As the MAHA movement of the Trump-Kennedy alliance takes shape post-election, one area for potential bipartisan progress is improving the healthfulness of school lunches that feed 30 million US children each school day. As with many complex challenges, the Safe School Meals Act awaiting consideration in 2025 elicits broad agreement on desired ends but confronts numerous regulatory and scientific hurdles.
Not-Happy Meals
American schoolchildren are being exposed to pesticide residues, artificial flavorings, and numerous “forever chemicals” in their food supplies. Whoever heads HHS, the baton will be passed to the next Congress to consider whether bi-partisan consensus can be achieved to take steps toward improving American children’s meals via the Safe School Meals Act. The legislation carries a bipartisan potential right out of the sponsor gate: Cory Booker (D-NJ) introduced the bill, and it was attracting bipartisan support even before the 2024 election upset. If Americans cannot forge common ground on improving school lunches, what hope is there for cleaning up ubiquitous pollution?
Numerous health and parent groups have joined together to advance Booker’s ambitious legislation. A leading proponent has been the tireless founder of Moms Across America, Zen Honeycutt, who offered Liberty Nation News a status report on the bill:
“First of all we want Robert F Kennedy, Jr. confirmed for the Secretary of HHS. This placement will ensure that we move in the right direction for the food supply and safety of vaccines.
“Second, we are seeking a Republican co-sponsor to advance the Safe School Meals Act with bipartisan support for 2025. Our children must have nutrient-dense food that does not contain toxins and hormone disruptors. Regenerative and organic agricultural practices are the key to eliminating dangerous toxins in our children’s food. These methods are beneficial to soils, wildlife, humans, and farmers and do not require expensive and harmful agrochemicals. The soil increases in organic matter, which makes the crop more nutrient-dense and is more weed and pest-resistant. The soil also sequesters more carbon and absorbs more water. I call it ‘legacy farming’ – leaving a legacy for their grandchildren in their soils, nutrient-rich and erosion-resistant. Children who eat legacy-farmed food will also one day be able to procreate, and their children will be the proud legacy our farmers want to see in America.”
Toxic Meals
Scientists have determined that many toxic endocrine disruptors and carcinogens endure in the environment (and accumulate in children’s bodies) forever. The EPA has identified 12,034 poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that saturate American soils, drinking water, and children’s reproductive systems.
Glyphosate, a weed killer used in GMO crops, is measurable in varying levels in pretty much every modern American body – and is also used as a desiccant to dry crops just prior to harvesting, including wheat, oats, sugarbeets, barley, sugarcane, buckwheat, millet, and potatoes. Plasticizers used in packaging called phthalates are found in pizza boxes, plastic food wraps, and gloves used to prepare meals in school cafeterias.
One media outlet collected samples of common favorites like breadsticks, fruit, pizza, and potatoes from schools in Maryland, DC, and Virginia to be independently lab tested. More than 50 pesticides were detected in the samples, often combined in a single meal. (This is consistent with the annual reporting of the “Dirty Dozen” by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, which ranks fruit and produce by toxin levels – often numerous different toxins in a single grape or strawberry – based on USDA testing, which generally lags years behind current crops and products.)
The 2024 analysis of school lunches detected 38 different pesticides in just a single elementary school meal; 23 pesticides in a single strawberry cup; the fungicide carbendazim, banned in the EU; glyphosate; weed killers dicamba and 2,4D; and six different neonicotinoids. If that weren’t bad enough, neurotoxic heavy metals were discovered: Cadmium was detected at a level 12 times higher than the FDA’s limit for bottled water, arsenic was found in rice at six times the level permitted in apple juice, and lead (for which there is no recognized “safe” level) was present in all the meals.
Most of these chemicals have now been linked to human harms, to which children are most vulnerable, including cancers, neurological damage to synapses and brain development, liver disease, infertility, birth defects, attention deficit disorder, and hormone disruption. But hey, who’s counting?
Which Bipartisan Legacy?
The Safe School Meals Act would commission the EPA to ensure that pesticide residues in school meals would be eliminated within five years. It directs that within two years, the FDA “establish for each heavy metal and toxic metalloid, a maximum permissible level found in or on final school meal products that poses a reasonable certainty of no harm to school-age children from aggregate exposure,” and requires the secretary of HHS within five years to assess “the safety of not fewer than 10 food additives.” Additionally, the Act charges the USDA to determine what additional agricultural costs are required to provide clean meals for schoolchildren and mandates funding for the USDA to provide grants to farmers and food processors to achieve the stated goals to compensate them for additional costs or reduced crop yields.
Cleaning up children’s food supplies is complex and challenging, but the Safe School Meals Act seems to cover the bases without harming farmers economically (though chemical manufacturer lobbyists will doubtless howl). Presumably, Cory Booker won’t have too hard a time finding Republicans to join him in addressing food toxins in school lunches – especially with the MAGA movement embracing RFK, Jr.’s MAHA ideals – and bipartisan discussions can almost certainly improve the efficacy of the current draft. America’s schoolchildren are nonpartisan: They don’t care who protects them from the invisible killers on their cafeteria trays.
