When I think about school lunch, I think about the smell of rectangular pizza, getting warmed up in an industrial oven.

I think about tater tots. I think about those little cartons of reduced fat milk.

But Helena Bottomiller-Evich, she's a reporter over at Politico, she thinks about a vast,

underappreciated supply chain.

The scale of school meals exceeds the largest restaurant chains.

It's a wild world.

School Meals is a wild world.

There's a whole separate food system set up.

I mean, you can get like reduced fat Doritos that you can get in first schools that we can't buy.

There's like low sodium whole grain rich dominoes that you can get for schools that we can't buy. There's like low sodium whole grain rich dominoes that you can get for schools that we can't

buy.

The pizza?

Yeah.

There's a whole other like market that serves schools.

This market, it's been set up to accommodate Washington, because Washington has made a lot of rules for this program.

For example, if you're going to look at just like grains, right?

So like the grains that schools serve, the bread, the pasta, we have a requirement that 50% of grains in schools are

whole grain rich. Whole grain rich means, you know, more than half of the mixture of grains is

whole grain mixed with refined grain. Okay, so that sounds like a good goal. But that's kind of one

example of, you know, as a school, you have to figure out, okay, am I at least at 50%? I've served

biscuits. I've served, you know, pasta. Did I hit that 50% threshold? So you're, you're doing a lot of

calculating. You have to make sure you're hitting, you know, nutrient targets. And you'll hear folks in school meals will call it like the daily miracle. The fact that we are able to feed more than 30 million kids in the U.S. every year on, you know, sometimes they're spending like a dollar per meal, $1.25 on food. That's pretty miraculous, right?

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