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S. HRG. 111–798 

REAUTHORIZATION OF U.S. 

CHILD NUTRITION PROGRAMS: 

OPPORTUNITIES TO FIGHT HUNGER 

AND IMPROVE CHILD HEALTH 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE, 

NUTRITION, AND FORESTRY 

UNITED STATES SENATE 

ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS 

FIRST SESSION 

NOVEMBER 17, 2009 

Printed for the use of the 

Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry 

( 

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.agriculture.senate.gov 

COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE, NUTRITION, AND FORESTRY 

BLANCHE L. LINCOLN, Arkansas, Chairman 

PATRICK J. LEAHY, Vermont 

TOM HARKIN, Iowa 

KENT CONRAD, North Dakota 

MAX BAUCUS, Montana 

DEBBIE STABENOW, Michigan 

E. BENJAMIN NELSON, Nebraska 

SHERROD BROWN, Ohio 

ROBERT CASEY, Jr., Pennsylvania 

AMY KLOBUCHAR, Minnesota 

MICHAEL BENNET, Colorado 

KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND, New York 

SAXBY CHAMBLISS, Georgia 

RICHARD G. LUGAR, Indiana 

THAD COCHRAN, Mississippi 

MITCH MCCONNELL, Kentucky 

PAT ROBERTS, Kansas 

MIKE JOHANNS, Nebraska 

CHARLES GRASSLEY, Iowa 

JOHN THUNE, South Dakota 

JOHN CORNYN, Texas 

ROBERT HOLIFIELD, Majority Staff Director 

JESSICA L. WILLIAMS, Chief Clerk 

MARTHA SCOTT POINDEXTER, Minority Staff Director 

ANNE C. HAZLETT, Minority Chief Counsel 

(II) 

(III) 

C O N T E N T S 

Page 

HEARING(S): 

Reauthorization of U.S. Child Nutrition Programs: Opportunities to Fight 

Hunger and Improve Child Health ..................................................................... 1 

Tuesday, November 17, 2009 

STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY SENATORS 

Lincoln, Hon. Blanche L., U.S. Senator from the State of Arkansas, Chairman, Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry ................................ 1 

Chambliss, Hon. Saxby, U.S. Senator from the State of Georgia ........................ 3 

Panel I 

Vilsack, Hon. Tom, Secretary, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, 

DC .......................................................................................................................... 5 

Panel II 

Bogle, Margaret, Executive Director, Delta Obesity Prevention Research Unit, 

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Little Rock, 

Arkansas ............................................................................................................... 26 

Huddleston, Rich, Executive Director, Arkansas Advocates for Children and 

Families, Little Rock, Arkansas .......................................................................... 29 

Sanders, Rhonda, Executive Director, Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance, Little 

Rock, Arkansas ..................................................................................................... 30 

Smith, Jennifer, Director of Compliance, Wal–Mart Stores, Inc., Bentonville, 

Arkansas ............................................................................................................... 33 

APPENDIX 

PREPARED STATEMENTS: 

Casey, Hon. Robert P., Jr. ............................................................................... 50 

Gillibrand, Hon. Kirsten .................................................................................. 52 

Harkin, Hon. Tom ............................................................................................ 54 

Roberts, Hon. Pat ............................................................................................. 56 

Bogle, Margaret ................................................................................................ 57 

Huddleston, Rich .............................................................................................. 63 

Sanders, Rhonda ............................................................................................... 72 

Smith, Jennifer ................................................................................................. 78 

Vilsack, Hon. Tom ............................................................................................ 89 

DOCUMENT(S) SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD: 

American Frozen Food Institute, prepared statement .................................. 98 

Child Food Insecurity: The Economic Impact on Our Nation ....................... 104 

Expanding Access to Child Nutrition Programs ............................................ 133 

Feeding America, prepared statement ............................................................ 139 

Obesity, Food Insecurity and the Federal Child Nutrition Programs: Understanding the Linkages ............................................................................. 143 

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center to Prevent Childhood Obesity, 

prepared statement ....................................................................................... 176 

Study Finds Lack of Food Plaguing More Families ....................................... 187 

Page

IV 

DOCUMENT(S) SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD—Continued 

‘‘Even Very Low Levels of Food Insecurity Found to Harm Children’s 

Health’’, Children’s Healthwatch Policy ACTION Brief ............................ 189 

‘‘Overweight Children, Weight-Based Teasing and Academic Performance’’, International Journal of Pediatric Obesity ...................................... 191 

QUESTION AND ANSWER: 

Chambliss, Hon. Saxby: 

Written questions for Hon. Tom Vilsack ........................................................ 200 

Harkin, Hon. Tom: 

Written questions for Hon. Tom Vilsack ........................................................ 200 

Bennet, Hon. Michael: 

Written questions for Hon. Tom Vilsack ........................................................ 201 

Brown, Hon. Sherrod: 

Written questions for Hon. Tom Vilsack ........................................................ 204 

Cornyn, Hon. John: 

Written questions for Hon. Tom Vilsack ........................................................ 203 

Casey, Hon. Robert P., Jr.: 

Written questions for Hon. Tom Vilsack ........................................................ 203 

Gillibrand, Hon. Kirsten: 

Written questions for Hon. Tom Vilsack ........................................................ 205 

Vilsack, Hon. Tom: 

Written response to questions from Hon. Saxby Chambliss ......................... 208 

Written response to questions from Hon. Tom Harkin ................................. 210 

Written response to questions from Hon. Michael Bennet ........................... 213 

Written response to questions from Hon. John Cornyn ................................ 216 

Written response to questions from Hon. Robert P. Casey, Jr. .................... 218 

Written response to questions from Hon. Sherrod Brown ............................ 221 

Written response to questions from Hon. Kirsten Gillibrand ....................... 224 

(1) 

REAUTHORIZATION OF U.S. 

CHILD NUTRITION PROGRAMS: 

OPPORTUNITIES TO FIGHT HUNGER 

AND IMPROVE CHILD HEALTH 

Tuesday, November 17, 2009 

UNITED STATES SENATE, 

COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE, NUTRITION, AND FORESTRY, 

Washington, DC 

The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:30 a.m., in Room 

562, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Blanche Lincoln, Chairman of the committee, presiding. 

Present or submitting a statement: Senators Lincoln, Harkin, 

Stabenow, Brown, Casey, Klobuchar, Bennet, Gillibrand, Chambliss, Lugar, and Grassley. 

STATEMENT OF HON. BLANCHE L. LINCOLN, U.S. SENATOR 

FROM THE STATE OF ARKANSAS, CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE 

ON AGRICULTURE, NUTRITION, AND FORESTRY 

Chairman LINCOLN. Well, good morning to everyone, and I hope 

the sky doesn’t fall because I am starting early, which is unprecedented for me. 

[Laughter.] 

Chairman LINCOLN. Unprecedented for me. I was waiting on our 

colleague, Senator Chambliss, and I know he will be joining us 

shortly, but I think I will go ahead and begin so that we can move 

forward. 

But good morning to everyone. We welcome you all to the Senate 

Agriculture Committee, where today we will continue a series of 

hearings begun by my predecessor, Senator Tom Harkin, in anticipation of the reauthorization of the Federal Child Nutrition Programs. 

We are honored today to be joined by two very distinguished panels of witnesses, including Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack 

and a panel of experts from my home State of Arkansas. 

We undertake this task at a very difficult time. Just one week 

before Thanksgiving, as we all reflect on the many blessings in our 

lives, we are reminded of the tremendous need that exists across 

our great country. I know as a child, a farmer’s daughter, and looking out at the field, realizing the plenty that existed and also realizing the need that existed in the community that I grew up, in 

East Arkansas. 

Just yesterday, the Department of Agriculture released its annual report on hunger and food insecurity. The technical terms 

2 

that USDA uses in this report are low food security and very low 

food security. But folks, we have got to be honest with ourselves 

and honest what that really means. It means that these are families that are either hungry or a meal or two away from being hungry. 

This report highlights the seriousness of the child nutrition bill 

that lies before us. According to the USDA, in 2008, 16.4 percent 

of all individuals, just over 49 million people, experienced hunger 

or were at risk of hunger at some point in time during the prior 

year. This is an increase of nearly 13 million people over a year. 

Never before in the history of this survey has this country experienced increases of this magnitude. 

For our most vulnerable citizens, our children, the story is even 

worse. For those of us that have young, growing children who come 

in from school or soccer practice and look up at us and say, ‘‘Mom, 

I am starving,’’ and we reach to the cupboard and find a healthy 

snack, an apple or a banana or maybe a breakfast bar of some sort, 

we look into their eyes and realize that they are satisfied and that 

we have done our best job. 

But we also have to put ourselves into the shoes of mothers who 

don’t have that opportunity, whose kids come in and say, ‘‘Mom, I 

am starving,’’ and a mom who loves her children just as much as 

I love mine has to look into those eyes and realize that there isn’t 

something nutritious to feed their children, or maybe nothing at 

all. That is what we are here to talk about today. 

Twenty-two-point-five percent of families with children were at 

risk of hunger in 2008, up from 16.9 percent in 2007. Rates were 

also markedly higher than the national average for single parents 

and black and Hispanic households. I am also sad to report that 

my home State of Arkansas now has the third highest rate of hunger in the country. Fifteen-point-nine percent are at risk. 

These grim statistics add a note of seriousness to these hearings 

that we hold today, but they also lend a sense of purpose for what 

we have to do. The task before us is not just a routine exercise. We 

do not undertake this simply because the reauthorization expires, 

but because people across this country are sorely in need. We go 

forward on this reauthorization because people across this country 

are suffering and because we all have a responsibility to act. 

I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today about how 

this committee can carry out its responsibility in this regard, especially in light of the new USDA report. But before we do, I would 

like to outline three priority areas that I think can serve as guiding 

principles for the reauthorization before us. 

First, we must take steps to ensure that all children eligible for 

Federal Child Nutrition Programs are actually receiving them. The 

number of children that are eligible and unenrolled is astonishing. 

Despite the fact that programs such as the School Lunch and 

School Breakfast Programs have been around for decades, there remain many children who could be participating but do not. A critical part of what we have to do is to ensure that they can access 

these programs and that they do. 

Second, we must improve the nutritional quality of the meal benefits provided through our Child Nutrition Programs. Ensuring 

that children have enough to eat should be a hallmark of a funVerDate Nov 24 2008 14:45 Jan 20, 2011 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00006 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\62718 MICHA
3 

damentally decent society. But with obesity and diabetes and nutrition-related chronic diseases epidemic among us, we must not stop 

at just filling their bellies. We must also take steps to provide foods 

that nourish and promote the development of our children. Not 

only does it make sense in terms of quality of life and what it is 

we are trying to provide, it also is cost effective. Think of their 

abilities to have better health care down the road with more nutritious meals and exercise. Think of what it means in terms of their 

learning capacity and their abilities to learn in school and excel to 

their greatest of potential. 

Third, we must modernize and improve the integrity of Child Nutrition Programs. We have a WIC Program that, for the most part, 

still relies on paper coupons even as most of our Federal programs, 

like the SNAP Program, have entered the electronic age by 

transitioning to electronic benefits. Even my mother got rid of her 

rotary dial telephone. We have got to move forward. 

In the School Lunch Program, elementary school children carry 

paper applications in their backpacks, and then we wonder why 

some applications never make it back to school. Folks, I clean out 

those backpacks once a night. They are full of paperwork and all 

kinds of things, whether it is homework that has been there and 

back again or whether it is multiple pieces of paper that children 

are sent home with for authorization from parents to walk-a-thons 

for the homeless to a number of other things. Some of them never 

reach parents. Some of them never make their way back to school. 

These are the circumstances that prevent our children from receiving those School Lunch benefits. Surely we can do more to bring 

these programs into the 21st century, with benefits for both children and for program operators alike. 

With these principles in mind, I look forward to the testimony of 

our very qualified witnesses today. I look forward to building upon 

the good work that this committee has already done under the 

leadership of Senator Harkin and Senator Chambliss and along 

with their incredibly capable staff and our incredibly capable staff 

today who continue to work on this issue with great passion and 

certainly with great energy in moving us forward. 

I would like to now, if it is appropriate, yield to my good friend 

and colleague from Georgia, Senator Chambliss. 

STATEMENT OF HON. SAXBY CHAMBLISS, U.S. SENATOR FROM 

THE STATE OF GEORGIA 

Senator CHAMBLISS. Thanks very much, Madam Chairman, and 

thanks for holding this hearing. I would like to join you in welcoming Secretary Vilsack back to our committee. Tom, it is great 

to see you. 

I am pleased we will have the opportunity to hear from the administration about its priorities for reauthorization of Child Nutrition Programs. Our country is fortunate to have a strong nutrition 

safety net comprised of 15 different Federal nutrition programs, 

but it is important that Congress reexamine them on a regular 

basis to make sure they are as effective as possible in serving 

Americans in need of nutrition assistance. 

Due to the current economic downturn, we are seeing unprecedented levels of participation in Federal nutrition programs. Over 

4 

36 million people are currently participating in the Supplemental 

Nutrition Assistance Program each month, which is the highest 

number in the program’s 40-year history. In my own State of Georgia, we have seen participation increase to over 1.4 million Georgians, which is almost 15 percent of the State’s population, and Mr. 

Secretary, I am going to be curious to hear how that corresponds 

to other participation around the country, because I am sure there 

are unprecedented levels at which we are seeing in all 50 of our 

States. The fact that the SNAP program can swiftly serve those in 

need highlights one of the program’s key features: The fact that it 

can easily expand and contract as economic condition change. 

Schools are also realizing increased participation in the National 

School Lunch and Breakfast Programs, with expenditures for 2010 

likely to exceed $16.8 billion. The caseload for the Women, Infants, 

and Children Program is also expected to rise, and I am pleased 

that the 2010 Agriculture appropriations bill funded the program 

at $7.25 billion to meet the potential demand. 

I look forward to hearing from today’s witnesses. We all agree 

that our Federal nutrition programs are not only important tools 

to combat hunger in the United States, but also effective tools to 

promote a healthy lifestyle and combat obesity. 

Regarding the National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs, 

the Institute of Medicine recently released a report with specific 

recommendations to USDA on how to update the nutritional requirements of the meals, calling for more fruits, vegetables, and 

whole grains. I look forward to USDA issuing a proposed rule on 

how best to implement the IOM’s recommendations to ensure that 

school meals meet the dietary guidelines for Americans. 

It is important to recognize the progress many schools have made 

since the 2004 Child Nutrition Reauthorization to improve the 

quality of meals served throughout the National School Lunch Program, as well as the nutritional environment throughout school 

campuses. Partnerships between schools, food companies, and the 

public health community have demonstrated various approaches to 

offering healthy foods in schools as well as increasing physical activity opportunities. 

One specific example is the Clinton Foundation’s partnership 

with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, which has effectively 

helped thousands of schools across the country create environments 

where physical activity and healthy eating are accessible and encouraged. We need to acknowledge the investment of time and resources in making these changes, as well as recognize that a onesize-fits-all approach may not be in the best interest of our schools 

or our children. 

Another program that I want to applaud is USDA’s Healthier 

School Challenge. I am very pleased that Secretary Vilsack recently 

announced that the Challenge will now be open to middle and high 

schools. Three Burke County public schools in Georgia recently 

achieved the goal level of the challenge, and I am impressed with 

the dedication of the School Food Service Director and school leadership for their commitment to ensuring a healthy and nutritious 

school environment. 

