Op-Ed: School Lunches in Tennessee
If you want to understand Tennessee school lunches, imagine a giant federal nutrition octopus with one tentacle extending from Washington, another through Nashville, and several more into your local cafeteria, where a heroic lunch lady is trying to hand a tray to a sixth-grader who insists that ketchup counts as a vegetable.
This is the National School Lunch Program, which sounds less like lunch and more like a classified military operation. In many ways, it is. The U.S. Department of Agriculture sets the nutrition rules, the Tennessee Department of Education oversees the program statewide, and local school districts handle the food, menus, pricing, payment systems, and the occasional mystery of whether today’s entrée is technically chicken…