World Business

WASHINGTON —

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Add schools to the list of places hazard hard by means of tumor food prices.

The school lunch program - long a trustworthy source of food for kids - is having serious trouble making cheap, healthy meals.

The culprit is food prices that hold rocketed higher as fuel prices rise. It’s not just the zooming require to be paid of oil and gas; food prices are also driven by exaction for corn-based ethanol, worldwide demand for food and the weak dollar, among other things.

These far-flung factors have combined to put the squeeze on chide kitchens, which contract free and reduced-price lunches, as well as full-price lunches, by reason of more than half of the nation’s 60 million school children.

“We are struggling to make ends muster,” Katie Wilson, president-elect of the School Nutrition Association, told members of the House Education and Labor Committee on Wednesday. “We simply slip on’t acquire the funds to continue in succession with this.”

Next year, most schools plan to charge more for full-price meals in addition to cutting staff, according to preliminary results of a School Nutrition Association study.

Schools can’t put just anything on a child’s lunch wooden vessel. Because the powers that be subsidizes lunches, schools are expected to come federal guidelines as far as concerns healthy corroding by means of providing lots of recent fruit and vegetables lengthwise with whole grains.

Those are the very foods hit hardest by the rising cost of food, as are milk and meat, two universal offerings in school lunch rooms.

It costs more to make fruit and veggies in part because they are processed less, if at all, which makes it harder to spread around the cost. And it costs more to make milk and meat because they come from farm animals that eat mostly corn.

Even a one-penny enlarge in the cost of milk can cost the community’s schools another $54 million, said Pavel N. Matustik, chief provender services administrator of the Santa Clarita Valley School in California.

The government reimburses schools $2.57 for both grain in powder, but for many districts, the cost of a lunch is far over $3, Wilson said.

The price of milk prompted Matustik to ask whether schools should even have to do milk through every meal, a question he acknowledged would get him in trouble by the nation’s dairy farmers.