Michelle Obama blames partisanship for making school lunch program controversial

Former first lady Michelle Obama said she couldn’t believe how controversial her school lunch initiative turned out to be during a recent podcast interview.  “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,'” Obama said on the podcast, “Not Gonna Lie” with Kylie Kelce, released Thursday.“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,” she added.Kennedy leads the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement and has said that he will push for “radical transparency” on food safety and removing artificial food dyes, chemicals and preservatives.In 2010, Obama launched her “Let’s Move” initiative intended to curb childhood obesity. The initiative had a focus on reforming school lunches and included changes such as “more whole grains, fruits, and vegetables; low-fat milk dairy products; and less sodium and fat,” as well as portion control.

The program specified that schools that complied with the changes would receive a reimbursement of 6 additional cents for each lunch served. “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,” Obama told Kelce. While acknowledging the pushback, Obama said that she thinks the program made a difference. “Eventually, we got a lot done.

You know, we were able to improve the nutrition standards, the labels so that they were more readable, so that people’s parents could really understand the breakdown of fat and suga...