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California becomes the first state to phase ultraprocessed food out of school meals
(www.nbcnews.com)
Love my state
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2025
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I'd rather be in CA than a lot of states, but it's such a low bar. The politicians are more annoyingly corrupt; passing laws that sound progressive but really help rich cronies in the know. It keeps people pacified into thinking meaningful progress happens as we slide with the rest of the country into an ultra capitalist nightmare.
I'm beyond hoping people will ever see past the illusion. The learned helplessness is so strong that I'd expect California nationalism behind some feudal lord before recognizing that Cali sucks.
California nationalism
Time for a New republic! We've already got the flag covered
I’d rather be in CA
Some counties are progressive than others.
The term ultra processed us pretty controversial unless they explicitly define it in this legislation. A PB & J is considered ultra processed even if you make the peanut butter, the jam, and the bread yourself because those ingredients have been processed heavily from their natural state.
Edit:
It defines such foods as those that pose the greatest risks to consumers based on scientific evidence of adverse health outcomes, and it directs the state Public Health Department to determine which particular products meet the definition by June 2028.
Ah ok that makes sense.
PB&J is not healthy for you regardless of whether it's ultra processed or not
Unless it's directly harmful to you like alcohol, the term "healthy" when relating to food is very poorly defined, and is for the most part exploited by companies to make you feel bad about what you're currently eating, and to sell you their food at a markup because it's "healthy"
What's healthy for is having a good idea of the levels of essential nutrients you intake, your caloric intake, and making sure you eat everything in moderation.
Listen, you only need sugar if you're doing sports in the next hour. You can eat zero sugar and be perfectly fine. It's not a nutrient necessary for life. So it doesn't fall under necessary nutrient.
Bread, similarly, is mostly carbs with little nutritional value it has coming from added vitamins in the flour. The amino acid profile is trash (low in lysine)
Peanut butter has some protein, but it's mostly fat. You need fat to live, so I'll consider it healthy.
Overall, a PB&J sandwich is less healthy than a pack of peanuts. That is unless you're a lumberjack or a professional athlete who needs the extra calories
There’s already a classification system in place used by researchers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification), but I imagine it has to be translated into legalese.
Also, according to that classification system, a PB&J wouldn’t necessarily be a UPF. You could use whole grain bread with no additives, jam made using raw sugar or honey and no other additives, and peanut butter with no additives.
Key factors to the Nova classification system seem to be whether it was made industrially and requires substantial processing, and the amount of additives, and whether those additives are heavily processed themselves.
My concern is that some of these "additives" could just be harmless preservatives, dyes, or even lab synthesized ingredients that are usually naturally occuring through some non industrial method, but they add them a different way because it's cheaper at scale.
Not saying it's the same but it gives me similar pause and concern as the the "natural dyes" initiative by RFK. The natural dyes are literally just the same chemicals just gotten from "natural" means rather than synthesized in a lab.
Another example is the fear mongering against high fructose corn syrup in the 00's when it's literally broken down into the same thing as sugar in your body before it's used. The only difference between it and sugar, even down to flavor, is that it was created in a lab from corn because it was cheaper because of government subsidies.
Yes a pb & j is ultraprocessed food, there is nothing healthy, only fat and sugar.
Check the ingredients of infustrial bread itself you might have surprises
Let's see how the magat morons try to spin this as being un-american and biased...
Probably the same way the did when Michelle Obama tried the first time.
"it's gunna kill jobs" "it'll trample my right to profit off slowly killing others"
10 year deadline
As an extremely experienced former K12 student^/s^ , I can tell you this promise is worth absolutely jack shit.
My burning fury for the Democratic party pretending to care about its constituency started with Michelle Obama nuking my school lunch.
Although to be fair, a rotting prison meal is still better than the Republican alternative of no food at all.
Why wait 10 years? Can it really take that long to change meal plans?
Yes. Contracts are hard to break, and most school food is produced by the same companies that produce prison slop. $2 per meal, per day is hard
I worked for a catering company that was looking into making a bid on a contract at a for profit prison company in California. The bosses had the chef put together a 7 day sample menu. He shows it to me and asks for feedback. This guy put stuff like quinoa and salmon on there. I just started laughing. I couldn't help it. He askes what was funny and I asked him what the food cost was. Apparently no one thought to ask or had a clue what a typical prison meal consisted of. He just sort of assumed it would be around 6-7 dollars per meal. The contract was for 87 cents per meal. That's right. The prison wanted 3 meals per person per day for $2.61. To be fair, there was also a flat fee but it would barely cover the cost of delivering the meals and the additional staff required to produce them. For it to be worth it to the owners, we would have had to produce those meals for about $1.50 per person per day. You don't get to serve roasted salmon with quinoa salad at that price point.
