Former First Lady Michelle Obama is surprised that her school lunch program proved to be so controversial.
Obama made the remarks during an appearance this week on the Not Gonna Lie podcast with Kylie Kelce, asserting that her decision to make a difference with school lunches — and her overall “Let’s Move” initiative — was “strategic” in nature.
“I was trying to be strategic about aligning my agenda with something that was important to the West Wing. And I thought, ‘There’s no way that anyone is going to take issue with trying to make school lunches healthier, getting kids more active,’” she said.
The wife of former President Barack Obama then appeared to try and take credit for more recent nutrition-related statements made by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., claiming that she said “the same things” during her school lunch initiative, which launched in 2010.
“Just trying to make the next generation healthier than ours and, boy, was I wrong, which is really interesting in these times with the current Secretary of Health and Human Services [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] who is now saying some of the same things that I was saying,” Obama said.
She ultimately blamed the controversy on partisan differences. “It became a partisan issue. People were telling me that I’m trying to be the ‘nanny state’ and I’m trying to control what our kids are eating. And telling them what’s good for them and what’s not good for them.”
However, the former first lady maintained that her team achieved its goals with her program. She argued that they improved nutrition standards and factors such as “labels so that they were more readable, so that people’s parents could really understand the breakdown of fat and sugar. And it was clear we got the school nutrition standards improved in our schools for the first time in, like, 50 years.”
Obama’s school lunch initiative garnered a flood of negative attention. Many students posted photos online of their unappetizing meals after its rules were implemented. President Donald Trump worked to expand the overly restrictive program by bringing items such as chocolate milk back to the table during his first term in 2017.
“Schools need flexibility in menu planning so they can serve nutritious and appealing meals,” Trump’s then secretary of agriculture, Sonny Perdue, said at the time.
“Schools want to offer food that students actually want to eat. It doesn’t do any good to serve nutritious meals if they wind up in the trash can,” he added.
In 2020, the first Trump administration went beyond chocolate milk to announce a comprehensive rollback of the Obama-era school lunch standards.
“Schools and school districts continue to tell us that there is still too much food waste and that more common-sense flexibility is needed to provide students nutritious and appetizing meals,” Perdue stated. “We listened and now we’re getting to work.”
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