This is an excerpt reprinted with permission from The Hagstrom Report, a news service providing original national and international agricultural news to its subscribers.

The drama over school meals continued Wednesday, following the online publication of The New York Times Magazine article How School Lunch Became the Latest Political Battleground.”

The story that appeared online on Tuesday is scheduled to be published in the Sunday print edition of the magazine.

School Nutrition Association CEO Patricia Montague wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times that said the article “ignored critical failures of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) overly prescriptive school meal regulations and misrepresented the School Nutrition Association’s (SNA) advocacy efforts, specifically omitting policy solutions proposed by school nutrition professionals.”

Montague repeated SNA’s calls for “commonsense flexibility” in administering the healthier meals rules, but in the letter she did not question the lengthy coverage and analysis of SNA’s decision to replace longtime lobbyist Marshall Matz.

The New York Times — How School Lunch Became the Latest Political Battleground


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