The State will spend hundreds of dollars a day to keep someone locked up but don't worry because they will make it back by skimping on five dollars worth of food and serving people mystery product #4291 instead.
And only pay them pennies for an hour of forced work.
The first three years are just for the department of health to research the problem and develop standards based on available and newly funded research. The next seven years would likely see schools phasing out problematic foods one by one as they find appropriate alternatives and end contracts.
Keep in mind that processed foods tend to be cheaper, too, so trying to maintain the same cost while replacing the processed foods will take time and effort.
The costs will rise, as you say it takes more effort to phase out industrial food.
Here we have fresh and healthy local food for kids, made by a school cook but it is very expensive, fortunately a part of the cost is supported by the city depending on family income.
California and Minnesota getting good stuff done while the rest of us are lagging further behind.
I mean, California is also going backwards on LGBTQ+ rights, so it's not all wine and roses there.
So no more rectangular “pizza?” We used to have brownies that smelled like kelp too.
The rectangular pizza is not actually that processed. It comes from a US Department of Agriculture recipe and you can make it at home using common grocery store ingredients, although the USDA recipe is intended to make 100 servings.
The recipe does call for something called "pourable pizza dough" but there's a recipe for that too and it's basically just very thick pancake batter.
Edit: https://www.tastinghistory.com/recipes/schoollunchcheesepizza
Thanks for that recipe. I think I saw his episode on this when he made it, but never went looking for the recipe. I've been kinda wanting this pizza for a while, and I think I may actually try making it now.
I remember one of the schools I went to as a kid serving a version of this pizza with exactly two pepperoni on it, looking out of the middle of the slab like greasy little eyeballs.
Not sure if you made the recipe already, but I recommend baking it for longer than it calls for, because the "pourable pizza dough" is really watery and will be undercooked otherwise. You should probably bake it for an additional 7–8 minutes more than it says to bake it for before adding toppings, and then keep it in the oven for another extra 2–3 minutes once toppings are added. I get that school pizza does not necessarily taste great anyway, but I think this change improves the flavour a lot.
Thanks for the tips. I haven't made it yet, mostly because I'm not sure what I'll do with a half sheet of school lunch pizza. I may save it for the next potluck I attend.
didnt michelle obama already do this? i thought it was all figured out by now.
All she did was get rid of the high sugary stuff mostly.
Lies, she got rid of everything except the high sugary stuff aside from drinks in vending machines.
We lost basically everything with a Scoville unit over 10 in exchange for 35g sugar per serving chocolate milk and aspartame bullcrappary in the vending machines.
Plus the portion sizes dropped anywhere from 10-40% depending on the meal.
I even lost the fresh fruit bar for canned peaches.
It has been almost 2 decades and I still want revenge for my KIA flamin hot funyuns.
At my school, they got rid of any kind of regular soda and regular Gatorade. Diet only and the snacks had to be the healthier kind like Baked Lays. We still had a fruit bar though so you could have something like peaches or a banana but they still had fucking pop tarts in the morning though lol.
Clearly big pop tart got to the food purchaser.
:sad mr beast noises:
My doc just recommended a book, Ultraprocessed People. Guessing I am about to have much stronger feelings on the topic as I learn more about it.
Another victory for that entity called "Center for Science in the Public Interest" aka food police.
Personally, I’m grateful that California takes the time to investigate whether products are safe or not, and chooses not to force kids to eat unhealthy foods.
The question remains: what counts as "ultra-processed"? America is a country where ketchup counts as vegetable for school meals. Can you imagine them serving normal, freshly cooked and healthy food instead?
Ketchup is not considered a vegetable in America. That is a myth. Some random school official essentially made the equivalent of a shit post (said something stupid in a meeting with no serious intent) and local papers ran with it.
If it really is a myth, it is so fitting for the US that no one i know has ever questioned it.
Myth? No serious intent?
Reporting on the proposed directive, Newsweek magazine illustrated its story with a bottle of ketchup captioned "now a vegetable." The proposal was criticized by nutritionists and Democratic politicians who staged photo ops where they dined on nutrition-poor meals that conformed to the new lax standards. Compounding this outrage, the same day that the USDA announced the cost-cutting proposal for school lunches, the White House purchased $209,508 worth of new china and place settings embossed in gold with the presidential seal.
Um... yes??
Did you read the linked article? The regulation doesn't define ketchup as a vegetable. It explains how that was a thing people concocted to attack the proposed nutritional standards as being too lax.