Again, Madam Chairman, thank you for holding this hearing. I 

look forward to the input of today’s witnesses as we move forward 

5 

with the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Program. Thank 

you very much. 

Chairman LINCOLN. Thank you, Senator Chambliss. 

We would like to welcome to the committee Secretary Vilsack. I 

note that he is joined by two other Iowans today on the committee, 

so we have got the whole State well represented, and that is a good 

thing. I would just like to say how much we appreciate Secretary 

Vilsack and all of your leadership as a past Governor, without a 

doubt, but also from my standpoint, the unbelievable passion that 

you have for rural development, particularly coming from your 

roots in small communities in which you provide a great leadership. 

So we are delighted to have you here. I don’t think there needs 

to be much more introduction, other than the fact that we look forward to working with you on really this very big challenging issue 

to us and to our nation. Thank you, Mr. Secretary, for being here. 

STATEMENT OF HON. TOM VILSACK, SECRETARY, U.S. 

DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, WASHINGTON, DC 

Secretary VILSACK. Madam Chair, thank you, and to Senator 

Chambliss and the members of this committee, thank you for the 

opportunity to discuss the pending reauthorization of the Department of Agriculture’s Child Nutrition Programs. 

One of the first items that President Obama discussed with me 

when I was first selected for this job was that one of his top priorities for USDA was to provide children with healthier, more nutritious meals. I pledged then and continue to uphold that pledge that 

USDA will do everything it can to support the health of our children and the health of the school environment in thousands of 

schools across the country. 

The upcoming effort to reauthorize the Child Nutrition Program 

is a major opportunity for us to advance a number of key priorities 

for our children, and I appreciate the chance to appear before this 

committee to discuss the need for this legislation and some of the 

administration’s key priorities. 

The reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Programs presents us 

with an important opportunity to combat hunger, to improve the 

health and nutrition of children across the nation, and to enhance 

program performance. The scale of these programs means that reforms can have a major impact on tens of millions of school children. For instance, the National School Lunch Program serves 31 

million school children in more than 102,000 schools across the 

country. The School Breakfast Program is available is over 88,000 

schools and serves 11 million children on a daily basis. In addition 

to the National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program, the authorities to operate the Summer Food Service Program, the Child and Adult Care Food Program, the Special Milk 

Program, and the WIC Program all come up for renewal this year. 

The Obama administration takes this opportunity very seriously. 

In the fiscal year 2010 budget, the administration proposed an historic investment of $10 billion in additional funding over ten years. 

The problems that we face and are challenged today to address 

through this reauthorization process are significant and critical to 

the future of this country. 

6 

At the same time, we are facing a continuing problem for some 

families being able to provide their children with enough to eat. As 

the Chair indicated, yesterday, the Department released a sobering 

report entitled, ‘‘Household Food Security in the United States 

2008,’’ showing that in over 500,000 families with children in 2008, 

one or more children simply did not get enough to eat. They had 

to cut the size of their meals, they had to skip meals, or even go 

whole days without food at some time during the year. This is simply unacceptable in a nation as wealthy and as developed as the 

United States. 

This legislation is an opportunity in one stroke to confront both 

the challenges of obesity and hunger, with the prospect of better 

health and well-being for our children in the years to come. Investing in meal quality and access to these critical programs will help 

support the capacity of our young people to learn and acquire the 

tools necessary to become the leaders of tomorrow. 

We can improve access to meals and explore new ways of empowering communities to reduce food insecurity and hunger, especially 

among children. We can make every school a place where nutrition 

and learning shape the food offered by improving food standards, 

eliminating foods that do not support healthy choices and expanding physical activity opportunities. 

We can help pregnant women, new mothers, and the youngest 

children receive the support they need for optimal healthy starts 

and supporting working families using child care by providing nutritious food for their children and help them deal with the challenges of today’s economy. 

Beyond these food security, nutrition, health, and learning objectives, the reauthorization is an important opportunity to promote 

economic development and a robust farm and food economy. The 

Child Nutrition and WIC Programs are significant outlets for the 

bounty of American farmers and ranchers. Each year, USDA purchases approximately $1.5 billion of healthy foods through its Commodity Distribution Program. These purchases help support the entire agricultural value chain, from growers to packers, shippers, 

manufacturers, to retailers. 

The legislation is critical, not only for the nutrition, but for 

health promotion, educational opportunity, and economic development. For these reasons, I want to share the Obama administration’s top priorities for this legislation and express my commitment 

to work with this committee to pursue a robust reauthorization 

that advances these key priorities. 

There are two main priorities that I will briefly discuss this 

morning, reducing barriers and improving access, and enhancing 

the nutritional quality and health of the school environment. Improving program performance is also important to us, and we will 

be attentive to that goal throughout the reauthorization process. 

For many children in our programs, school lunch and breakfast 

represents the only healthy food they may eat all day. We must 

work to ensure access to nutrition assistance for children when and 

where they need it, particularly during the gap periods when we 

know children struggle to receive the nutrition they need, during 

the summer months, during breakfast, and in after-school environments. 

7 

We also need to expand the School Breakfast Program. Healthy 

days begin with healthy breakfasts. Many teachers report that they 

can tell which of their children started the day with a healthy 

breakfast and which did not. While 100,000 schools offer lunch, 

only 88,000 offer breakfast, and about one-third as many children 

receive school breakfast as participate in the lunch program on an 

average day. 

To increase the number of schools offering breakfast and the participation of children in the program, we need to look for ways to 

support improvements in the nutritional quality of the school 

breakfasts, as well. To expand participation in school meals more 

generally, we must find and test innovative approaches and determine their effectiveness in addressing hunger among children, including modifications to accounting and claiming processes in very 

low-income areas. Support should also be provided to communities 

and States committed to ending the scourge of hunger. And support 

should be provided to direct certification efforts that automatically 

enroll eligible children in these programs. The Department looks forward to using the $22 million provided 

in the Direct Certification Grants Program recently approved in the 

Agricultural appropriations bill to encourage States to enhance 

their existing direct certification systems with new technologies or 

borrow ideas from States with demonstrated direct certification 

success. 

We also look forward to expanding support for breastfeeding, the 

medically preferred feeding practice for most infants in the WIC 

Program, especially through expansion of peer counseling programs. 

We must do everything we can to improve the nutritional quality 

of school meals and the health of the school environment, our second priority. The recent Institute of Medicine report showed that 

the average American child between the ages of five and eight consumes about 720 empty discretionary calories per day, nearly half 

their total diet of about 1,600 calories a day. Our young people are 

eating far less dark green and dark orange vegetables than they 

need, far fewer fruits than they need, far more refined grains and 

far too few whole grains, and far too many high-fat dairy products 

and too few low-fat and non-fat dairy products. We can and must 

do better. 

Additional support should be provided to train food service professionals so they have the skills to serve top-quality meals that 

are both healthy and appealing. We need to expand the current requirements of the Food Safety Program to all facilities where food 

is stored, prepared, and served. Every parent knows that encouraging children to try new foods can be challenging, but because 

children are developing preferences and practices that will last a 

lifetime, it is especially important that we recognize and support 

the role that school food service professionals play in serving foods 

that demonstrate that a healthy diet can be tasty and fun. But our 

approach can also reflect the critical role that the whole school environment plays, not just the lunch room. We need to promote 

healthy lifestyles and combat obesity throughout the school. 

Not only should USDA establish nutrition standards for school 

meals, but we should set national standards for all foods sold in 

8 

schools, including in the a la carte lines and in vending machines, 

to ensure that they, too, contribute to a healthy diet. This step is 

long overdue and critically important to enhancing the health of 

the school environment. And we need to strengthen school wellness 

policy implementation and promote physical activity in schools. 

But to be truly successful in making our schools a healthier environment, we need more input from parents and communities and 

we need their help. More information must be provided to American parents on the performance of schools so they can make 

choices for their children and take action to make schools improve. 

We recommend that schools be required to share information about 

the content of their meals with the families that rely upon them, 

and we should work with stakeholders to develop and communicate 

common nutrition messages and provide materials in support of 

those messages. 

Lastly, we should continue to advance the public trust by investing in the school meal performance. Through technology and training, we can reduce and should reduce error rates and result management challenges in a way that serves our children and the general public well. 

Several weeks ago, through the passage of the Agricultural appropriations bill, Congress made an important first step toward accomplishing these goals. Thanks to the leadership of the Chair, 

Senator Chambliss, and Senator Harkin, and Chairman George 

Miller, we were able to improve children’s access to meals during 

the summer, help enroll more children in the School Lunch Program, and improve health and nutrition in child care settings. I 

view this as an important downpayment on the priorities mentioned above. 

I hope you will look at all these opportunities for improving the 

health and well-being of America’s children as you consider legislation to modernize these programs. Just as teachers inspire and parents encourage our children, we must have healthy food that is 

available to help those future generations grow and learn. The 

President, the First Lady, and I are committed to combating hunger and providing healthier foods to our nation’s children and I 

hope we will have your support in these efforts. 

Again, I would like to thank the committee for the opportunity 

to appear before you this morning to discuss the reauthorization of 

the Child Nutrition Programs and I look forward to answering 

questions you may have this morning. Thank you, Madam Chair. 

[The prepared statement of Hon. Thomas J. Vilsack can be found 

on page 89 in the appendix.] 

Chairman LINCOLN. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. We are pleased 

that you are here. We do look forward to not only working with you 

to get this done, but get it done in a timely way in order to make 

sure that we get the full benefit of this program out into our 

schools and into our communities where our children need it, without a doubt. 

I will start off with a couple of questions and turn to my colleague, and then start in the order of arrival with other members 

for opening statements and any questions that they may have. 

Secretary Vilsack, there has been considerable discussion about 

the need of additional funding to increase reimbursement in the 

9 

National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program, 

especially in light of the recent Institute of Medicine’s recommendation for new meal standards, which will likely increase 

cost, as well. And I am certainly sympathetic to the concept of increased reimbursement rates. Common sense does tell us that as 

we improve that quality, it also increases the cost. 

But I also want to be certain that if the committee does recommend an increase in reimbursement rates, that we are certain 

to be buying the outcomes that we want in terms of both meal 

quality and efficiency, and I think that is going to be really critical. 

Should the committee provide that additional funding for reimbursement rates for school lunches and breakfasts, do you have any 

idea as to how we can ensure quality? Does it make sense to provide for reimbursement rate increases that are conditioned on certain quality factors, is that an option? Or how do we go about that, 

in your opinion? 

Secretary VILSACK. Madam Chair, this is an important issue. I 

think you have mentioned the fact the Institute of Medicine’s report did reflect that their recommendations would carry with it additional costs. I think it is appropriate to note that it will take us 

some time to institute the recommendations of the Institute of 

Medicine, and during that period of time, we are going to continue 

to encourage schools to look at the nutritional content and value 

of the meals that they are providing. 

I think it is important for us to reward top performers, look for 

ways in which we can work with the Secretary of Education and 

the Department of Education to reward performance. So we would 

encourage this committee and the Congress to take a look at reimbursement rates that would be linked directly to increased nutritional value in the form of more fruits and vegetables, more whole 

grains, less fat, less sodium, less sugar, transferring to low-fat 

dairy products, things that were recommended by the Institute of 

Medicine. 

We know what we need to do. In addition, we also should take 

a look at increasing physical activity in our schools. It is a troublesome statistic to me that approximately one-third of high schools 

in this country are working at the recommended physical education 

level and just about half of our students in the country today actually have access to physical education. So I think there are many 

ways in which we can encourage healthier environments. 

Chairman LINCOLN. Well, I agree, just having met with a lot of 

our school lunch folks in a symposium that was hosted by the Heifer International Project on the Farm to School Program, and talking to some of those food service people who were enormously 

grateful for the additional funding, because they have been using 

40-and 50-year-old equipment. And one of the women said steaming vegetables for 300 or 400 kids one pot at a time is not very efficient or effective. She said, all we have got is frying equipment 

from 30 years ago. Making sure that they have got the kind of facilities and equipment they need to be able to help prepare those 

foods, I think is going to be critical, and I am pleased that we have 

gotten started with that as we created our extension. 

The School Breakfast, program is such a critical program. Growing up on a farm, it is instilled in you that probably the most imVerDate Nov 24 2008 14:45 Jan 20, 2011 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00013 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\62718 MICHA
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portant meal you get during the day is to get off with a good start 

on breakfast. One of the things that I think holds a great deal of 

promise is some of the new methods for providing breakfasts in 

school. I know with 13-year-old boys, getting them up extra early 

to go to school is not a pleasant thing and oftentimes doesn’t work 

with school children, trying to get them to the cafeteria before 

school starts. They would rather spend that extra 15 minutes in 

bed, and I am sure other children are the same way. 

Has USDA looked into some of the different methodologies and 

assessed their effectiveness in reaching more children? I know 

there have been some suggestions experimenting with Grab ’n’ Go 

Breakfast Bags or breakfast in the classroom or other things like 

that. 

Secretary VILSACK. Madam Chair, we are constantly looking for 

ways and opportunities to encourage an expansion of School Breakfast. As I mentioned in my opening statement, we are still short 

of the number of schools that actually participate in this program 

and we would obviously encourage those that don’t participate to 

do so. 

We are open to suggestions to best practices. I think one of the 

responsibilities USDA has in this area is to be able to identify 

where best practices, where participation rates are high, where 

teachers report to us an appropriate environment where youngsters 

are active and energized early in the morning as a result of having 

a healthy breakfast. 

We have done some research, as you probably know, in the past 

on whether or not a universal breakfast system would work. There 

are some concerns about mandating this, but I think there are 

ways in which we can identify—there are schools, Kevin 

Concannon was sharing with me earlier today, the Under Secretary, about how he was in a school in Colorado that was essentially having school [sic] in the classroom, which made it a little 

easier for youngsters, especially youngsters who may be a little bit 

young, to know how to access the food. If it is in the classroom, it 

makes it easier and more convenient. So I think there are ways in 

which we can look for opportunities for expansion. 

Chairman LINCOLN. Well, I look forward to working with you, 

and I have got a few more questions I will save for later and I will 

turn to my colleague, Senator Chambliss. 

Senator CHAMBLISS. Well, thanks, Madam Chairman. 

Mr. Secretary, I am very pleased to hear you talk in terms of parental involvement in exercise in addition to just our diet, because 

there is no question but what this has got to be an integrated force 

if we are going to be successful in making sure that our children 

are healthy, which includes dealing with the issue of obesity. There 

are other reasons besides that why they need parental involvement 

in exercise. Having a wife who taught for 30 years in the classroom, parental involvement is so critical in the educational phase 

that without it, students have a much tougher time. But it is tough 

to get them involved in a lot of instances. 

I look forward to dialoguing with you about how, from a nutrition 

standpoint, we can engage parents, and by doing that, and viceversa with education, maybe we can kind of dual track that. The 

11 

more involvement parents have, the healthier the kids are going to 

be and the better education they are ultimately going to get. 

Congress has considered the issue of Federal standards for food 

sold in competition to the meals provided through the National 

School Breakfast and Lunch Program for a number of years and 

there are still several policy issues that obviously remain unresolved. You recommend a, quote, ‘‘national baseline standard for all 

food sold in elementary, middle, and high schools,’’ and I would like 

for you to elaborate on that recommendation a little bit. Are you 

talking, Mr. Secretary, about individually standardizing items in 

vending machines or in a la carte lines, or an overall program, and 

really, how are we going to define that? What is your thought 

about how we can enforce that? 

