When U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unveiled the “Harvest to Hallways” initiative last month, they described it as a groundbreaking program that would finally bring healthy, locally grown food back into America’s schools.

It isn’t. The Harvest to Hallways initiative, which includes $125 million in funding for cafeteria upgrades, local food grants and research, is just a fraction of the $660 million in funding this same Trump administration canceled last year for schools to buy locally sourced food.

And while Kennedy accused American schools of committing “mass poisoning,” some schools have been making great strides in improving food quality long before the MAHA movement entered the White House.

The idea of real food, farm-to-school supply chains, and a reduced reliance on processed convenience items is not controversial to dietitians, school nutrition professionals or parents. Good food, it turns out, is popular with everyone: progressive or conservative, rural or urban. District nutrition directors told Reuters that the real challenge they face isn’t a lack of vision — it’s navigating the mixed signals of funding cuts and calls for healthier and more expensive food. It’s enough to drive even the sweetest lunch lady into early retirement.

In February, for instance, I wrote about the vibes-based approach behind “MyTriangle” and the revisions to the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which sidelined the government’s own scientific advisory committee to promote more red meat and dairy. Six months later, the Make America Healthy Again movement’s sentiments remain unchanged along with their approach: policy by press conference, presented as a fresh start.

Thankfully, Minnesota has never waited for Washington’s permission to tackle hunger, or improve the quality of our food. Upstream, we have our nationally renowned “Team D”, tracking food safety incidents and preventing foodborne illnesses like Cyclospora. In the fight against hunger, we’re also pioneers with free school meals for every student in the state, regardless of income. Eight other states have enacted similar measures.

Saint Paul Public Schools offers a striking example of a district making great strides to serve quality meals to all children. In 2015, long before MAHA, nutrition services director Stacy Koppen’s department created its own list of ingredients to avoid and monitor, all the while taking advantage of federal programs to begin serving free meals across most of its schools under the federal Community Eligibility Provision.

“We do have a menu philosophy,” she told me. “A very clear-cut list of ingredients that we’re avoiding, and then also ingredients that we are watching.”

Any flagged item must pass through four people before reaching a tray: the district chef, the director, the nutritionist and the purchasing analyst. While nitrates are not banned by USDA rules anywhere in the country, Saint Paul avoids them.

“There’s no USDA standard that says you can’t serve something that has nitrates,” Koppen said. “But we know through the evidence we’re seeing right now in scientific literature that there is a connection to some consequences for young children.”

The idea of cleaner meals and simplified ingredients didn’t just take hold in MAHA or back-to-the-land segments of our public discourse: New York City recently passed its own set of rules which are very similar to Saint Paul’s, banning processed meats and restricting additives like titanium dioxide across every meal the city serves.

“I appreciate that the Harvest to Hallways initiative includes grant funding opportunities for schools,” Koppen said following the announcement. “Grants and research can be very valuable.” Her main concern is what the money likely won’t cover.

“To create equitable access for all students, districts need adequate staffing, training, equipment, facilities and sustainable funding,” she wrote. “Not some schools. All schools.”

Unsurprisingly, this sentiment was echoed nationally in a recent survey by the School Nutrition Association (SNA) on school nutrition trends. SNA’s annual survey, conducted nationwide in October 2025, found that “serious concern” about a program’s financial sustainability had climbed three years in a row, from 45% in the 2023-24 school year to 51% in 2025-26 — the largest single-year jump on the trendline. Only 21% of school nutrition directors could state that federal reimbursement covered the true cost of a kids lunch.

In that vein, universal school meals gave Minnesota leverage that has yet to be fully applied — giving schools the resources to make good food possible and available for every kid by funding the programs themselves across the state. Federal recommendations to radically improve food quality with one hand while cutting funding with the other puts further stress on districts already operating on a tight budget.

Universal access changes this equation. Every quality improvement Saint Paul Public Schools implements now benefits children who wouldn’t otherwise have received a meal at all, not just those whose families could afford good food or navigate a free-and-reduced application. That’s the case for a state floor on quality: Minnesota has already built the essential piece — access — that makes the quality component worth pursuing at scale statewide. Every child in Minnesota deserves a meal free of high-fructose corn syrup, nitrates and excess fats.

None of what Saint Paul has established depends on a federal mandate, and perhaps the greatest challenge for school nutrition directors today is identifying where Trump administration media posturing ends and regulatory policy begins.

“Myself and a lot of my peers, we are waiting to see what USDA will actually issue,” Koppen said. “Our school menu is not changing for the school year based on those recommendations. We’re still adhering to the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.”

Any food system, especially one feeding thousands of Minnesota kids every day, cannot pivot that quickly. To do so without the federal rulemaking processes and policy rollout common in years past could leave nutrition directors, particularly those who jump the gun on making their lunch programs MAHA-compliant, risking what little funding they have left — should political winds change. After all, the next version of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans is just around the corner, due in 2030.

I asked Koppen what people outside the cafeteria still misunderstand about school food. “Ketchup does not count as a vegetable,” she said. As we wrapped up, she had made another point, almost as an aside, about how few parents have actually seen what their kids eat now. “It would be a great opportunity for parents to take a visit to the school, have lunch or maybe even breakfast, with their child,” she said. Not many have taken her up on it; neither parents in Saint Paul nor policymakers in Washington.

With school back in session, it might just be time for parents to take their lunch break in the cafeteria, where Minnesota’s kids eat free every day.