What can you accomplish in five years? A college degree? A promotion at work? Starting your own small business? Maybe it means saving up for a family home or finally living the lifestyle you’ve dreamed of.
For the federal government, the past five years led to incredible improvements in our nation’s childhood nutrition programs. In 2010, President Obama reauthorized the Child Nutrition Act (commonly known as the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act), which included the most significant improvements to child nutrition programs since the 1970s. It increased children’s access to nutritious food, improved the nutritional standards of school food and supported healthier school environments by eliminating a lot of the junk that’s sold in schools.
This year — five years later — the Child Nutrition Act is up for reauthorization again.
In my March blog post, I introduced the 2015 reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act. The Child Nutrition Reauthorization regulates all federal school meal and child nutrition programs, and the reauthorization process can alter these programs drastically. Rollbacks on regulations that safeguard children’s access to nutritious food could eliminate much of the progress that’s been made in the past five years.
Advocacy groups around the country are gearing up campaigns to ensure that the CNR will continue to protect children from hunger and malnutrition through programs such as the National School Lunch Program, the School Breakfast Program and WIC. Unfortunately, corporate lobbyists who profit from children’s consumption of processed and junk foods are also gearing up, and their influence on the Congressional representatives who create the CNR is very real.
Your influence on your representatives, however, is just as real, and we need your help to tell them that the current regulations governing school food are working and must be upheld. Studies have shown that children are not only responding positively to the healthier school lunches, but are now also eating more fruits and vegetables at school and wasting less since before the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act was enacted.
There are many ways to stay informed and to get involved. Groups such as Feeding America, the Food Research and Action Center and the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition have begun advocacy and awareness campaigns to ensure that Congress understands that we must not roll back the regulations that are producing real changes in school food, child feeding programs and children’s diets.
I will post regular updates about the CNR here and ways that you can take action. As a first step, you can sign this Causes.com pledge stating that you will contact your Congressional representatives and tell them to save school lunch. The pledge provides a letter you can use as a template and helps you contact your representatives.
It’s an incredible experience to look back on the last five years and to take stock of the school food improvements across the country, but the time has come to look forward to the next five years. We must build on, not break down, what has been accomplished.
More from U.S. News
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The 5-Year Plan for National Childhood Nutrition: Don’t Undo the Progress originally appeared on usnews.com