Secretary VILSACK. Well, Senator, I think it starts with the 

wake-up call that the Institute of Medicine’s report suggesting that 

we have some serious issues with the quality, nutritional quality 

of what is taking place in our school lunch programs. But the concern that I have is that we could do everything we need to do on 

the school lunch line and it could be countermanded or counteracted by what we do or what we don’t do with reference to vending 

machines and things that are sold in the school during the school 

day. 

So I think it is incumbent upon us to work with schools to create 

standards that basically define the nutritional value of things that 

will be sold. We have seen schools that have sort of transitioned, 

and we have been working with the industry, the food industry, 

with the beverage industry, that recognize the need to be responsible and are anxious to work with us in making sure that those 

vending machines have appropriate content. We know that youngsters will continue to purchase. We are not concerned about substantial reductions in school income because the vending machine 

content changes. 

But we think it is important for us to lay a marker, to lay down 

what we think the nutritional value ought to be and then work 

with schools. Obviously, as this goes through a rulemaking process, 

we will receive comments. We will receive information from experts. But the bottom line is for us to make a statement that we 

want our school environments to be healthy, and to do that, it is 

going to require not just focusing on more fruits and vegetables in 

the school lunch line and more fruits and vegetables, et cetera, during the Breakfast Program, but it is also going to take a look at 

vending machines. 

Senator CHAMBLISS. I have heard from a number of my food 

banks around my State about the increase for demand of items in 

the respective food banks, and obviously that increased demand includes families with an awful lot of children. I want to commend 

you on the job that USDA has done in meeting that increased demand, and again, that compliment has come from the food bank directors themselves. USDA has done a very good job of addressing 

this increased demand. 

That does bring on other issues, though, when we see this population increase. Can you share with the committee how you see the 

outlook for ongoing levels of USDA food and financial support for 

emergency food providers and give us an idea of where you think 

12 

we are headed there? What kind of time line are you anticipating 

that increased demand? 

Secretary VILSACK. Well, Senator, I think it is obviously tied to 

the health of the economy. It is my—— 

Senator CHAMBLISS. I was hoping you had a good, solid projection, Tom, that we could look at. 

Secretary VILSACK. I will tell you, just from a USDA perspective, 

we are encouraged by the number of grants, loans, business activity in our rural development portfolios. As a result of the Recovery 

and Reinvestment Act, we know that there are a significant number of infrastructure projects that are going to result in construction and employment opportunities in 2010 and we are encouraged 

by the participation, the interest, the capacity to move resources 

out at USDA. So I am hopeful that we will begin to see a leveling 

off of this rather steep increase. But it is clearly tied to the health 

of the economy. 

Fortunately, the Congress had the wisdom to include in the Recovery and Reinvestment Act more resources for SNAP, more resources for food assistance, and the reason I say that is that there 

is probably no more direct immediate stimulus than the resources 

that you are providing through SNAP. 

Ninety-seven percent of those resources are actually invested 

within 30 days. In other words, people actually utilize those resources immediately. And if you think about it, when they use 

those resources, it means something more is being purchased at the 

grocery store. Somebody has got to stock that, which means that 

you can keep your job at the grocery store. Somebody has got to 

truck it, which means somebody keeps their trucking business 

open. Somebody has got to process it, which means those processing facilities are still operating and employing people. And 

someone has got to produce it, which means the farmers and 

ranchers ultimately receive the benefit. 

So it is important for people to recognize the economic development component of food assistance. This isn’t just about human 

services. It isn’t just about the moral responsibility we have. It is 

actually good economics in tough times. 

So we attempted to try to get these resources out as quickly as 

we could. We saw a tremendous demand. And we will continue to 

work hard with the States. I will say that we have to acknowledge 

the activity of State governments, Governors, in helping us administer these programs effectively. 

Senator CHAMBLISS. Are you comfortable with where you are resource-wise with respect to the anticipated continuing demand? 

Secretary VILSACK. Well, I think our focus, Senator, is making 

sure that we have adequate resources to be able to expand programs that currently, in our view, are underutilized. We have still 

youngsters today that don’t participate in the School Lunch and 

School Breakfast Program that need the School Lunch and School 

Breakfast Program, which is why we are suggesting additional resources and improvements in how people qualify and how people 

can become eligible for these programs. We are looking for ways to 

remove the stigma that is sometimes associated with participation 

in these programs so that more people participate. 

13 

Our focus obviously is on the children of this country. I find it, 

and I know you do, too, troublesome that when the report was 

issued yesterday that over a million children every day are faced 

with low food security, which is skipping meals, not having sufficient nutrition, and we can’t expect those youngsters to perform at 

their optimal level as students if they are not well fed and well 

cared for. 

Senator CHAMBLISS. Lastly, for several years, USDA has worked 

very closely with the Department of Defense to distribute fresh 

fruits and vegetables to schools around the country. In recent 

years, DOD’s Fresh Program has made changes to its procurement 

and distribution process and there have been concerns raised about 

the results of these changes, such as higher prices and inconsistent 

deliveries. While these concerns have been voiced only in certain 

pockets of the country, I wanted to bring this issue to your attention. While previous farm bills have mandated that USDA partner 

with DOD for the distribution of produce, the most recent farm bill 

gives us USDA the flexibility to consider other distribution partners if they are needed. 

I don’t have a question about this, I just wanted to highlight it 

with you. I am going to submit some questions to you and I look 

forward to getting your answers to see how we can address this 

further down the road. 

Secretary VILSACK. Senator, we will take a look at those questions and answer them promptly. We are currently purchasing 60 

different varieties of fruits and vegetables under that program. Obviously, if there are problems in distribution, we need to address 

them. 

Senator CHAMBLISS. Thanks, Madam Chairman. 

Chairman LINCOLN. Thank you. Just for the members’ knowledge, I think there are going to be either two or more votes called 

at 11:15, unfortunately, so we will try to keep our hearing going. 

We go to Senator Harkin, and I would just like to take a personal privilege and say thank you for all your hard work on this 

issue and handing over a committee that is certainly well versed 

and well equipped to deal with this. So thank you, Senator Harkin. 

Senator HARKIN. Madam Chair, thank you very much, and thank 

you for your leadership on this and always working together to try 

to move this child nutrition bill. 

I also want to thank our Ranking Member, Senator Chambliss, 

for his longtime and continuing interest in the area of child nutrition. 

I just ask that my statement be made a part of the record. 

[The prepared statement of Hon. Tom Harkin can be found on 

page 54 in the appendix.] 

Senator HARKIN. You know, there is a lot of debate going on and 

now we are all getting wrapped around the axle on health care reform around here, but it seems to me that the essential underlying 

feature of having a healthy country is having healthy kids. If we 

are going to change all this system of how we are paying the bills 

and yet we have got a whole cohort coming along that are overweight and obese and have diabetes and high blood pressure, we 

are going to go broke. 

14 

So it seems to me we have really got to focus in this area, and 

I want to commend our Secretary of Agriculture for again focusing 

on this, not just as Secretary, but before when, as Governor of the 

State of Iowa and as a former State Senator, this has been an area, 

I can tell you, of Tom Vilsack’s focus and interest for a long, long 

time. So I am glad we are kind of coming to this point where this 

committee and the Department and administration are working together to really move the ball forward in great ways in terms of 

child nutrition. 

But I can’t resist the opportunity at times like this to always ask 

the fundamental question that I keep asking over all these years. 

If schools are places we send our children for education, why do we 

have vending machines in schools? Tell me again, why are there 

vending machines in schools? There weren’t vending machines 

when I was young. I mean, there were vending machines, just not 

in schools. I am not that old. 

[Laughter.] 

Senator HARKIN. We just didn’t have them in schools. I followed 

this and watched this happen, and then a la carte lines and sales 

of foods. Mr. Secretary, you said it best. You said children are subject to innumerable influences in their environment. As they develop preferences and practices that will last a lifetime, their 

choices are shaped by their surroundings, at home, in school, and 

their wider community. The school nutrition environment is a powerful influence in this regard. Accordingly, the administration recommends setting higher standards for all foods sold in school. You 

stated that earlier. 

What good does it do for the Secretary to have jurisdiction over 

the food in the lunch room when the kids can go right down the 

hall and put their money in vending machines and get whatever 

they want, or they can go to a snack bar someplace or that kind 

of thing? 

So I think we have to ask—I always ask that fundamental question. Why do we have vending machines in schools? It seems to me 

that we got off track. We got off track by providing an easy, easy 

access to kids for high-sugar, high-fat, high-salt type of foods. It 

seems to me that we need to recommit ourselves to having schools 

be commercial-free zones for kids—commercial-free zones, where 

they are not inundated with all the commercials. It is almost like 

our schools are becoming like little minor strip malls where kids 

have easy access to some of the worst foods. So this fundamental 

question of why we allow this. 

And then, again, the Secretary of Agriculture should have the 

authority, and that is what my bill does, and I am grateful, Madam 

Chair, for your support of the bill, and we have 30-some cosponsors 

on both sides of the aisle on this. I think the time has come to give 

the Secretary that kind of authority so that we have a standard. 

We look to the IOM, we get scientific-based data, and let the Secretary have that authority. 

One question I had, Mr. Secretary, was sort of asked by Senator 

Chambliss. He talked about the additional funding and stuff. But 

there is another thing. We have seen some schools in this country 

where they have changed the way they prepare foods. They use locally-grown foods and they deliver healthier, more nutritious foods 

15 

and the cost increment is not any more than buying the packaged 

foods. It is just a different way of doing things. 

I use the example in our State of Cedar Falls, where they have 

shown that they can prepare very healthy, nutritious meals that 

kids like. It is not just a glump of something put on a plate. And 

they have kept their costs down very comparable with what they 

get with packaged meals. 

I guess the only thing I would ask from you is, is the Department 

looking at examples, and I am sure there must be examples in 

other States and places where schools are experimenting with ways 

of preparing local foods, yet keeping the costs down? 

Secretary VILSACK. Senator, we are, and in fact, we are putting 

together as part of our Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food Initiative a set of tactical teams from the USDA that are going to go out 

and educate school districts and food service officials with what is 

available in the locality where their school district is located. Oftentimes, there is a disconnect between what is available and what 

people know is available, and those tactical teams will encourage 

local production and local consumption and creating the link. 

We are also going to use some of our rural development resources 

to try to create the supply chain that in some cases does not yet 

exist, but if it did, schools could access those foods more easily and 

less expensively. So that is part of our Know Your Farmer, Know 

Your Food Initiative. 

Senator HARKIN. Great. One last thing. Next year, on the other 

committee on which I sit, we are going to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. That is the Department of Education. I know you are working closely with Secretary Duncan. I 

encourage you to keep that up. We have got to meld these two together, this bill, Madam Chair, that you are going to lead on school 

nutrition and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to get 

exercise and more time for our kids in school to exercise. So I encourage you and Secretary Duncan to continue to work together to 

put these together as a package. 

Secretary VILSACK. Well, I have appreciated the partnership that 

we have. I think both Secretary Duncan and I believe that we need 

to reward good performance and this is certainly part of it. As I 

said before, I am a little bit distressed by the statistics that suggest 

that so little physical activity takes place in many of our schools. 

It is an issue of time, but it is also an issue of understanding the 

importance of it and how it leads to better academic performance. 

Senator HARKIN. Thank you, Mr. Secretary, thank you Madam 

Chair. 

Chairman LINCOLN. Senator Lugar. 

Senator LUGAR. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman. 

Let me just follow up on Senator Harkin’s thinking. There was 

recently a report offered by a military group in Washington which 

indicated that because of poor education, poor nutrition and obesity, essentially physical ailments in addition, 75 percent of Americans 17 to 24 years of age would be ineligible to serve in the Armed 

Forces. That is a huge number, three-quarters. Mind you, this covers all three of the Departments that you have recently mentioned 

are going to be coordinating, you with Secretary Sebelius and Secretary Duncan. 

16 

I would just underline the importance of this in a recent visit I 

paid to Warren Township’s school in which a number of students 

have not done well have been brought back into the system, about 

280 people. They have combined that with a community health center which literally serves as an emergency room for the community. 

They have combined that with the school feeding programs so that 

the health side of it as well as the nutrition and the education are 

combined. It is a remarkable exercise, and I am certain there are 

other examples of this around the country. 

But I mention that it is not impossible to do what you three Secretaries are thinking about. What I am wanting to inquire today 

is how are your preparations going? In other words, what are the 

physical elements of this cooperation? Do you have a steering committee? Do you have a group of people that gather together from 

time to time in addition to you as Secretaries? In other words, 

what can we look at in Congress to follow in all of our committees, 

whichever they may be, which may be elements of this coordination 

so that American youth are not only prepared to serve in the military, but prepared really to serve as citizens, parents, and what 

have you? 

Secretary VILSACK. Senator, first of all, let me comment on the 

fact that you and your staff provide a good example. I understand 

you have got a fitness activity that you participate in with your 

staff and it is something I think many of us should follow. 

One of the great opportunities that we have is the leadership of 

the First Lady on this particular issue. I have been joined by her 

on a number of occasions where she has indicated that this is a priority for her. It is obviously a priority for the President, as well. 

And she within the White House is creating an opportunity for us 

to meet on a regular basis to take a look at how we can—for example, Senator Chambliss mentioned the Healthier U.S. School Challenge—how we can encourage more than the 600 schools that are 

currently acknowledged as part of that challenge to participate? 

And as you know, that involves that combination of better diets, 

better nutrition in the school environment, as well as physical activity. The First Lady wants to be able to acknowledge schools that 

meet that challenge. That is a good way of getting the word out 

about the importance of this. 

We need to continue to look for ways in which we can provide 

best practice information to school districts that are interested in 

this, and so there is a coordinated effort within the White House 

where you have multiple agencies working and involved on this, 

and we are absolutely committed to it, make no mistake about it. 

This is one of the top priorities that I have identified for the USDA. 

Senator LUGAR. Well, that is very encouraging, and I am hoping 

there are some metrics that can be devised that show how much 

progress is occurring. 

Secretary VILSACK. Well, that is an interesting challenge, because we are trying to determine precisely what the right metric 

is. Is it time? As you know, the NFL is currently working to promote its Play 60 Initiative, which we are very interested in working with them to encourage that. Is it reducing the levels of obesity, and if so, how is that defined? 

17 

I will tell you that it isn’t just in the school environment that we 

need to be concerned about this. If you take a look at early childhood statistics, a very troublesome trend zero to five in terms of 

obesity, as well. So there are also efforts that have to be taken in 

early childhood, which is why the Department is partnering with 

Sesame Street and other programs to do PSAs and ways in which 

we can encourage young parents to understand what they can do 

to make it better. So there are an awful lot of partnerships. 

We are currently dealing with the metric issue. I don’t know that 

we have an answer today, but we are aware that we have to have 

a metric by which to determine success or failure. 

Senator LUGAR. My second line of questioning is the goals that 

you have expressed in your opening statement and that many 

members of the committee would reinforce with regard to things we 

ought to be doing in child nutrition. By and large, expansion of 

these programs is expensive. It carries some fiscal responsibility. I 

am just curious, as we reauthorize the programs, have you been 

able to work through the budget process to determine whether we 

can pay for them or what the prospects are of this? 

This is not a new question. Each time around, reauthorization 

comes and there are annual appropriations and what have you. 

And sometimes even within the Agricultural budget, there are—I 

wouldn’t say battles, but disputes as to where the money ought to 

go, whether in terms of crop subsidies or conservation or all sorts 

of other good things that we do. But what is the prospect for the 

financing of the goals that you have suggested today? 

