CleanEats Coalition

Federal law makes every school meal program keep a written wellness policy, and it names students as people who get a seat at the table. Here's how to find yours and use it.

Federal rules cap reduced-price lunch at 40 cents, but that still keeps some kids out of the cafeteria line. Nebraska just passed a pilot to wipe it out. Here's how it works.

Federal rules allow school garden produce in cafeteria meals. Local policy is what gets in the way. Here's how students can fix that.

Unpaid school meal debt can turn into a stamped hand, a swapped tray, or a cold sandwich. Here is what federal rules require, which states have banned the practice, and how students can find out where their district stands.

California's AB 1264 is the first state law to go after ultra-processed food in school meals. Here is how it defines the term, what it exempts, and the clock your cafeteria should be watching.

A federal law signed in January 2026 lets schools serve whole and 2% milk again. The key word is lets. Here is what changed, what did not, and why the flavored milk on your tray still has a sugar cap.

In 2021, scientists at a California state agency published a review of the research on food dyes and children. Three years later, that review helped convince lawmakers to ban six dyes from every public school cafeteria in the state. Most students have never heard of it. This post walks through what that report actually said, how it turned into a law called AB 2316, what the law covers and what it skips, and what you can take from it to your own school. The report that started

When Lincoln Public Schools tells parents which item on the menu still contains artificial dye, the reaction is almost always the same. Andrew Ashelford, the district's nutrition services director, says parents respond with, "Wow, that's it?" The answer is the gelatin base used in the fruited gelatin cups. That one item is the whole story in Nebraska's biggest district, and it matters for every student trying to get dyes out of their own cafeteria. This post covers what Nebra

Most school boards set aside a few minutes at every meeting for public comment. Often it's three. Most nights, nobody signs up to talk about lunch. That means the person who does gets the full attention of the people who approve the food contracts, the budgets, and the policies behind every tray in your cafeteria. This post walks through why that microphone matters, what to say in three minutes, and how to follow up so your comment turns into something that sticks. You don't

Most school food laws start with a date on the calendar. Texas wrote its school lunch law around something less obvious: a contract. SB 314 bans more than a dozen artificial dyes and additives from school meals, but it only kicks in when a district signs or renews a food contract on or after September 1, 2026. That date just passed. This post covers what the law bans, why the contract trigger matters more than the headline, and the three questions any Texas student can ask th

In April 2026, Nebraska's governor signed LB 940, a law that bans six artificial dyes from school meals. Tennessee passed its own version, SB 2423, the same year. Both sound like wins, and they are. But both also carry a start date of August 1, 2027, which means the students who fought for them may graduate before the change ever reaches their trays. This post covers what these laws actually ban, why the timeline is so long, and the one loophole in the fine print that student

In 2026, USDA handed out nearly $20 million in Patrick Leahy Farm to School grants. That is the biggest single-year investment in the program's history, and it was split across dozens of projects in every corner of the country. Odds are, your school wasn't one of them, and nobody told you the money existed. This post breaks down what the grant pays for, why it matters for what ends up on your tray, and how a student with no budget and no title can push a district to go after

In March 2026, a federal judge blocked West Virginia's first-in-the-nation ban on synthetic food dyes, ruling the law too vague to enforce against retailers statewide. Food and beverage lobbyists who'd fought the law for a year finally got the win they wanted, at least on paper. But buried in the ruling was a detail that mattered more than the headline: the injunction never touched what was happening in the state's schools. Since August 1, 2025, West Virginia cafeterias have

In 2012, a ninth grader in Hattiesburg, Mississippi read the ingredient list on a bottle of orange Gatorade and stopped at three words: brominated vegetable oil. She'd seen that same chemical described somewhere else, in a patent for flame-retardant foam. Same compound, different bottle. Sarah Kavanagh started a petition asking PepsiCo to take it out of her favorite drink, and within a year, it was gone from every bottle of Gatorade sold in the U.S. The federal government too

Time it yourself tomorrow. Start the clock when you actually sit down with your tray, not when the bell rings, and stop it when you stand up to dump it. In a lot of American schools that number lands somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes. The walk from class, the wait in line, the swipe at the register, the search for a seat: none of that is eating, and all of it comes out of the same period. Here is the part almost no student knows. There is no federal law setting a mini

Walk your building tomorrow with your phone out and count logos. The scoreboard in the gym. The cooler by the front office. The cups at the concession stand. The menu board over the serving line. The banner on the fence by the practice field. Most students have never counted, and most would be surprised by the number they get. Here is the part almost nobody knows. There is a federal rule that says a lot of those logos are not supposed to be there. It has been on the books sin

On January 1, 2023, sesame officially became the ninth major food allergen in the United States. The FASTER Act required every packaged food containing sesame to say so on the label, in plain English, the same way peanuts and milk have to be declared. It was supposed to make life safer for the roughly 1.5 million Americans who report a sesame allergy. Here is what actually happened. A wave of large commercial bakeries responded by adding sesame flour to products that never ha

Walk into your cafeteria tomorrow and look for a piece of paper. Federal law says a report from your school's most recent food safety inspection is supposed to be posted where the public can see it. In most schools, nobody can tell you where that paper is. Sometimes it's taped inside a kitchen office. Sometimes it lives in a binder at the district nutrition office. Plenty of schools have never posted it at all. That report is one of the very few documents about your cafeteria

Stand next to the trash can in your cafeteria for one lunch period and actually count what goes in. Whole apples. Unopened milk cartons. Sealed cups of peaches. Vegetable sides that never got touched. Nobody at your school is writing any of it down, and it is probably the most useful piece of information about school food your building will produce all year. This post is about plate waste: what the national numbers say, why the usual explanation for them is wrong, and two thi

The line moves fast. Somebody behind the counter drops a cup of syrupy canned peaches onto your tray without asking, and forty minutes later that cup goes into the trash unopened. It happens at your school today, it happened yesterday, and it will happen tomorrow at roughly the same rate. Most students assume the tray is fixed and their only choice is to eat it or throw it out. It isn't. There is a federal rule that governs exactly what has to land on your tray and what you a