ABSTRACT
The 2010 Child Nutrition Act reauthorized spending on a variety of food and nutrition programs, including the national school lunch and school breakfast programs, and upgraded the nutritional standards for these meals. This act was the first significant change to the nutritional standards of these meals in 15 years and the first significant change to the financing for these meals in 30 years. This chapter uses primary sources, including newspaper articles, legislation, committee reports, and articles in the Congressional Record and multiple streams analysis in order to evaluate this surprising policy change. I argue that this change occurred due to the strategic construction of obesity as a public health problem, which foreclosed other potential solutions to both obesity and unhealthy school meals. As such, this chapter implicitly considers the inadvertent consequences of problem definition, as well as the ways in which problem definition is itself explicitly political.