Secretary VILSACK. Senator, I think it is important to focus when 

you are dealing with the issue of costs and affordability of what the 

cost of inaction and inactivity might be. I think Senator Harkin put 

his finger on the cost long-term. If we fail to address this issue aggressively now, we will clearly, clearly pay for it in significant increases in health care expenditures in the future. So that is the 

first thing. 

Secondly, I think it is incumbent upon us to continue to look at 

ways in which we can utilize the resources that Congress has provided to us in more efficient ways, and we may be able to come up 

with a suggestion or two about how that could be done. But I think 

it is important for this committee, if I respectfully could say this, 

to really raise the level of appreciation for the importance and priority of this issue. 

If you combine the hunger issue with the obesity issue, with nutrition and food safety, I think we are at a tipping point in this 

country and hopefully in this Congress to take all of these matters 

to a different level. And when you take them to a different level, 

they become a significant priority. And as you well know, Senator, 

from your experience, you fund your priorities. You fund your priorities. I believe this ought to be a priority. 

Senator LUGAR. I admire your leadership and we will support 

what you want to do here. I just as a practical matter say there 

will come a time when choices will have to be made by this committee as well as our appropriation types and it will be important 

for us all still to be on board at that stage. Thank you very much. 

Chairman LINCOLN. Thank you, Senator Lugar. 

Senator Stabenow. 

18 

Senator STABENOW. Well, thank you, Madam Chair. First, I want 

to congratulate you on your new position and on picking such an 

important topic for the first hearing of your Chairmanship, and 

also to thank Senator Harkin for his wonderful leadership over the 

years. But I very much appreciate your leadership, Madam Chair, 

and also the priorities that you laid out for us in terms of this bill, 

which I think are very important and welcome. 

Secretary Vilsack, it is always great to see you. 

I did want, within the priorities that the Chair has laid out, to 

speak about an additional piece of this in addition to breakfast and 

lunch which is after-school or supper programs. I am very pleased 

that Senator Lugar has joined with me as well as the Chair and 

Senator Brown, and I know there will be support from other members of the committee, as well, for an After-School Meals Act that 

would expand what is right now essentially a pilot, where 13 

States plus the District of Columbia are authorized to provide supper for young people up to the age of 19. And, of course, in our 

other States, it is up to the age of 12, and there are ways in which 

we have lessened the bureaucracy in that. 

I do have a question, though, about how that is actually working 

in States. Michigan is one of the States that is authorized, but we 

right now are in a situation where we have very low participation 

even though we have very high need, and one of the reasons is that 

the suppers can only be reimbursed through the Child and Adult 

Care Food Program. It is not through the other programs, the Russell Program on School Breakfasts and Lunches. What this means 

for us is it is a totally different funding stream. It means they have 

to comply with different State licensing laws and regulations on 

after-school day care to provide for this and it is just another whole 

bureaucracy. So it is stopping States even who have been authorized, like Michigan, from being able to fully participate. 

I wonder if you and your staff would be willing to work with us, 

both to support the legislation, which would expand the program 

to all 50 States, but to also create a way where States could use 

the Russell funding criteria rather than going through the CACFP 

right now. 

Secretary VILSACK. Senator, as you know, we obviously, absent 

legislative direction and authority, don’t have the capacity to utilize 

other programs. We basically have to work within the lane provided by the Child and Adult Care Food Program, and as you well 

know, that is a program in terms of participation that is substantially lower in terms of numbers of people than the School Lunch 

and School Breakfast Program. I think it is around 2.6 million people that are currently involved and engaged in it. 

We obviously would work with Congress if you direct that this 

is something that is a priority and that you believe that it needs 

to be expanded and you provide us the legislative authority. We 

will do everything we can to administer it as effectively and efficiently as possible. 

We are interested, and I might say from a priority standpoint, 

we are interested in continuing to also expand participation in 

those regular programs that already have high levels of participation, but still students, still youngsters today don’t fully participate 

in them. It is important for us to also improve, as we talked about 

19 

earlier, the nutritional value, and there is some expense associated 

with that. But if you give us the legislative authority, we will use 

it as effectively and efficiently as we can. 

Senator STABENOW. Obviously, we have multiple needs. I think 

it is clear, though, in this economic time where families are struggling with one or two or three different jobs or part-time jobs to try 

to pull things together and keep a roof over their heads that the 

Supper Program has also become something very important for the 

same children. So I appreciate working with you on that. 

And then the other question I would have relates to efforts we 

have been working on to modernize school kitchens. I was really 

struck by a visit I had a couple of years ago in Traverse City, 

Michigan, where a school on its own chose to take away just the 

microwaves. We think about, well, we will just have healthy food. 

But most of the schools don’t have the capacity to cook healthy 

food. They have a microwave. They have other things for fast food. 

But they don’t really have a kitchen. 

And this particular school on their own had actually redone their 

entire kitchen so they could actually have not only salads, but cook 

real food. I know this is something we have been working on. We 

put dollars in the economic recovery package and money into Agriculture appropriations bills. But at least in Michigan, the requests 

have been six times higher than the dollars available. It seems to 

me that it is going to be impossible for schools to do what we wish 

them to do if we don’t give them the infrastructure to be able to 

cook healthy food and prepare healthy food. 

So I wonder if you might give us an update on where we are on 

that program, and given the tight budgets that we all face, are 

there ways we can creatively partner with schools or public-private 

funding in order to modernize kitchens, which I think if we are not 

careful is really going to be a barrier for us getting to where we 

want to go on this. 

Secretary VILSACK. Senator, as in all things in this topic, it is a 

complex set of discussion points. First of all, again, the Congress 

and the administration should be thanked for seeing the wisdom of 

putting resources in the Recovery and Reinvestment Act for modernization efforts because it gave us a sense of what the demand 

was. As you know, you put $100 million. We received 24,000 applications—24,000 applications—which would have, if we had fully 

funded all of them, would have required $640 million. We were 

able through a competitive grant process to fund a little over 5,000 

of those grants. 

We are certainly appreciative of the $25 million that was included in the 2010 appropriations bill and we will use a process 

similar to make sure that the $25 million is stretched as far as it 

possibly can go. I think the more we do this, the more awareness 

will be created. 

I would say one other thing. I think it is important to also recognize the need for additional technical training and education for 

food service providers, and that is why it is important for us to continue to support the National Institute at the University of Mississippi to make sure that we continue to provide additional training and upgrade the skills of those who are currently managing 

and operating these food service operations so they, in turn, can 

20 

make the case locally effectively of the need why this should be a 

priority. 

The more awareness, the more discussion there is, the greater 

the likelihood that private foundations, community foundations, 

community backers, school boards will understand the significance 

and importance of these investments, and that way, we can leverage the resources that the Federal Government has. 

Senator STABENOW. Thank you. 

Chairman LINCOLN. Senator Grassley. 

Senator GRASSLEY. Thank you Madam Chairman, Secretary 

Vilsack; thank you for your testimony today. 

I have been preempted on a couple questions, so I may only have 

one, but bring emphasis to the issue that the Senator from Indiana 

brought up about national security. That report emphasized that 

what we do today is going to have a difference when young people 

today are joining or not joining the military, being ready or not 

being ready for the military in 2030. So we are talking about national security issues, as well. 

My question is in regard to the report that you issued yesterday, 

and I commend you for that. It brings attention to what this hearing is all about today. When you try to, as a Federal agency, try 

to lead local governments and schools in America, or local governments, if there ever is a local government, could you describe any 

resistance or reluctance on the part of schools to develop these policies with your agency’s outreach efforts? 

Secretary VILSACK. Senator, drawing on my experience as a 

mayor, a State Senator, and a Governor, I know that during stressful economic times, oftentimes in State budgets, a substantial percentage of the State budget goes to schools. And so when budgets 

are being cut, then obviously resources available to schools are reduced and that creates challenges for school boards and administrators. So anything relating to additional cost obviously carries 

with it some stress and pressure. 

That is why I think it is important for us at the Federal level 

to appreciate and understand that challenge and to figure out ways 

in which we can, A, provide additional resources if they are available to make it easier, and B, work with those school districts to 

create creative and innovative ways in which they can stretch those 

dollars. It gets back to the training issue. It gets back to the equipment issue that I discussed earlier. 

So I think that the pressure point here is not—I think everyone 

wants our children to have more nutritious food. I think everyone 

appreciates the necessity of physical activity. But I think time and 

resources are often the pressure points and we are trying to address at least one of them here with this discussion this morning. 

Senator GRASSLEY. Madam Chairman, I am going to yield back 

my time. I had a couple of other questions, but they were asked 

by other members. 

Chairman LINCOLN. Thank you. 

Senator Klobuchar. 

Senator KLOBUCHAR. Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and 

thank you for holding this important hearing. We both have children of the same age and we both have that experience, I think, 

of walking into that cafeteria line and seeing these kids having to 

21 

make the choice between a yogurt or french fries, and guess what 

they choose. I think most adults might make the same error. 

And so I am really glad that we are moving forward with this 

Child Nutritional Promotion and School Lunch Protection Act. I am 

proud to be an original cosponsor of that bill. I thank Senator Harkin for his leadership, as well. 

The way I look at this, we have two things going on. We have 

the nutrition issues which we are talking about today, Secretary 

Vilsack, and thank you for your leadership on that, as well as the 

fact that as recesses get shorter, kids waistlines are getting wider, 

and so we also have to look at the exercise that they have. The 

availability of exercise both during the day and after school, I think 

is very important, as well. 

But I wanted to start—I know Senator Harkin touched on the 

vending machine issue and this idea that we can have more 

healthy food in vending machines, but I wanted to talk about this 

a la carte line idea, that maybe free choice is not the best idea. You 

want to have healthy food, but if you start having choices that 

aren’t that healthy, that doesn’t really help. And what I like about 

this bill is that it looks at the whole school nutritional value. Do 

you want to talk about some of the problems if you have choices 

that aren’t at all healthy? 

Secretary VILSACK. Well, the Institute of Medicine in its report 

outlined that it isn’t just simply having a planning mechanism that 

focuses on nutrition, but it also needs to address—the school needs 

to address those choices and essentially encouraging, creating ways 

in which we can encourage schools to have youngsters make the 

right set of choices. 

Part of it, I think, is information. As we know more about the 

caloric content of our choices, we sometimes make different 

choices—— 

Senator KLOBUCHAR. I don’t think a seven-year-old is going to be 

able to know that. 

Secretary VILSACK. Well, I was thinking about all the youngsters 

in the schools, high school, middle school. I think there are youngsters certainly in high schools and in the upper grades of the middle school that are becoming more conscious of that. 

Secondly, it is creating systems and processes in which schools 

are rewarded or incented for encouraging and limiting the choices 

that youngsters have and making sure the choices they make are 

nutritious. And I think that there are ways in which we will, 

through the process of finalizing the rule, following the Institute of 

Medicine’s report, ways in which we can look to incent the right 

kind of behavior. 

Senator KLOBUCHAR. Also, Secretary Vilsack, I think this idea of 

having the standards, these national standards, national interpretation of these dietary guidelines, would not only be better for our 

kids, but could save money, as well. Could you talk about that? 

Secretary VILSACK. Well, any time you have standards, it gives 

definition to the school and makes it a little bit easier for people 

to comply with the requirements, and therefore, hopefully, it would 

encourage a broader array of choices which encourages competition 

and in turn should support lower prices. 

22 

I think, secondly, the important role that local production and 

local consumption and linking—we talked about this earlier—our 

farm to school efforts, our Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food efforts, we think we can reduce the cost by reducing the transportation expense that is associated with the sale of processed items 

completely. So there are a multitude of ways in which we can 

stretch those dollars. It is also better training. There are recipes, 

there are ways in which we can encourage those dollars to be 

stretched and still provide nutritious food. We are dealing with this 

right now sort of globally by encouraging on the USDA web site 

recipes and so forth that allow the SNAP recipients, for example, 

to be able to figure out how to stretch their resources. 

It is about the work that Sesame Street is doing with early childhood. They have distributed three million booklets that contain recipes, games, ways in which youngsters can be encouraged to put a 

rainbow on their plate, things of that nature, to understand the difference between, as they say, anytime foods and sometimes foods, 

which some of us obviously have difficulty with. But if we can get 

our youngsters to understand the difference, understand that a 

treat is a treat and not something that can be expected every day, 

I mean, those are all ways in which you can save money and provide more nutritious foods. 

Senator KLOBUCHAR. Well, one issue that was raised with me 

was this idea of charging school nutrition programs indirect costs. 

As you know, there are no limits under current law placed on the 

amount of Federal nutrition money that can be directed toward indirect costs, such as heating the school or paying for paper. Do you 

think there should be some limits, that would help to funnel more 

money toward the nutrition programs, since we are also dealing 

with shortages in our school budgets? 

Secretary VILSACK. Here is the challenge with that issue. A 2008 

study suggested that 79 percent of school districts are not currently 

involved in that type of activity with indirect costs. Those that are, 

it is a wide range of those who are doing it the right way, charging 

for reasonable and necessary expenditures, and those that may be 

taking advantage of the circumstance, I think rather than placing 

a cap which could potentially encourage more schools in that 79 

percent to utilize indirect, rather than doing that, I think perhaps 

a better way would be to focus on those schools that are perhaps 

utilizing the capacity in an ineffective way or an inappropriate way 

and encouraging them to get their indirect costs more in line with 

what is reasonable and necessary. 

And let me give you an example that was given to me yesterday. 

If you are going to charge a School Lunch Program for the dumpster that they use, that is fine. But if you are going to charge them 

for every dumpster in the entire school system, that may not be 

okay, and those are the kinds of things that we need to encourage 

schools to do a better job of. 

Senator KLOBUCHAR. I appreciate that, and I am out of time 

here, but I also at some point want to talk to you about the Child 

and Adult Care Food Program and trying to get more places online 

there, because as you know, that is also a place where we want to 

have nutritional standards set and I am working on some legislation in that area. Thank you very much. 

23 

Senator HARKIN. [Presiding.] Thank you. 

Senator Gillibrand, we are on the last part of the first vote and 

we have two votes, so please proceed. 

Senator GILLIBRAND. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for 

holding this hearing. I am very grateful to you and Senator Lincoln 

for your leadership on this issue. 

Thank you, Secretary, for being here and for your leadership on 

these issues. 

Some of the things that I am most focused on right now is the 

high obesity rates in America. We spend about $100 billion a year 

on obesity. And when I was a kid, only about five percent of children were obese, and now it is higher than 17 percent. So this is 

a grave national health care issue that has to be addressed. 

Some of the best ideas that have been developed through your 

leadership through the hearing are feeding our children better 

foods. One thing that I have advocated for is a 70-cent increase for 

school lunches. That 70-cent increase would allow for more whole 

foods, more whole grains, more fruits, more vegetables. We could 

feed our children better foods. 

Second, we want to keep our kids more active, fun programs that 

get them being athletic, being outside, making sure all schools have 

an hour of P. E. or gym time. Teaching kids about nutrition—most 

kids don’t understand about nutrition, making that part of the 

school curriculum. And banning trans-fats, just banning them 

across the board in all schools. We have some leadership in New 

York, in New York City, where they have already done that quite 

successfully. 

Another issue we have in high-cost States like New York is we 

would also like to see more people eligible, which you addressed in 

your opening remarks, both for breakfast and lunches. But one 

thing, because our State is such a high-cost State, a lot of working 

families can’t afford good quality lunches for their kids, and so if 

we could increase the eligibility rate based on HUD’s rental 

scheme, you would actually be able to get more children in, to 

maybe about $40,000 for a family of four income level. So that is 

another area of interest that I have that I hope you will pursue and 

look at. 

