More than 60% of a typical child’s diet is made up of ultraprocessed foods. If that number feels abstract, here’s what it looks like on a cafeteria tray: chicken nuggets loaded with fillers like soy, gums, and starches designed to hold shape after months in a freezer. A “crispy chicken salad” that’s actually an ultraprocessed chicken patty chopped over greens with a dressing full of ingredients you can’t pronounce. Bread products packed with emulsifiers to maintain a soft texture for months. Fruit yogurt with more sugar than a soda.
These aren’t meals. They’re food products, engineered for shelf life rather than nutritional benefit—and kids are consuming up to half of their daily calories at school.
This isn’t a home-kitchen problem
The ultraprocessed food conversation right now puts a lot of pressure on parents: read labels, cook more, pack a lunch. But when nearly 30 million kids eat school meals five days a week, the reality is that a huge portion of what our children eat is simply out of our hands.
So why does school food look this way? It’s not because the people making it don’t care. It’s simply because the system was designed this way.
“School food professionals deeply care about the kids they serve, and most want to feed them the best meals possible,” says Lori Nelson, Chief School Food Operations Officer at the Chef Ann Foundation and a former school food director with more than 25 years of culinary experience. “They are not your adversaries—they are stuck in a broken school food system, where change is daunting and complex.”
The numbers bear that out. Federal reimbursement for a school lunch is $4.60—and that has to cover food, labor, equipment maintenance, utilities, and administrative overhead. Most school kitchens were built for reheating, not cooking. Staff are underpaid and undertrained. The result is a system that defaults to shrink-wrapped, heat-and-serve meals, not because anyone chose it, but because it’s what the infrastructure supports.
Scratch cooking is the way out—and it’s already working
When Nelson talks about transforming school food, she describes a continuum. On one end: fully prepackaged, individually wrapped meals. On the other: scratch-made meals prepared with whole, raw ingredients. Most school districts, she says, are stuck somewhere in the middle where they’re using ready-made products without adding fresh ingredients or applying any culinary technique.
But the districts that commit to moving along that continuum see real results. In Tompkins County, New York, the Dryden Central School District transitioned from individually wrapped breakfast items heated in ovenable bags to scratch-made French toast casserole. They swapped pre-made macaroni and cheese for a version with fresh-cooked pasta and house-made cheese sauce. They started making baked ziti from scratch using New York beef. By the end of the 2024–25 school year, average daily participation increased 21.8% for breakfast and 39.1% for lunch.
When kids are offered food that actually tastes good, they eat it. When they eat it, participation goes up. When participation goes up, so does reimbursement revenue which, in turn, helps fund more scratch cooking.
And in case you’re wondering what $4.60 can really look like: during her time as a school food director in Texas, Nelson served Pork Tacos Al Pastor—commodity pork shoulder slow-roasted overnight, then finished with a scratch-made marinade of achiote, fresh pineapple, cilantro, onion, and garlic, served in locally sourced tortillas with house-made lime-cilantro slaw, scratch-made black beans, fresh fruit, and local milk.
I’ll be honest: hearing this made me tear up, and I don’t even eat pork. Because that’s a meal made with real thought and real care for real kids—and every child deserves that.
What actually needs to happen—and what you can do
Nelson is clear-eyed about the federal policy landscape. On one hand, for the first time, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend avoiding highly processed foods—a significant milestone. On the other, over $1 billion in local food funding has been cut and significant farm-to-school funding was canceled last year, making it harder for schools to purchase fresh, whole ingredients.
Banning food dyes and defining “ultraprocessed food” are steps in the right direction, but Nelson warns they don’t solve the root problem. “Without addressing outdated school kitchens, undertrained and underpaid staff, and low meal reimbursement rates, we’ll be stuck in a ‘whack-a-mole’ loop where this or that unpronounceable additive is banned but then replaced with something else that might also get banned down the road,” she says. “When schools cook with whole ingredients, they know what’s in their meals.”So what can parents actually do?
Start by getting to know the people who make your kid’s lunch. Most districts have a food service or child nutrition director—their name is usually on your district’s website under the food services or nutrition department, or you can call the district office and ask. Send an email introducing yourself, and request a brief meeting or a chance to visit the kitchen. Ask about their goals, what they’ve tried, what barriers they face. If your school has a wellness committee (many are required to by federal law), ask to join or attend a meeting. That’s often where food decisions are discussed and where parent voices carry real weight. Your school’s PTA can be another way in.
Treat your school food director as an expert in their field—not an obstacle. Nelson says the difference between advocacy that gets results and advocacy that gets politely ignored almost always comes down to partnership versus confrontation. Parents who show up demanding change are met with defensiveness. Parents who ask “what do you need?” and “how can I help?” open the door to something real.
If you want to learn more about how to be an effective advocate for better school food, join a free live panel discussion on April 8 at 1 p.m. ET: “What Parents Need to Know to Improve School Food,” hosted by the Chef Ann Foundation and featuring Motherly CEO Lindsey Abramo, the National PTA’s president-elect Dr. William Datema,Jenné Claiborne, CEO and founder of Sweet Potato Soul, and Lori Nelson. Register here.
