Fast forward to April 2010, when Oliver reinvades Huntington to confront McCoy, who is threatening to put processed foods back on the district's menus. McCoy, reprising the role of helpless victim that has brought her TV notoriety, tells Oliver that she had to order more processed foods for the 2010 - 2011 school year. Referring to her warehouse full of frozen chicken nuggets, tenders, fingers, and patties, McCoy manages to squeak out, "We don't want it," but "We've got to have some food!" To which Oliver replies, "But not processed."
Exactly.
Federal aid for school meals comes in two forms. First, the government provides money to help pay for school meals served to children whose family income falls below certain economic thresholds. In addition, the USDA provides school districts with surplus foods through the federal commodity food program. Early each calendar year, school district food service directors like McCoy place their commodity orders for the following school year. The list of products available to them includes raw, whole-muscle meat products such as chicken, turkey breasts, pork loins, and ground beef. While these products are almost certainly the result of the factory farming system that now passes for animal husbandry in this country, they are nonetheless basic cuts of meat that our grandmothers would recognize as food. These "brown box" products are available to most school districts for the cost of shipping and handling—about three to four dollars per case—and can be turned into herb-roasted chicken, barbecued pork, sliced turkey sandwiches, meatballs, or any number of scratch-cooked items.
But the USDA is not just the overseer of the National School Lunch Program. It also acts as the federal government's marketing arm for industrial agriculture and its progeny, the processed food and beverage industry. Given the current state of campaign finance laws, it's no surprise that the USDA's allegiance to corporate interests wins out over its duty to America's children.
This manifests itself in the USDA explicitly encouraging school districts to spend cold hard cash to turn free commodity foods into the highly processed products that our retired armed forces officials are now holding partially responsible for our lack of military readiness.
According to the USDA's own website:
Commodity Processing expands donated food use from a limited number of commodities to a broader array of nutritionally sound, popular items, while keeping labor costs to a minimum. Also, State distributing agencies and [over 150] food processing companies have learned that working together is mutually beneficial to the food industry and program participants alike.
The site goes on to provide a handy chart clearly laying out the "nutritionally sound, popular," and "mutually beneficial" products that can be obtained through such processing:
At least 70 products are reprocessed. Those that are reprocessed most often are:
According to the USDA's own data, about 30 percent of the approximately 1 billion pounds of USDA commodities made available to schools each school year are "directly diverted" for further processing.