And then my third area of concern is food safety. I have begun 

looking at this issue. I am very concerned about lack of testing for 

E. coli, for example, in hamburger meat before it is ground up. I 

am very concerned about the lack of notification. If foods are recalled, our schools are not even notified that a food has been recalled in a grocery store or in the national media. So our schools 

need far more information, and our parents have no information 

whatsoever about where our food comes from. 

In particular, there is an article today in USA Today that I hope 

you study, because it is a very concerning article that brings some 

significant evidence to bear on this topic. First of all, they report 

that between 1998 and 2007, the data that they have been able to 

collect shows 470 outbreaks where 23,000 children were made sick. 

And some of the examples they use are where there was evidence 

that the FDA knew about that a certain producer or provider of 

food had unsanitary habits, had made children sick in the past, 

24 

and that information never got to the school districts, never got to 

the parents. 

So I would like you to address that issue today in our time. 

Given the complex task of assuring food safety, and it is shared 

jointly by the USDA and the FDA, can you please elaborate on the 

steps you are taking to ensure better coordination between your 

agency dealing with the food safety and the Food and Drug Administration? I have heard reports that the FDA has delayed finalizing 

an MOU with the Food and Nutrition Service, so I would like you 

to discuss some of the problems you may face there. 

And second, can you also talk about the steps that the USDA has 

taken to help schools increase transparency about what items are 

being served to students so parents can be more involved in planning menus and the development of those menus? 

Secretary VILSACK. Senator, thank you for raising the issue of 

food safety. I know that is of particular interest to you and I appreciate you addressing this. It is a deep concern for us at USDA. It 

is the reason why we encouraged the President and were encouraged by the President’s establishment of the Food Safety Working 

Group that involved myself and Secretary Sebelius as the CoChairs. 

As a result of that Food Safety Working Group, whose work is 

still ongoing, there have already been a number of steps taken to 

try to address the issues raised in the article that you mentioned. 

First of all, as it relates to ground beef specifically, we have 

started a process of encouraging the testing of bench trim that goes 

into ground beef, which was not done before, which we think will 

help reduce E. coli in ground beef. We are also focused on salmonella in poultry and increasing and enhancing our roles in that 

respect. We are increasing worker training. 

We are also working on a unified incident command system and 

structure. We understand and appreciate that there has been a 

lack of communication between the two agencies and a gap in communication, which results in school districts not getting information on a timely basis. We are addressing that with this unified incident command structure and system. We also appreciate the need 

for us to get information to parents as quickly as possible, which 

is why we are exploring the utilization of the social marketing techniques, Facebook, Twitter, and the like, to try to get messages out 

as quickly and as effectively and as correctly as possible. 

Now, we are instituting within USDA, as it relates to our portfolio of food safety issues, a series of initiatives. We have developed 

a hold and recall procedure for foods procured by USDA for the National School Lunch Program. We have got a commodity complaint 

system in place that has been added to our electronic commodity 

ordering system. We have a rapid alert system to quickly notify 

program operators of food safety issues. We are utilizing that electronic commodity ordering system to announce recalls of non-USDA 

commodities. 

We are implementing a food safety program developed in part on 

our HACCP principles. In fact, school districts are the only retail 

outlet, if you will, that is currently operating under HACCP principles. As you know, we are requiring safety inspections within 

schools, two a year. We are now at 70 percent participation. We 

25 

want to get to 100 percent. We are instituting a public notification 

system that allows individuals to receive bulletins of significance, 

especially recalls affecting USDA commodities. 

So there is an awful lot of activity emanating from the Working 

Group. We are very focused on this. Staff knows that this is another priority area of ours, and so I can assure you that we are 

going to try to do better than we have done. 

Senator GILLIBRAND. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I will go vote 

and come back. Thank you. 

Senator CHAMBLISS. [Presiding.] Mr. Secretary, the number of 

members attending has absolutely nothing to do with the quality 

of your testimony—— 

[Laughter.] 

Senator CHAMBLISS. —and everything to do with this vote that 

is going on. We are going to try to keep going here. 

First, I would ask unanimous consent that the testimony of 

Kraig R. Naasz, the President and CEO of the American Frozen 

Food Institute, be inserted into the record. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Naasz can be found on page 98 

in the appendix.] 

Senator CHAMBLISS. Mr. Secretary, in regard to your recommendation that schools be required to share information about 

the content of their meals, are you suggesting that schools post this 

information in the cafeteria, similar to the legislation that we are 

considering where restaurants are going to be required or may be 

required to post information relative to items on the menus, or 

what exactly are you talking about here with regard to the information provided? 

Secretary VILSACK. Senator, what we are trying to do is to try 

to engage in a more meaningful way parents, so that parents are 

informed and are up to speed with what is happening in school. 

Virtually every school that I am aware of, I suspect has either a 

newsletter or a website or a combination of some kind of method 

by which they communicate with parents. Our suggestion is that 

we utilize those communication techniques to let parents know precisely what is taking place relative to the nutritional value of what 

their children have access to in the hope that they will either support the school in increasing and enhancing nutrition, or acknowledge that the school has made efforts to increase nutrition or support that at home, as well. We think the more education, the more 

information people have, the more informed choices they will make, 

and the better choices they will make. 

[Pause.] 

Secretary VILSACK. Senator, if I could add just one other comment on the issue of information—— 

Senator CHAMBLISS. Sure. 

Secretary VILSACK. This is a consistent theme throughout the 

various programs that we are administering. We are working very 

hard to encourage SNAP recipients, for example, to have more information available to them about the nutritional value of certain 

food products, and we see in some grocery stores around the country a real concerted effort to inform the customers. In my home 

State, the Hy-Vee Food Chain, for example, is currently assessing 

a nutritional value, a numerical value to virtually everything that 

26 

they are going to sell in their grocery store so that people can then 

make an informed choice. They started, I believe, in the cereal 

area, and what they found was that when they did that, that 

shredded wheat sales went significantly higher than they had anticipated. So it is really about informing folks so they can make the 

right set of choices. 

Senator CHAMBLISS. It is interesting that people are starting to 

pay more attention to what is on the side of those boxes now, so 

that is encouraging. 

Secretary VILSACK. I think we are all very sensitive to health 

care costs, and as Senator Harkin suggested, one way you can bend 

that health care cost curve is to have prevention and wellness, and 

that requires better nutrition and more physical activity. 

Senator CHAMBLISS. Mr. Secretary, we are going to go ahead and 

move on. I know you are extremely busy and we don’t need to keep 

you here. If anybody does have any questions, the record will be 

held open and they can submit those questions to you in writing. 

Thanks for your willingness to come up and provide information on 

these issues that are so critical to your functioning as the Secretary, but from a policy standpoint to aid us. So thank you very 

much. 

We will now move to the second panel. To the members of this 

panel, thank you for taking your time to come up and visit with 

us today. Welcome to the Senate Agriculture Committee. We look 

forward to hearing your testimony. 

First of all, we have Dr. Margaret Bogle, Executive Director, 

Delta Obesity Prevention Research Unit, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, from Little Rock, Arkansas. 

Dr. Bogle, welcome. 

Mr. Rich Huddleston, Executive Director, Arkansas Advocates for 

Children and Families in Little Rock. Welcome to you, Mr. Huddleston. 

Ms. Rhonda Sanders, Executive Director, Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance, also from Little Rock. 

And Ms. Jennifer Smith, Director of Compliance, Wal-Mart, 

Bentonville, Arkansas. Ms. Smith, welcome to you. 

Dr. Bogle, we will start with you for your presentation, and Mr. 

Huddleston, we will go right down the line there upon completion 

by Dr. Bogle. 

STATEMENT OF MARGARET BOGLE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, 

DELTA OBESITY PREVENTION RESEARCH UNIT, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH 

SERVICE, LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS 

Ms. BOGLE. Chairman Lincoln, Ranking Member Chambliss, and 

other members of the committee, my name is Margaret Bogle. I am 

a nutrition scientist with ARS located in Little Rock. I want to 

thank you for this opportunity to come before you today to discuss 

reauthorization of the U.S. Child Nutrition Programs. 

My hope is the relating of my experiences in the lower Mississippi Delta of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, working 

with families, rural communities, and schools, public and not-forprofit agencies will enhance your discussion of the USDA Child Nutrition Programs. These are complex issues which have already 

27 

been described this morning, but they require the innovative efforts 

of our government working in collaboration with individual citizens, families, communities, farmers, food processors, and manufacturers, and educational [inaudible] at all levels. My goal is to set 

the stage with an introduction to the nature of good nutrition and 

healthy lifestyles for families and children so that the rest of the 

panel can present their views of the role of policy changes, child advocacy, and recommendations for the reauthorization of the Child 

Nutrition Programs. 

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and First Lady of the 

United States Michelle Obama have taken a leadership role in recent months with the example and message of healthy eating as it 

relates to the health and well-being of our children and young people. The First Lady’s White House Garden, the People’s Garden at 

USDA, and the joint USDA-White House effort to promote the 

Healthier U.S. Schools Challenge clearly shows that our senior 

leadership understands the importance of healthy eating and physical activity for children and has made it a priority. 

An ongoing concern is that almost one-third of our children are 

overweight and at risk of becoming obese. We know that obese children have much greater risks of becoming obese adults than those 

children who maintain healthy weight patterns, making them 

much more susceptible to various chronic diseases, such as hypertension, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Overweight children 

in many instances are not physically able to participate in vigorous 

physical activity with their peers and are often subject to ridicule 

or even bullying. This can lead to more serious emotional problems 

and may contribute to additional overeating, which exacerbates the 

original problem. 

Another question is whether or not some children are getting 

enough to eat. Food security studies for 2008 released just yesterday and already entered into the record today indicate that approximately 15 percent, or 17 million households, were food insecure at some time during the year, which is an increase of four percent from 2007. And the negative influences of food insecurity on 

children’s health are included in my written comments. 

Children who do not eat breakfast have lower scores in school, 

more tardiness, and increased rates of absenteeism than their 

counterparts who do eat breakfast, again, showing that the School 

Breakfast Program makes a contribution not only to the health of 

the children, but also makes it possible for them to take advantage 

of the education provided at school. All children should be encouraged to eat breakfast. Children who get a healthy breakfast are 

less likely to be overweight. 

The USDA Child Nutrition Programs have the potential to impact over 31 million school children and thereby improve access to 

healthy, nutritious foods during an average school day. For many 

children in the Delta, the food eaten as snacks and meals at school 

may account for as much as 75 percent or more of their total intake 

for the day. 

Recent reports from the Institute of Medicine, the American 

Academy of Pediatrics, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation 

have recognized that environmental factors affect individual behaviors related to food and physical activity. In many communities, for 

28 

example, fresh produce is simply not available or affordable. 

Streets and parks are not amenable to exercise. And policies and 

economic choices make fast food cheaper and more convenient than 

healthier alternatives. Communities have made efforts to improve 

these factors in diverse settings and with diverse populations, resulting in many promising approaches. 

The Agriculture Research Service has been collaborating with 

scientists in a tri-State region to improve the health of at-risk rural 

populations in the lower Mississippi Delta, where the prevalence of 

nutrition-related chronic diseases, including obesity, is much higher than in the rest of the United States. ARS is coordinating this 

research with the 1890 Land Grant Universities and an additional 

university in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The prevalence 

of many nutrition-related health problems is greater for minority, 

rural, and low-socioeconomic groups which have led to the designation of at-risk populations. 

The Delta is one of the regions of the U.S. which clearly exemplifies the designation of at-risk and has great potential for USDA 

and ARS and other governmental agencies to study the effects of 

nutrition and health strategies, including the effects of Child Nutrition Programs related to improving the lifestyle and the prevention 

of obesity. The ability of ARS to engage in long-term research is 

particularly appropriate. Additional details of our research are included in my written comments. 

We know that in the Delta, as in much of the U.S., children and 

their families are not following the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for 

Americans, which are positioned to provide recommendations for a 

healthier lifestyle. As compared to the recommendations, they are 

eating fewer servings of fruits and vegetables, more refined grain 

and fewer whole grains, more high-fat dairy and high-fat meats, 

more discretionary calories, especially sugar, and they are not exercising up to the recommendations of the dietary guidelines. 

Many children in the Delta have not experienced a wide variety 

of fresh fruits and vegetables and are less likely to eat new fruits 

and vegetables when seen for the first time. This underscores the 

need for the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program in every school. 

My testimony is intended to show the breadth of the problem as 

well as suggest some solutions that are working and some that are 

still being tested. The most important thing we can do is to begin 

to involve children, families, and communities in being part of the 

solution, and I am happy to report that is beginning to happen, the 

most important of which is that, as a nation, we must begin to put 

nutrition in its rightful place as regards to health and health care 

in the United States. 

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss the reauthorization of Child Nutrition Programs, and I look 

forward to answering questions that you may have after the rest 

of the panel’s testimony. Thank you, Senator Chambliss. 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Bogle can be found on page 57 

in the appendix.] 

Senator CHAMBLISS. Thank you very much. 

Mr. Huddleston. 

29 

STATEMENT OF RICH HUDDLESTON, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, 

ARKANSAS ADVOCATES FOR CHILDREN AND FAMILIES, LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS 

Mr. HUDDLESTON. Thank you, Senator Chambliss. My name is 

Rich Huddleston. I am with Arkansas Advocates for Children and 

Families. We are a nonprofit, nonpartisan child advocacy organization. Our mission is to ensure that all children and families have 

the resources and opportunities they need to lead healthy and productive lives and realize their full potential. 

Even though she is out of the room, I did want to congratulate 

Madam Chairman Lincoln for taking over the reins of this committee and to say how proud we are back home to have such a 

strong leader in helping vulnerable children and families. 

Let me start by painting a picture of poverty in Arkansas. One 

in four Arkansas children is poor. Arkansas ranks among the four 

worst States nationally—— 

Senator CHAMBLISS. She is back now, so you can say nice things 

about her again. 

[Laughter.] 

Mr. HUDDLESTON. Arkansas ranks among the four worst States 

nationally in overall poverty, with roughly one in six residents living in poverty. No matter how hard they work, fully half of all Arkansans don’t make enough to fully support themselves, and the 

current economic crisis is not making things any easier. 

Nationally, about six million households with children struggle 

against hunger. Children in these households also tend to have 

poorer health outcomes and face barriers which make it difficult for 

them to succeed in school and become productive workers and 

adults. One of the best things Congress can do to support struggling children is to strengthen the Child Nutrition Programs when 

it reauthorizes them this year. These programs have extraordinary 

reach. More than 31 million children eat a meal provided through 

the School Lunch Program on a typical day. By providing nutritious meals to children and making it easier for low-income families to make ends meet, the School Meals Programs reduce poverty 

and food insecurity and shrink the educational achievement gap for 

our most disadvantaged children. 

Unfortunately, millions of children who qualify for free school 

meals don’t receive them. When Congress reauthorized the Child 

Nutrition Programs in 2004, it required school districts to use direct certification to automatically enroll school-age children in 

households that receive Food Stamps. But not all districts conduct 

direct certification equally effectively. The USDA estimates that 3.5 

million out of the ten million children who were eligible for direct 

certification at the start of the 2008-2009 school year weren’t directly certified. 

Our goal should be to automatically enroll every single child who 

is eligible for free meals in a timely manner. Working toward this 

goal will bring about three important benefits. First, needy children will get the food they need and their parents won’t have to 

complete duplicate paperwork. 

