RFK Jr. Is Coming for School Pizza

The Atlantic

3 days ago

Every Monday and Wednesday, students at Channelview High School, outside Houston, are treated to Domino's for lunch. Delivery drivers from a local branch of the fast-food chain arrive at the school with dozens of pizzas fresh out of the oven, served in Domino's-branded cardboard boxes. Children can be picky eaters, but few foods are more universally enticing than freshly cooked pizza—let alone from a restaurant students are almost certainly already familiar with. 'For kids to be able to see Oh, they're serving Domino's, I think it makes a huge difference,' Tanya Edwards, the district's director of nutrition, told me.
The deliveries are part of Domino's 'Smart Slice' initiative, which sends pizzas to school districts around the country—often at little or no cost to students themselves. 'Smart Slice' is part of the national school-lunch program, so taxpayers foot a portion of the bill to guarantee that every kid has lunch to eat. Despite kids' enthusiasm, you can see the problem: Students munching on free fast food might seem to embody everything wrong with the American diet. If school cafeterias can be thought of as classrooms where kids learn about food, giving them Domino's would be akin to teaching driver's-ed students how to drive by letting them play Grand Theft Auto.
The days of school Domino's—and school pizza in general—are numbered. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his supporters are on a mission to overhaul school lunch. Late last month, the Trump administration's Make America Healthy Again Commission released a highly anticipated report on children's health that pointed to school meals as one venue where ultra-processed foods are offered to kids unabated, contributing to obesity and other kinds of chronic disease. Unless cafeteria workers make school pizza from scratch, nearly every kind contains industrial ingredients that qualify the meal as an ultra-processed food. In effect, ridding school lunch of ultra-processed foods means the end of pizza day as we know it.
Many of the food reforms pushed by RFK Jr.'s movement are popular. Doing away with artificial food dyes, for example, is far more sensible than Kennedy's conspiracist views about vaccines. But in the case of banning most school pizza, RFK Jr. could be facing a tougher sell. MAHA's vision for food is about to run headfirst into a bunch of hungry kids in a school cafeteria.
Even though Domino's school pizza is delivered by Domino's drivers carrying Domino's pizza boxes, the company's Smart Slice is different from what would arrive at your door should you order a pie for dinner tonight. Cafeteria pizza has to abide by nutrition standards for school meals that the Obama administration spearheaded in 2010. The overly cheesy rectangular pizza with a cracker-like crust that you might have eaten in school no longer cuts it. Consider Domino's Smart Slice pepperoni pizza: It's made with mostly whole-wheat flour, low-fat cheese, and pepperoni that has half as much sodium than typical Domino's pepperoni. It's not a green salad by any means, but school Domino's is far from the worst thing kids could eat.
Other common cafeteria offerings—such as mini corndogs, mozzarella sticks, and chicken tenders—are also now more nutritious than in decades past. Those standards could still be improved (and we're still talking about corndogs, mozzarella sticks, and chicken tenders), but they have led companies to sell slightly healthier versions of their foods in schools. Research h as shown that, on average, school meals are now the healthiest things kids eat in a day.
In an email, HHS Press Secretary Vianca N. Rodriguez Feliciano said that 'while some of these products may technically meet outdated federal guidelines, they are still heavily engineered, nutritionally weak, and designed for corporate profit, not for the health of our kids.' Indeed, school lunch starts to look considerably less healthy if you account for the growing concern over ultra-processed foods. Many school lunches are made in factories with chemicals such as emulsifiers and flavor enhancers you wouldn't find in a home kitchen. Eating lots of ultra-processed foods is associated with a range of maladies, including Type 2 diabetes and heart disease, though nutritionists are deeply divided on just how much we should be fretting over these industrial ingredients.
To some degree, whether school pizza should be avoided because it's ultra-processed is besides the point. By allowing Domino's into school cafeterias, the government also is essentially giving the company carte blanche to advertise its pizza. Serving Smart Slice out of a typical Domino's box gives 'the false impression to children and parents that the less-healthy products served in their restaurants are healthy choices,' Jennifer Harris, a food-marketing expert, told me in an email.
Kennedy has called for schools to serve 'real food, whole food, farm-fresh food,' instead of anything ultra-processed. It would, of course, be better for school cafeterias to swap out the pepperoni pizza with salad and chicken breast. But for many kids, school lunch subsidized by the government may be their only real meal of the day. At Channelview, where such a large portion of students are eligible for public assistance that everyone eats for free, simply getting food in kids' bellies is top of mind. 'I can make a fancy little sweet-potato black-bean bowl, but I don't think my kids are going to eat it,' Tanya Edwards said. 'Instead, they are going to go home hungry, and I don't really know what they have at home.'
The concern isn't theoretical. Evidence shows that when school meals are too healthy, a sizable portion of kids simply get off the lunch line. In the early 2010s, when the Los Angeles Unified School District overhauled its lunch offerings—an effort that included removing pizza from the menu—schools reported that massive amounts of food were landing in the trash. (The district later brought back pizza, and pepperoni pizza is now the district's most popular item, a spokesperson said.) Food waste is a perennial issue in school meal programs. A Department of Agriculture study of more than 100 schools found that an average of 31 percent of the vegetables included on observed school lunch trays were wasted. Pizza, however, was among the least wasted food, along with breaded and fried chicken patties and nuggets.
Even advocates for healthier school meals admit that there's a limit to how much students will tolerate healthier offerings. 'We definitely need to harness school food to educate kids about healthy eating, but I don't think that means no pizza,' Janet Poppendieck, a professor emerita at Hunter College who wrote a book on fixing school meals, told me. 'We need to include healthy versions of kids' favorite foods; otherwise, I don't think they'll eat.' In part to ensure that kids actually eat lunch, many school districts seem to have pizza day at least once a week. A spokesperson for Florida's Hillsborough County Public Schools, the seventh-largest district in the country, told me that its first, second, fifth, and seventh most popular entrees are all in the pizza family (No. 5 is mini calzones; No. 7 is pizza sticks). All told, the district has doled out nearly 3 million servings this school year.
If it wanted to, the Trump administration could simply force kids to suck it up and literally eat their vegetables. Technically the responsibility of overseeing the school-meal program falls to the USDA—which isn't under Kennedy's purview—but Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has signaled that she is onboard with MAHA-ing school lunch. Still, any attempt to enact a ban would likely invite significant backlash. In 2023, when the federal government floated the idea of banning the sale of sugary chocolate milk in elementary and middle schools, many parents flooded the government with complaints. So did some students: Ben, a fourth grader who left only his first name, wrote in an official comment to the USDA that it should abandon the proposal 'because students are super MAD.' Members of Congress also put pressure on regulators to stop the reform. The USDA later abandoned the chocolate-milk ban. In 2011, after the Obama administration released its new guidelines for school lunch, Republicans in Congress tried to fight back against healthier pizza by classifying the dish as a vegetable.
It's no wonder why MAHA has a problem with school pizza. Kennedy has pointed to corporate malfeasance as a leading source of America's diet problems. You don't have to be a fan of his to feel uneasy that Domino's, a fast-food company that sells philly-cheese-steak-loaded tater tots, is participating in a taxpayer-funded program meant to feed kids nutritious meals. But Kennedy's favored approach to food and, well, everything—big proposals and dramatic overhauls—isn't well suited to school meals. The health secretary might dream of kids eating from a salad bar stocked with seed-oil-free dressings five days a week, but ending school pizza day won't automatically make that happen. Telling kids what to eat is one thing; getting them to eat it is another.