Renegade School Lunch Lady, Chef Ann Cooper, who runs the school lunch program for Berkeley's public schools, is the lede in Sunday's farm bill story by Nicole Gaouette in the LA Times:

When Ann Cooper took over the lunch program for Berkeley schools, she found children eating chicken nuggets and Tater Tots. (”Pre-flash fried with corn fillers and corn coating,” she tut-tutted.) There was also canned fruit cocktail and chocolate milk. (”Both with high-fructose corn syrup.”)
Lunches averaged 800 to 900 calories — much higher than federal guidelines — and were loaded with salt. “That is just crazy in a world of obesity,” Cooper said.

The question is, will we be able to muster enough momentum over the next few months to improve the nutrition title and expand funding. Gaouette quotes my sentiment on the current stall-out in the Senate.

"Farm bills always favor the status quo when they’re rushed,” said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group. “This gives us some time to educate people.”

The good news and the bad in the Senate agriculture committee's pending nutrition title of the farm bill are summarized here by Dottie Rosenbaum and Stacy Dean of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The good news, in a nutshell:

Including improvements added to the bill by a manager’s amendment after the bill passed out of Committee, the nutrition provisions of the bill include about $4.3 billion over five years in improvements for the Food Stamp Program and the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), $1.1 billion for an expanded program under the School Lunch Program to provide free fresh fruits and vegetables in schools, as well as various provisions that reauthorize and improve the Food Stamp Program and various commodity distribution and other nutrition programs.

Here's the main worry:

Under the Senate Agriculture Committee bill, all of the food stamp improvements listed below, with one small exception that is noted, would expire after five years. This unprecedented approach to food stamp legislation appears to result from the bill not including sufficient budgetary offsets to make these improvements permanent. Unless Congress later took action to extend the proposed policies, more than 10 million recipients would experience benefit cuts and over 100,000 low-income people would be cut off food stamps in 2013.

Several amendments likely to be offered to tighten rules for crop subsidies (like Dorgan Grassley) or reduce crop insurance company profits (Brown-Sununu) would devote some of the savings to nutrition programs. But we'll have to dig deep to win those amendments, and dig even deeper to dramatically improve and boost funding for the nutrition title in this farm bill and in budget battles in the years to come.