Second, program integrity will be strengthened as schools rely on 

data that have already been scrubbed by other means-tested proVerDate Nov 24 2008 14:45 Jan 20, 2011 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00033 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\62718 MICHA
30 

grams instead of the paper-based applications that are prone to errors. This will help ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely. 

Third, schools will have a lower administrative burden, which 

will free up resources they can use to provide healthier meals or 

to enrich academic opportunities. 

I am going to discuss two ways in which Congress can improve 

access to free school meals. The first is to allow schools with large 

concentrations of poor students to serve free meals to all of their 

students rather than spend time identifying the very small number 

who don’t qualify. The school’s Federal reimbursements would be 

based on the results of direct certification. If a school directly certifies more than 40 percent of its students, generally more than 80 

percent of its students qualify for free or reduced meals anyway. 

So if the school agrees to serve all meals free, it shouldn’t have to 

process applications or check eligibility in the cafeteria. Nationwide, six million children attend schools where more than 80 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced meals. 

The Senate bill that includes this proposal is entitled the Hunger-Free Schools Act. These schools will be literally hunger-free 

spaces. All children will be eligible to eat breakfast and lunch free 

of charge. Congress, in short, would eliminate administrative hurdles that get in the way of effectively feeding poor children. 

The other way in which Congress can improve access to free 

school meals is by allowing schools to automatically enroll in free 

meals any student receiving Medicaid. This would help ensure that 

the poorest children receive free meals regardless of where they attend school. Children in households receiving Food Stamps have 

long been eligible for free school meals. This makes sense, since 

these families have already proven that they have low incomes 

through the rigorous Food Stamp enrollment process. The same is 

true for parents who have enrolled their children in Medicaid. They 

shouldn’t have to complete a duplicate application for school meals 

and schools shouldn’t have to process unnecessary paperwork. Congress should permit the school systems and States to work directly 

with Medicaid agencies to use income data from Medicaid to automatically enroll children for free school meals. An estimated two 

million poor children participate in Medicaid but not Food Stamps. 

In conclusion, I know the committee has received many proposals 

as part of this reauthorization process, but I believe the two proposals I have described today offer a big bang for the buck and 

thus deserve high priority. 

Thank you again for allowing me the opportunity to testify before 

this committee today. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Huddleston can be found on page 

63 in the appendix.] 

Chairman LINCOLN. [Presiding.] Thank you. 

Ms. Sanders. 

STATEMENT OF RHONDA SANDERS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, 

ARKANSAS HUNGER RELIEF ALLIANCE, LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS 

Ms. SANDERS. Chairman Lincoln, Senate Committee members, 

staff, and other honored guests, it is an honor to actually be able 

to speak to you today concerning childhood hunger and the Child 

31 

Nutrition Act. I am the Executive Director of the Arkansas Hunger 

Relief Alliance. 

We are an association for the food banks in the State and for all 

of the local hunger relief organizations and hunger advocates. We 

have over 100 members in the Alliance and over 900 organizations 

as part of our network. We are truly a united voice in Arkansas 

to end hunger. We work to raise the level of awareness concerning 

hunger in Arkansas, advocate for public policy concerning hunger 

and feeding programs, and to secure funding. We believe the ability 

to provide an adequate diet to all Arkansans requires the collaborative effort of government-sponsored feeding and nutrition programs, a diverse and capable charitable food system, a healthy, 

thriving private sector, and strong public policies that support moving families from poverty to self-sufficiency. 

This morning, I just want to address three specific areas about 

childhood hunger: Briefly, the state of childhood hunger in Arkansas; childhood hunger related to health and obesity; and finally, 

some of the gaps that are in the provision of nutritional services 

to children. 

Arkansas is a low-income rural State. Fifteen-point-nine percent 

of our households in Arkansas are food insecure. Over half of the 

464,000 public schoolchildren in Arkansas receive free or reducedprice lunch. The Feeding America Food Banks that are part of the 

Alliance serve over 300,000 people a year. Of these 300,000, approximately 40 percent of them are children. 

We are, as you mentioned earlier, currently ranked third in the 

nation for the highest incidence of hunger. It is a reality for many 

of the people in our State that they live with daily, wondering 

where their next meal will come from. We have seen this rate of 

food insecurity increase, and it has actually played its way out in 

recent studies that the Arkansas Children’s Hospital has been a 

part of through the Child Health Watch Program that has shown 

a drastic increase in the number of children reporting to the ER 

that are suffering from food insecurity. It has jumped from last 

year at 10.7 percent all the way up to 2008, it jumped up to 22.2 

percent reporting incidences of hunger. These are extreme increases. 

We know that Arkansas is not the only State in the nation struggling with poverty, poor health outcomes, and low educational attainment, but we do know that hunger is a direct contributor to 

each one of these. But hunger is a curable problem. 

Thanks to research of many organizations, like Feeding America, 

FRAC, Robert Wood Johnson, we have shown that there is a clear 

correlation between hunger and poor health outcomes and hunger 

and obesity. It is rather startling when you read some of the numbers from studies that show that toddlers who have suffered from 

food insufficiency at any point in time before their fourth birthday 

are 3.4 times more likely to be obese at 4.5 years. Those are rather 

startling facts when you consider that the families most likely to 

suffer from food insecurity are those with young children who are 

trying to make ends meet and getting their careers and their lives 

started. 

So it is very clear that there are things that we need to do in 

addressing the overall health outcomes of children who may suffer 

32 

from food insecurity. Government-sponsored programs like School 

Lunch, Breakfast, WIC, After School, and Summer Food clearly 

have a role to play, and it is important for us to expand access, 

make it available, and also to keep high nutritional standards for 

these programs, nutritional standards like the ones that Senator 

Harkin has recommended for all school foods. 

In Arkansas, we have been fortunate to do some of that. Thanks 

to legislation in 2003, I was able to be on that committee and we 

worked to set some very high nutritional standards for all foods in 

the State that are provided in the school. It has been very successful and Arkansas has been the only State in the nation to halt the 

progression of obesity amongst their children. Now, while these 

things weren’t directed specifically at hunger children, the effect is 

the same. Hunger children need nutritionally high items to eat as 

much as any other child needs. 

I want to touch very briefly on some things that the Charitable 

Food System is actively involved in and some ways that we can 

help all programs. The Charitable Food System is involved in many 

ways with After School and with Summer Feeding. Those programs 

need to be streamlined. They can often be difficult to manage. The 

After School Program that was mentioned earlier, where after 

school suppers are provided in 14 of the States, that should be 

looked at being expanded to where all States have access to do 

that. 

But finally, the one Charitable Food program that food banks are 

involved in throughout the nation that has no Federal support is 

the Backpack Program. This program was actually initiated in Arkansas with a school nurse that called one of the local food banks 

and said, you know, we are getting children in here with tummy 

aches and headaches and they can’t function in their classroom and 

we finally figured out that it is because they are hunger. So they 

started putting together backpacks of food. These items were provided through the food banking system. They are items that are 

easy to prepare, single-serving meals, and they go home with them 

in a low-profile backpack on the weekend. 

Well, these foods can be expensive and the food banking system 

and the Charitable Food System juggles the cost of these items and 

the nutritional value that we want to send home with children on 

those weekends. This is a program that could benefit from you 

looking at some pilot programs to look at ways to implement this 

in a cost-effective manner, to institutionalize this so that it is available to all schools, because the one issue that we do hear is that 

there are lines, there are waiting lists for children who want to get 

on this program all over the nation. So it could be a very good way 

to bring more food to children on the weekends when they are 

going hungry. 

I want to close with a story about a Backpack Program from 

Jonesboro, Arkansas, from our food bank there. After the food bank 

of Northeast Arkansas began a Backpack Program, the Executive 

Director did a site visit to one of the schools to monitor the program’s progress. The school counselor shared the story of a young 

boy who was so excited to get his first backpack of food that he sat 

down in her office and started going through it right there. He 

33 

opened up the backpack and there were two fresh red apples right 

on top. 

He reached in it and with a big smile handed it to the counselor. 

The school counselor said, ‘‘Oh, put that back in your backpack. All 

of that food is for you. Isn’t that wonderful?’’ And his smile kind 

of faded and she thought, what is wrong? So she asked him and 

she was totally unprepared for her answer. He looked at her and 

he said, ‘‘But I have never had anything that was mine to share. 

I want you to have this apple.’’ So who would have thought that 

something like giving a child an apple in a backpack would provide 

such an opportunity to that child to be like so many of the other 

children, to have the joy of giving and the joy of being a part of 

something. 

So what we are doing in feeding children through the schools and 

the things that we are providing them are giving them so many 

long-term opportunities to be successful. I applaud what you have 

done with the extension to the Child Nutrition Act. We think that 

the things that are there will give us a chance to pilot and to model 

some opportunities for the future. I look forward to working with 

you in any way possible. Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Sanders can be found on page 72 

in the appendix.] 

Chairman LINCOLN. Thank you, Rhonda. 

Ms. Smith. 

STATEMENT OF JENNIFER SMITH, DIRECTOR OF COMPLIANCE, WAL–MART STORES, INC., BENTONVILLE, ARKANSAS 

Ms. SMITH. Chairman Lincoln, Ranking Member Chambliss, and 

distinguished members of the committee, on behalf of Wal-Mart 

and our 140 million weekly customers, I am honored to testify before you today. 

My name is Jennifer Smith and I am the Director of Regulatory 

Compliance based at our home office in Bentonville, Arkansas. I 

would specifically like to address the WIC program and two issues 

we have identified that should be addressed in the upcoming reauthorization: The program’s transition to Electronic Benefits Transfer, or EBT, and the importance of standard operating rules, and 

the new food packages and the need for one place where retailers 

and manufacturers can access information about all approved 

foods. 

Wal-Mart supports the President’s goal of ending childhood hunger by 2015. We have partnered with the Feeding America Network to donate food from our locations around the country, and we 

expect to donate more than 90 million pounds of food by the end 

of 2009. 

Possibly the most significant advantage we have is our ability to 

source and sell safe and high-quality food products at the most 

competitive prices, which helps our customers save money so they 

can live better. 

We are the largest grocery retailer in the United States, with 

stores in many communities, Tribal areas, and all 50 States. We 

are currently processing more than four million WIC transactions 

on a monthly basis, approximately 400,000 over the same period 

last year. As you might imagine, we are looking for the most effiVerDate Nov 24 2008 14:45 Jan 20, 2011 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00037 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\62718 MICHA
34 

cient way to process WIC transactions while providing the highest 

level of customer service to everyone. 

First, I would like to address the transition to EBT. The existing 

paper voucher system is one of the most complicated, time consuming, and costly transactions conducted at our point of sale. The 

paper transaction process spotlights the WIC participant, creates 

confusion, frustration, and sometimes confrontation between the 

customer and the cashier, and requires participants to separate 

WIC foods from their other groceries, all potentially adding to the 

stigma associated with receipt of these benefits. 

Like others in the retail community, we support the transition of 

WIC benefits to EBT. The SNAP Program’s transition to EBT has 

positively impacted the SNAP recipients’ shopping experience, retailer efficiencies, and fraud reduction. We are eager to see these 

same positive outcomes for the WIC Program. We believe that 

standardization of WIC EBT will help bring efficiency to the transactions and help create administrative savings for the program 

that could be redirected to provide more WIC benefits to those in 

need. 

While it is important to allow for technological innovation and 

creativity, there are times when all relevant stakeholders should 

coalesce around a common set of technical standards to ensure a 

successful implementation. The USDA FNS should be commended 

for beginning work in this regard, and we encourage the committee 

to mandate development of one set of technical standards and operating rules for WIC EBT in the upcoming reauthorization. In 2002, 

Congress addressed the need for similar standardization with the 

SNAP EBT. 

Wal-Mart has participated in WIC EBT developments with several States involving the two prevailing technologies, the Smart 

Card, or offline approach, and the online magstripe approach. After 

testing and implementing both technologies, we can say with confidence that the Smart Card technology has been the best performing WIC EBT system to date. 

When Congress issued the initial EBT mandate for SNAP, it was 

not conditioned on interoperability. This created 

problems in places like Washington, DC, New York City, and 

Southern Ohio, where SNAP recipients commonly shop outside 

their home States. We believe the ability to use and to accept WIC 

EBT cards at any WIC authorized retail location in any State goes 

hand-in-hand with standardization. Without standardization and 

interoperability, we believe there would be an unnecessary increase 

in State and retail costs and unnecessary restrictions placed on the 

shopping options of WIC participants. In addition, interoperability 

would be essential in times of natural disaster, when WIC participants are displaced from their home States. 

Second, I would like to address the new food packages. While we 

supported the modernization of the packages, it is important to 

note that the former packages had only about 500 approved food 

items. The new packages have approximately 12,000 items to date. 

Given the added complexity, it would be helpful if there were a 

centralized resource identifying all eligible products under the program. This would help retailers meet their obligations as WIC vendors to stock the required WIC-approved foods. 

35 

We have heard from our suppliers and others in the retail community that there is a significant need for a universal set of guidelines or criteria that WIC authorities could use to approve products 

for the program. We would support a provision in the upcoming reauthorization that authorizes and funds the development of a centralized database within USDA to manage a list of all eligible products under the program and make universal criteria used to approve products for the program available to retailers and manufacturers. 

In closing, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to testify 

here today. Congress has an unprecedented opportunity to bring 

uniformity and standard operating rules to the program, which will 

bring costs down, improve program efficiencies, and help simplify 

the shopping trip for moms. The retail community looks forward to 

working with you on the upcoming Child Nutrition reauthorization 

legislation. 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Smith can be found on page 78 

in the appendix.] 

Chairman LINCOLN. Thank you. Thanks to all of you. 

In deference to my colleague, I know he has got somewhere he 

has to be, so I would like to turn to him first for any questions he 

may have of you all and then we will continue. Senator Chambliss. 

Senator CHAMBLISS. Thank you, Madam Chairman. I appreciate 

your indulgence and your cooperation, as always. 

All of you have given us good practical issues to look at, and very 

honestly, you have given us some very good practical solutions to 

those issues, and I am appreciative of the way you all have delved 

into this issue. In fact, Ms. Smith, you just answered my question 

that I was going to ask you relative to some of the practicalities 

of the WIC program. And, gosh, going from 500 to 12,000 items, I 

can see we have got a little work we have got to do there. Your 

suggestion, I think, is well taken. 

Dr. Bogle, as you know, childhood obesity rates are staggering. 

Of course, the problem is beginning more and more at earlier ages 

now. The rate of obesity for children entering kindergarten seems 

to be the same it is when they complete kindergarten, if I remember my numbers right. In your research, have you found any effective interventions aimed at parents and caregivers to help them be 

more aware of childhood obesity issues as well as providing tools 

to help prevent or reverse this in the home? 

Ms. BOGLE. Thank you, Senator Chambliss. We are working on 

that, absolutely. And the one comment I wanted to make in regard 

to other things that have been said, you know, it is not just the 

schools. It is the families, and particularly when we talk about 

these preschool children, many of them are not enrolled in school 

programs where they might get information and parents might get 

information about better feeding choices. 

In reference to what Rhonda just said about the preschool kids 

and the increase in obesity in the zero to three, part of that problem is the fact that for those children, the source of calories for 

them oftentimes—most of the time—are foods that do not have or 

are not high in nutritional quality—heap calories, both fat and 

sugar-related items, but not other items. 

36 

For instance, it is very difficult for families in rural areas, lowincome families, to find ways of preparing fruits and vegetables for 

their children—in the zero to three, I am talking now—unless they 

are just buying the baby foods, the commercial foods that are already on the market, which are more expensive than they would 

be if they were using some of the foods that the rest of the family 

is eating. But it is more difficult to get that job done. 

