New Bill Would Fund Nutrition Education in Unhealthiest Schools
In the wake of major cuts to school lunch funding, a new bill would put an emphasis back on nutrition education.
When the USDA finalized its new rules for SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, roughly a million kids were projected to lose school lunches.
The Trump administration has steadily rolled back programs aimed at making sure kids have access to healthy food, including removing requirements for fruit, vegetables, and whole grains, as well as simply making it harder for kids to receive free school lunch. A new bill with bipartisan authors tries to go in the other direction, proposing new nutrition education programs.
The bill, introduced by Senators Cory Booker and John Cornyn, is titled The Food and Nutrition Education in Schools Act of 2020. It is not a replacement for the SNAP cuts; that’ll have to come from somewhere else. Instead it’s a broad education bill, aimed at inserting nutrition education into public schools.
The idea that food education should be a larger part of public schooling has been kicked around before. There’s a small but growing contingency of those who believe agriculture, with all its fundamental elements of science, technology, home economics, and lifestyle, should be a required subject in schools. This new bill includes some gestures towards that, but it’s specifically aimed at the schools that need it the most.
According to The Hill, the bill would target those school districts in neighborhoods with the highest rates of diet-related health issues and those in which a large percentage of the students qualify for nutrition assistance.
In terms of what the bill would actually do, it seeks to give funding so schools can hire full-time educators on the subjects of food and nutrition. It would also enable the sorts of gardening projects and field trips to farms that, for now, only a few schools have access to. The overall goal is to teach kids about the importance of nutrition, and to make sure kids know what healthy food is.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
-
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
-
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
-
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
-
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
-
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
-
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
-
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].New Bill Would Fund Nutrition Education in Unhealthiest Schools
by Dan Nosowitz, Modern Farmer
February 17, 2020
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreShare With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
Submit
Dan Nosowitz, you are awesome. That is all. I am a nurse practitioner and doctoral student. My project focuses on nutrition education in schools. I consider myself to be fairly politically and socially aware, but your articles have educated me on numerous topics that are not publicized in other media. GOD did not bless me with a green thumb. But, please let me know if there is anything I can do to help support you and the cause of nutrition education in schools. Thank you for all that you do!