.

"This year, I have to say, except for the spaghetti, they were accepting it and they were willing to try some of the new vegetables," says Birmingham, who has worked for food service in the district for more than 40 years.

[Find out why some students are skipping lunch for more class time.]

Schools that participate in the National School Lunch Program are required to comply with a number of new nutritional guidelines in order to continue receiving lunch reimbursement money from the federal government under the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.

School lunches must meet lower sugar, fat and sodium guidelines. They also require meals to include more fruits and vegetables and all bread products to be whole-grain rich, among other requirements.

Steven Marinelli, food service director for Milton Town School District in Vermont, says that his district stopped serving frozen food and switched to food that is mainly made from scratch a few years before the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act took effect.

He says high school students have enjoyed the fresh fruit and vegetable bar especially, since it allows them to have a choice in what they eat.

"Our participation in the past few years has gone up, instead of down," he says.

But the new requirements have posed challenges, particularly related to whole-grain rich foods.

[Read about how students don't have enough time to eat lunch.]

"It is a different taste profile," Angela Torres, director of food and nutrition services for Florida's Flagler County Schools, says of whole-grain rich products. "It's heavier, it looks different, it's darker. So that has been a little bit of an issue."

Finding a tasty whole-grain pasta has been such an issue for many schools that the Department of Agriculture has loosened whole-grain requirements on pasta.

"It was awful, just awful. The kids really had an uproar over it," says Birmingham about a 100 percent whole-wheat pasta she once served. The pasta was a huge issue, she says, because it is one of her biggest sellers.

But despite some pushback, students are still participating in school lunch programs.

"It's nothing so, so substantially different that I don't think they are noticing it too, too much," Torres says.

Have something of interest to share? Send your news to us at highschoolnotes@usnews.com.

Alexandra Pannoni is an education staff writer at U.S. News. You can follow her on Twitter or email her at apannoni@usnews.com.