I think, unequivocally, what we are seeing in the rural communities, and that is where I have spent most of my time so that is 

what I will talk about, is the involvement of families, particularly 

grandparents. Now, in the Delta, we have a lot of grandparents 

that are raising grandchildren and they are living in these rural 

areas again and they are becoming one of the biggest advocates for 

the prevention of obesity of not only their grandchildren, but greatgrandchildren and others to come. So we think that part of what 

we are seeing is if we can involve the schools, the communities, 

agencies within the communities, families, even extended families, 

and the children themselves when they are old enough to know 

what we are trying to tell them about, is the best way to go, because it is not just a single item. It is a very complex issue. 

For instance, this whole idea of physical activity, I know a lot of 

people think that those of us who live in rural areas just have 

ready access to all kinds of physical activity, but it is not the case 

anymore. It is very unsafe in many areas for children to even play 

outside their homes. So we are not just talking about the lack of 

exercise facilities, but we are talking about the safety of areas 

where they might exercise. 

So I think that the other thing we are seeing is that different 

segments of the society—and we know from the report released 

yesterday on food insecurity that there are groups within our society that are at higher risk of food insecurity—those same groups, 

it turns out, are at higher risk of obesity for their children. Some 

of that is cultural, and so we must begin to make some kind of efforts to inform our citizenry about some of the differences in culture and health issues for their children. So that is really what we 

are trying to work on in the Delta. 

Senator CHAMBLISS. I am glad to hear you say that the adults 

that participate in your study are becoming more cognizant of the 

way food is prepared, because I am sure Arkansas is very much 

like Georgia, and I live in a rural part of our State. If there is any 

question about how to prepare it, you batter it and you deep fry 

it—— 

[Laughter.] 

Senator CHAMBLISS. —and it is pretty darn good, whatever it 

is—— 

Ms. BOGLE. It is tasty—— 

[Laughter.] 

Senator CHAMBLISS. —but it is probably not the healthiest way 

to prepare it, so that is encouraging. 

Well, I want to thank all of you for your testimony and we look 

forward to staying in touch and dialoguing with you as we go 

through this reauthorization next year. 

Thank you, Madam Chairman. 

37 

Chairman LINCOLN. Absolutely. Well, a special thanks to Senator 

Chambliss for covering as the votes were going on and certainly for 

working with us on this critical issue. He is always there, and he 

and his staff both are wonderful to work with, so I am grateful to 

him. 

I want to take my personal time here to be able to welcome you 

all to the committee and, again, your voices in this very critical 

issue that we face in terms of child nutrition and really getting it 

right. We know that we have to start at an early age and it is not 

just what we put in front of them, but it is what we teach them, 

and that is critical. 

So, Dr. Bogle, thank you for all of your work as Executive Director of the Lower Mississippi Delta Obesity Prevention Research 

Unit. You all do tremendous work there, not only in terms of what 

children eat, but also looking at how we can teach them so many 

other things. 

We are so very grateful to Rich Huddleston, whose tremendous 

years of service to children across the State of Arkansas, now as 

Executive Director of the Arkansas Advocates for Children and 

Families. You have just been a great resource to me and I am 

grateful for all of your hard work and the things that you have 

done. 

Rhonda with our Hunger Alliance, we appreciate—I should say 

Ms. Sanders, sorry—for all your work with the Hunger Alliance 

and what it means. Those Backpack Programs, listening to those 

stories is unbelievably meaningful, and to see what it has meant 

in the lives of those children and to think that it was just from a 

school nurse who really thought that there has got to be a better 

way to help these kids over the weekend, and when our Hunger Alliance and our food banks came to the rescue and said there is a 

better way, we are going to work and we are going to work to improve upon it. So we are grateful to you all. 

And Ms. Smith, thank you, because Wal-Mart does a wonderful 

job, not only in our communities in providing for our families a way 

to—and a very economical way to provide for families, but they also 

share their information with us in helping to figure out a better 

way to get families what they need. The information that you all 

have in terms of the customers that you serve is really critical for 

us in getting it right and making it a simpler process and one with 

integrity and respect, and that is so critical, as we all know. We 

are all put on this earth to look after one another and there is a 

right way and a wrong way to do that, and without a doubt, the 

respect is a critical part of what we want to do here in the committee as we design these programs for our fellow man, and particularly for our children. 

So I appreciate it and am particularly proud that this panel is 

here today and feel like you have already offered a great resource 

in terms of your knowledge, but look forward to continuing to work 

with you. 

Chairman Harkin did a tremendous job, along with the staff, in 

really teeing up what we need to do on child nutrition and we are 

looking forward to bringing that to fruition in the bill shortly after 

the new year so that we can move forward and really get down to 

38 

the business of what we want to do, and that is making sure that 

our children are healthy in this country. 

Just a couple of questions, if I may. Dr. Bogle, in your testimony, 

you note that food insecurity can have a negative impact on academic performance. Children that don’t eat breakfast have lower 

scores in school. It is why so many of our schools are providing food 

for children on days when it is standardized testing. But without 

a doubt, with those Breakfast Programs, it is important for us to 

be creative and inventive in making sure that children have good 

nutrition in the mornings and making sure that there is a way that 

they can get it. I have got teenage boys now, and they don’t like 

to get out of bed in the morning, so we need to make sure that it 

is something that is deliverable to children. 

But what about the relationship between poor diet, especially 

overweight and obesity, and academic performance? Do we have 

any research that conclusively demonstrates that poor diet or obesity also contributes to low test scores? Is there anything, whether 

it deals with both the diet and the health of the child or the selfesteem? 

Ms. BOGLE. Senator Lincoln, I am not sure that there is a body 

of research out there specifically dealing with the academic performance of obese children. It is certainly an area that needs some 

research and looking at. I think in many ways, the obese child has 

been ignored, more or less, in this whole health issue while professionals like myself fussed about whether obesity was a disease or 

wasn’t a disease. 

So I am not sure that there is, but I will tell you this. Arkansas 

is in a good position to give you some information about that based 

on the BMI studies that they have in the State, and I am sure that 

Dr. Thompson would be willing to give us that information and I 

will get that back to you. 

But just one brief thing is this. We do know about the extreme 

connection between obesity and health. So we don’t really have to 

look for a lot of other reasons until you study whether or not the 

obesity makes a difference in the academic scores. We know that 

the unhealthy children don’t do as well. 

Chairman LINCOLN. But it gives us, I think, an added advantage 

of being able to seek out the solutions to that issue, because there 

are multiple effects, obviously. 

Ms. BOGLE. Right. 

Chairman LINCOLN. Obviously, health, but without a doubt, if it 

is absenteeism or if it is low self-esteem that is causing those poor 

grades, that is yet one more thing that we could correct, I hope, 

in terms of addressing obesity through better nutrition. 

Ms. BOGLE. I agree. 

Chairman LINCOLN. I also appreciate your discussion of the environmental factors that constrain or contribute to individual behaviors regarding food and physical activity choices. When we talk 

about helping people make good choices, we need to understand 

that their choices themselves are often limited by outside factors. 

I know when my husband and I left Little Rock the other day headed to Lee County, we stopped in Brinkley to get some gas, and the 

boys were hungry and wanted a snack and we walked into, really, 

39 

almost the only place there to get food, and there was plenty of 

unnutritious food. 

I hate to use too many terms, but—and then I noticed on the 

counter there was a small bowl that had two rotten bananas and 

a small kind of shriveled-up apple, and I realize that what you 

have talked about there in terms of access in rural areas, we call 

them food deserts. They are something, really, that both rural 

areas and inner-city areas share in the fact that it is much more 

difficult to find fresh fruits and vegetables and nutritious foods, 

and that is something hard for most people to believe here in 

Washington. 

Those that didn’t grow up in rural America, they don’t realize it, 

because they think rural America is where all those fresh fruits 

and vegetables come from, on the farms that are there. They don’t 

realize that sparse areas sometimes lead themselves to very few 

availabilities in terms of the kind of nutritious foods that we want 

and need. 

Maybe you might just touch on our need to understand that the 

choices themselves there are almost limited, and whether it be that 

the nearest supermarket is 30 miles away or the kids can’t walk 

to school—you mentioned a little bit about the safety of it—but is 

there something there? Can we talk a little bit about how you coordinate your research with other Federal agencies that also have 

a role in health promotion policy, exercise, and other things? Do 

you think there are additional steps or actions that the government 

could take to coordinate those policies across programs and agencies? 

Ms. BOGLE. I will say two things to that. Certainly, you have described the one place that I know in Brinkley to eat—— 

[Laughter.] 

Ms. BOGLE. The catfish is really good, but you can only get it 

fried. 

[Laughter.] 

Ms. BOGLE. But there are other issues there where most folks 

don’t understand that we don’t have a Wal-Mart Super Center in 

every rural community in Arkansas, Louisiana, or Mississippi, 

which would be great. And so it gets down to sort of mom-and-pop 

stores, and when you go in—and we do this on a frequent basis— 

the quality of the fruits and vegetables are not—the fresh ones— 

what they should be, the reason being, of course, that they have 

been trucked long distances and then they sit there because it is 

expensive for that store owner to buy in the first place, so he is 

going to let them lay there as long as he hopes to sell them, I 

guess. 

And so it drives us many times to say, well, if not fresh fruits 

and vegetables, let us look at canned or frozen. And some people 

don’t understand that when we recommend canned and frozen 

fruits and vegetables, but certainly that is better than just eating 

the fried things that may be more available. 

As to the cooperation at the Federal level or at the State levels, 

Secretary Vilsack mentioned earlier the efforts that are going on 

here between the Department of Education, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Agriculture. I think that is all very 

good. And, of course, he is really stepping up to the plate with his 

40 

economic development. I have always maintained that nutrition 

had an economic development arm. We just need to promote it 

more. 

I think that if we teach the families in these rural communities 

to each more fresh fruits and vegetables and the little mom-andpop stores provide them, the families will buy them and it would 

be a win-win situation for both of them. But it is going to take the 

cooperation of a lot of different agencies and a lot of different folks 

in all communities to get that done. 

Chairman LINCOLN. Is there any one or several interventions or 

sets of interventions that you feel have had the biggest impact on 

the health of the participants, or would you feel like had the most 

promise for replication elsewhere? Is there any one thing that 

comes to mind? 

Ms. BOGLE. I would just mention two. One, we developed, in addition to a food choice testing to see whether or not young children 

in an elementary school in Mississippi would even try fresh fruits 

and vegetables that they did not know or weren’t accustomed to, 

we associated that with the development of a soccer team, or soccer 

teams in that elementary school for the kindergarten through third 

grade, now realizing, again, that is an area where the children 

don’t normally participate in organized physical activity. And they 

didn’t know what soccer was in this school, of course, or what kind 

of a ball to use. 

But to make a long story short, they loved it. And when we left 

there, when the research was over—and to us, this is the gratifying 

thing, that if we can do some research that is sustainable in those 

communities once we leave, then we know we are on the right 

track. But they incorporated the soccer program into their elementary school program as we left, and more and more children are 

getting the benefit of that. 

It also made a difference in their school lunch in that as we were 

doing the research to see whether or not the children would actually try these fresh fruits and vegetables, we used that in conjunction with the School Lunch Program and the Snack Program so 

that they were able to see that just minor changes in what they 

were doing and involving some women from the community and 

helping to get them prepared would make a difference for those 

children. 

Chairman LINCOLN. So coordinating those activities, those sports 

with the feeding programs. I know that has been something that 

we have really looked at in the Summer Feeding Program because 

it is so difficult to implement those programs. 

Ms. BOGLE. They need—so far as obesity is concerned, it is going 

to take both, you know, physical activity and good nutrition. 

Chairman LINCOLN. Exactly. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Bogle. 

Rich, thank you for being here. We appreciate so much what you 

have done. You are very positive on the actions of this committee 

that was led by Chairman Cochran and that he took in 2004 when 

it required the State Child Nutrition Agencies to directly certify for 

school meals children who are already participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Some people forget what 

SNAP is, so we kind of like to word it out there a time or two. 

41 

But your testimony also notes that of the ten million children eligible for direct certification in the 2008–2009 school year, only 6.5 

million of them were directly certified. Can you provide the committee some explanation as to why so many children were missing 

out on that direct certification? And when it is supposed to be—I 

mean, it is supposed to be an automatic process, I mean, why are 

we missing so many? And can you also make some suggestions as 

to how we can improve that State performance in direct certification? 

Mr. HUDDLESTON. Sure. Well, the good news is that USDA has 

done some very helpful research to identify these factors and to 

really offer some positive solutions. I mean, one of their findings 

was that the most effective way to really reach kids through direct 

certification is for the Food Stamp office and food districts to use 

computer matches. And believe it or not, there are still a lot of 

States out there who are trying to do direct certification, but basically what happens is that instead of doing a computer match, the 

Food Stamp agency will send paper applications to the homes of 

their Food Stamp recipients and ask the parent to fill it out and 

then return it to the school. Well, that really kind of defeats part 

of the advantages of doing direct certification, when you have access to computers. 

The second suggestion they had was to do these matches more 

than once during the year, because obviously families become poor 

after kids start the school year. And so we may be missing kids if 

we don’t do matches more often. I mean, so that was another suggestion they had. 

And then finally, it is really important for States that aren’t 

doing well here to really kind of consciously step back, sit down 

and look at the reasons why they are not reaching kids through direct certification. I mean, it is real important that they work with 

USDA to really figure out these reasons, and believe it or not, 

State agencies get busy sometimes and they don’t have the time or 

don’t make the time to really kind of sit back and do that kind of 

analysis. 

I think the good news is that for low-performing States, Congress 

provided in the 2010 Agricultural appropriations law some grants 

for low-performing States that really should help motivate States 

to identify improvements and provide them with the resources to 

implement these improvements. 

The Hunger-Free Schools Act, which is obviously still not law 

yet, includes other provisions that would help improve direct certification. It would include bonuses for States that are performing 

especially well or that show significant improvement. It would also 

require States that don’t perform well to write and implement improvement plans. 

So there are things that States can do already and there are 

steps coming down the road that could also improve the ability of 

States to be effective here. 

Chairman LINCOLN. So incentivizing them is helpful, it sounds 

like. 

Mr. HUDDLESTON. Yes. 

Chairman LINCOLN. You mentioned a proposal that would allow 

schools in high-poverty areas to just offer free meals to all students 

42 

and just skip the regular paper application process. Could you tell 

me what that might mean in our State of Arkansas? 

Mr. HUDDLESTON. Sure. 

Chairman LINCOLN. How many schools would be eligible? 

Mr. HUDDLESTON. In Arkansas, there are about 250 schools in 

which more than 80 percent of the students are enrolled for free 

or reduced meals in those schools. And you add those kids up, that 

is about one in five Arkansas students who attends one of those 

250 schools. 

Schools that participate in a universal feeding option like this 

would see a major reduction in their paperwork. They would not 

have to process applications, or they wouldn’t have to go regularly 

verify eligibility for a sample of the enrolled students. They 

wouldn’t have to take payments in the cafeteria or track which students qualify for free meals on a daily basis. The administrative 

savings—I mean, the simplifications would allow school staff to 

really focus more on either providing more nutritious meals or on 

improving their educational programming. 

So this is a real important step that could really be a big benefit 

to these schools, and not just to mention from the perspective of a 

student. It really would reduce the stigma that students have to go 

through on a daily basis. I mean, kids are very conscious about 

who is wearing the best tennis shoes and the best jeans and all 

that. Well, the flip side of that is that kids know who is having to 

fill out paperwork for these meals. So no student should have to 

go through that stigmatizing process in order not to go hungry. 

Yes. 

Chairman LINCOLN. Thanks—— 

Mr. HUDDLESTON. And not to mention the fact that if you did 

this, you would reach a lot of students who maybe don’t qualify 

now, but because if the school was serving all of the students, you 

would have folks at 190 percent of poverty, 200 percent of poverty, 

210 percent of poverty who are still struggling to make ends meet 

day to day but who would also benefit from free meals. 

Chairman LINCOLN. Right. Well, I visited with a school—I went 

to the lunchroom with some students in St. Francis County, which 

is in East Arkansas, and it was amazing not only to the stigma 

that children get, but the position it puts those school cafeteria 

workers in when they have to ask a child. They don’t want to do 

that. They don’t want to put that child in that position. They know 

what it does to their self-esteem and they know that it might cause 

that child to turn and walk away or not come back to the cafeteria 

the next day. So, I mean, it is beneficial for everybody, not just the 

kids, but the workers, the community, and certainly the school and 

being able to really put their resources where they can be most effective on behalf of the children. 

But thank you for your work. We are so grateful to you. 

And, Ms. Sanders, thank you. In your testimony, you mentioned 

that our State is a low-income rural State. People, again, in Washington oftentimes that look at this issue just on paper have such 

a hard time understanding that children or families in rural areas 

have a difficult time getting nutritious foods. They think that is 

where the bounty is. It comes from rural America. Why is it so difficult for those families that live in those areas? 

43 

But it is not only that you live further from perhaps the delivery 

point, which is the grocery store, where you are going to get the 

majority of your access, but you also live out in that country where 

you are farther away from the human services agency, certainly 

the nearest food pantry, which may be difficult to get to, which is 

usually in town, not out in those rural areas and those rural 

routes. 

And your child is going to live farther from the school that they 

attend, so they are going to be on a bus. They are going to be in 

transit more time than other students, as well. They may miss the 

Breakfast Program because it takes them too long to get to school, 

or they may miss the after school snack because they have to leave 

early enough on the bus to get home. 

So those are a lot of other things that factor into that issue, and 

I think it is so important for those of us that have lived out on a 

county road. We know what those challenges are, and it is so important for us to remember that because they are probably those 

that are more likely to be lower income and in a greater need. 

I just want to ask, knowing that these challenges all exist in 

fighting hunger in rural areas, what advice or maybe recommendations you would give the committee about how we better address 

that particular food security need in rural areas. 

Ms. SANDERS. That is an interesting question and there are some 

things that can be done utilizing the current government programs 

that could expand access, especially to children when they are not 

in school, which is one of the things that you mentioned. 

For instance, the Summer Feeding Program, an excellent program, woefully underutilized throughout the nation, and part of 

that has to do with some of the ways that we have determined 

those meals have to be provided. First of all, they have to be provided in a congregate setting, which means everyone has to come 

there, sit down, and eat. Well, just as you mentioned, in the rural 

setting, it is not always easy to do. During the summertime, those 

children may not be able to hop in their cars and drive to the nearest place where they can all sit down together and eat that meal. 

So I think there will be an opportunity to look at some new ways, 

some new pilot thoughts on can we maybe take the meals out more 

into the rural setting, some different methods of delivery. And I am 

hoping that with what you have done through the extension of the 

Child Nutrition Act, with some of that money for pilot thoughts of 

Summer Feeding, we might be able to find some pretty significant 

ways to expand those opportunities that are outside of that congregate setting that I think affect rural Arkansas, rurality throughout the nation. Those would be good opportunities to look at ways 

to expand those programs. 

There is also, when we talk about eligibility to things like after 

school meals and summer school programs, currently, they use the 

area eligibility indicators of 50 percent on free or reduced lunch, 

and then those children are eligible for after school and summer 

meals. That could be reduced down to 40 percent. It has been lower 

than that even previously. But we could go back to that, which in 

Arkansas—I think I have attached the map to my written testimony—would significantly allow for more areas of the State to be 

44 

eligible for meals after school, during the summer, those things like 

that are very difficult for rural Arkansas. 

As far as for the Charitable Food Systems’ involvement, things 

like the Backpack Programs or those where when we have the opportunity that we have the children to send boxes with them, once 

again, they are taking it with them. We are not having to worry 

about how to get to them. And they are having access to food, that 

we can be a part of that through this system is just a great way. 

And I know so many of them utilize the—so many of our pantries 

and agencies are involved in the Commodities Program, and those 

expansions provide lots of opportunities for families to have assistance with food. 

Chairman LINCOLN. Well, I think just recognizing that it is a 

challenge is important. I know Dr. Bogle had worked on the aspect 

of doing almost a circuit rider-type delivery system, where trucks 

were going out to those county roads and providing fresh fruits and 

vegetables on a regular basis so that people knew that there was 

going to be a food service-type truck stopping by at a regular time 

and point where they could actually get the kind of nutritious foods 

that they would want and need in those rural settings if they didn’t 

have access to being able to drive 30 miles into the nearest town 

where the nearest grocery store was. So there is certainly a lot 

there. 

Just one last thing I wanted to ask you. You said that the data 

shows that children whose families are food insecure are more likely to be at risk for overweight and obesity. 

Ms. SANDERS. Yes. 

Chairman LINCOLN. You know, that just sounds counterintuitive. 

If you live in a household where you don’t know where your next 

meal is going to come from, you would think that you would be eating less often, which you would think would reduce your risk of 

overweight or obesity. Either you are food insecure or you are overweight, not both at the same time. 

But what your testimony suggests is just the opposite, and I 

think there is more. Not only can you be both food insecure and 

overweight, you are more likely to be overweight, and, of course, 

a lot of that goes to the types of foods that you eat. 

Would you offer maybe some of your insight as to why you think 

this is the case, and how do we fight this twin problem of hunger 

and obesity? 

Ms. SANDERS. I think you hit on several of the areas that we feel 

like are the cause for this. One is the availability of quality foods 

at a price that is affordable to low-income families. So they are 

struggling with, I only have so much money and how do I get those 

really good foods that are more expensive. 

They are also struggling with—just oftentimes for a young mom 

or a caregiver, the emotional impact of dealing with all of those 

things that are hitting you at one time. So there have been some 

bodies of research and causes that have linked caregiver depression 

and the situations that they are in that are related directly to the 

child eating things that may not be the most nutritious for them. 

And this data all came from the Children’s Health Watch Project, 

of which Arkansas is one of the main sites for gathering informaVerDate Nov 24 2008 14:45 Jan 20, 2011 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00048 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\62718 MICHA
45 

tion. So it has been very interesting to look at it and see how it 

correlates. 

As far as to addressing the issue, obviously, increasing the nutritional packages, such as they have done with WIC and those programs, the things that we have done through the schools, through 

preschool—in Arkansas, as you know, we are getting a lot of threeand four-year-olds in preschool. So a lot of the standards that we 

are looking at for nutritious food and physical activity fit now within that preschool setting. 

And it has been very interesting being—I am also on my local 

school board, so I get to hear a lot of the discussions bouncing back 

and forth between what the schools can do and what can be done 

for the health of children and balancing those nutritional items and 

teaching the kids the right way to eat and involving the parents. 

And whether people liked it and enjoyed it, sending the BMI letters 

home in Arkansas was awareness raising for the parents to get 

that in their home. It was uncomfortable in many aspects. It was 

hard to deal with. But once again, you talk about getting some parental involvement, they became involved at many levels at that 

point. 

So I think the Head Start programs, when you go back to things 

that can be done and access to preschool, here you are once again 

dealing with three-and four-year-olds. They have got a strong program, more nutritional education and parental involvement. Once 

again, it gets to the sources of those families of young children that 

are struggling with how to feed their children, how to feed themselves, and how to make ends meet. 

Chairman LINCOLN. But you make a good point, and we did experience that in Arkansas, the discomfort level among parents 

when they received information about their children that their 

body mass index was out of control. And many of them, I can remember the reaction was, you are telling me I am not doing a good 

job raising my children. And that wasn’t what it was. It was clearly 

information to help them better provide for their children and to 

work at creating a healthier environment for their kids. 

But it does go to the fact that information is key in making sure 

that parents are aware and they do have information. And it is a 

good way to get them involved. I know a couple of our school principals found that providing a steak dinner for the parents actually 

got the parents all to come to the school, and then she got their 

attention and was able to really convince them to participate in a 

lot of the school activities with their kids, which in turn engaged 

them in the ideas of not only what their kids were doing at school 

in terms of meals and other activities, but also at home. And so 

that is really important. 

But we appreciate all your hard work and your outreach to the 

people of Arkansas who, particularly in these economic times, have 

tremendous needs. So thank you for being here today, too. 

Ms. Smith, I am very interested to learn about your experience, 

obviously from the transition on the SNAP Program, but how we 

can also transition WIC. You have spoken an awful lot about that, 

transitioning WIC into the 21st century, especially by encouraging 

or mandating the transition to an EBT system. Could you talk a 

little bit more about your experience with the SNAP EBT transiVerDate Nov 24 2008 14:45 Jan 20, 2011 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00049 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\62718 MICHA
46 

tion and the benefits that occurred? I mean, you have talked a little bit about that, but clearly, being able to, in the volume that you 

all deal with, to be most efficient. 

Ms. SMITH. Well, and I apologize, but my experience doesn’t reside with that. I know that happened a few years ago, and that 

was really before my time with the company, so—but I can speak 

to you about the WIC EBT transitions we have been through and 

what we have seen in the States that have already fully adopted 

a WIC EBT platform. 

Chairman LINCOLN. That is a good comparison, the ones that 

have and the ones that haven’t. 

Ms. SMITH. Say Texas, for instance, a fairly large State, we have 

seen increased engagement from our store associates in serving the 

WIC customers. It is a much more pleasant experience at the cash 

register point of sale. A colleague of mine for another company 

often refers to the cashier as having to act as the WIC police sometimes in a paper transaction. So with an Electronic Benefits platform, that type of confrontation is eliminated. 

There is also a faster turnaround time in payment to the retailers with an Electronic Benefits payment platform. So on a paper 

transaction basis, you normally see float of maybe 30 to 45 days 

before a retailer might receive payment for WIC vouchers submitted to the State agency for payment. With WIC EBT, depending 

on the platform, you are paid either same day or next day at the 

latest. So that is an increased turnaround time for settlement purposes for the retailers. 

It has also, I think, lessened administrative burden quite a bit. 

Many of the compliance issues that retailers face with the WIC 

Program are borne at the point of sale with the cashier or in the 

office, where we are processing the checks and submitting them for 

payment. So with an Electronic Benefits platform, those opportunities for error, either at the cash register or in the office, are eliminated. So you have less risk of compliance violations and less administrative burden following up on those compliance violations. 

So those are some of the benefits that we have seen—— 

Chairman LINCOLN. Well, maybe you can—when you talked 

about standards earlier in your testimony, you can paint a picture 

for the committee of what is going to happen if the committee does 

require a national EBT system by a certain date but without national standards. 

Ms. SMITH. We actually may see that scenario play out very soon 

in the State of Oklahoma, a neighbor to the State of Arkansas. The 

Cherokee Nation, a recent adopter of EBT for its benefits distribution for the WIC program, has implemented a Smart Card program, the offline program, and the State of Oklahoma, which obviously those jurisdictions overlap, is considering right now an online 

or magstripe program. The Chickasaw Nation, also in Oklahoma, 

is committed to developing an online program, as well. So very 

shortly, we will see just how well this mix of technologies may or 

may not work in a real world environment. 

There are examples, though, of interoperability in Texas and 

New Mexico, neighboring States that both adopted the Smart Card, 

or offline approach to EBT delivery. Those two States—in the El 

Paso market area, there are a number of New Mexico residents 

47 

who shop in the El Paso market area because it is closer for them 

to go there than somewhere else inside their own State to buy their 

groceries. New Mexico residents very easily use their Smart Card 

to purchase their WIC items in our Texas stores and it has been 

a very successful—it is a win-win for both the State of Texas and 

the State of New Mexico. 

Chairman LINCOLN. Well, I thought I heard you in your testimony, you were saying that last year, you did 400,000, and then 

you went within the same period of the next year, you did four million—— 

Ms. SMITH. We went from four million to 4,400,000, so we increased approximately 400,000 transactions in a year’s time. 

Chairman LINCOLN. Okay. I was thinking, 400,000 to four million was a pretty big leap. I wasn’t sure if I had heard that correctly. 

Particularly in regard to the central database of products that 

are eligible for use under the WIC program, do you think there is 

a role for the private sector and the retail community in establishing a central database? And maybe you can help us understand 

the scope of a task like that, both in terms of establishing such a 

database, but also in terms of maintaining it. I mean, I would be 

curious to know how often new food products are introduced into 

the marketplace and how often are new WIC foods introduced into 

the marketplace and how much work would that be to maintain a 

real-time system that has tracked all those products. 

Ms. SMITH. It is a very good question. Particularly with the WIC 

Program, it is much more onerous than, say, the SNAP Program, 

where you really have foods within the SNAP program—it is easier 

to identify the foods that are not eligible than the foods that are. 

The WIC Program has very specific food requirements for its participants, whether it be package size requirements or nutritional 

value of the foods that are being purchased, those types of things. 

Is there a role for the private sector to play? I think we play that 

role already today in that we are submitting the information about 

the products that we want to make available to the WIC participants. I think the challenge today is that because the process varies so widely between WIC authorities, it is difficult to come up 

with a uniform approach to submitting that information to WIC authorities, and that is a problem not only for the retail community, 

but the manufacturing community, as well. 

I think that we want an easier way to submit the product information more quickly to one single location so that we can get that 

information out to all of the WIC authorities—it would be available 

for them, as well—to more quickly make choices about changes to 

their food packages or their approved food lists. 

Right now, generally speaking, most WIC authorities review 

their approved food list once a year. It is typically in the fall in concurrence with the Federal fiscal year. So just last week, in fact, we 

got a request from the State of Pennsylvania to submit information 

about our Great Value brand products that would be available in 

the State of Pennsylvania for the 2010–2011 food lists. So they are 

already planning for next year’s food items. 

Chairman LINCOLN. Those are good suggestions. 

48 

Well, thank you all so much for joining us. I apologize for the 

interruption with the votes on the floor, but that is pretty commonplace around here, and I want to thank my colleagues. I think you 

hopefully noticed the level of attendance we had early on with the 

hearing. Members are extremely interested in this issue. 

Senator Harkin did an awful lot of work and the staff did a tremendous amount of work early on in the Child Nutrition reauthorization, and we want to work diligently to do it in a timely way so 

that we can also get the maximum benefit out of our Federal resources. That means being sure that we get it done before the 

budget baseline changes. So we are going to be working hard to do 

that and we appreciate your input and look forward to working 

with you all as we move forward. 

I think this is the fifth hearing we have had now on child nutrition, so we are working to come to a completion and be able to be 

ready to do something after the first of the new year. 

But again, thank you all so much for your input here today, but 

more importantly, for the hard work that you do across our State 

in really dealing with the tough issues of food insecurity among our 

families and particularly our children at a really critical economic 

time. Hopefully, that translates up here and we can get some good 

work done on behalf of all those families. 

So thank you all so much for joining us. 

The committee is adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 1:05 p.m., the committee was adjourned.] 

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A P P E N D I X 

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