Bananas could vanish from school lunch menus. Here’s why

School nutrition workers and advocates have “lots of concerns about bananas”, said Erin Ogden, policy associate for federal child nutrition programs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).

Bananas are nutrient-dense foods that many children like. That makes them popular offerings in school cafeterias, since any healthy food that a kid will eat prevents waste and ensures that child isn’t eating either nothing or something less wholesome instead.

“For little kids, they can peel a banana. They can eat a banana if they have braces. Football teams need bananas for the potassium,” said Donna Martin, a school nutrition consultant from Georgia. “But now, school districts are saying, ‘I can’t get you bananas because they’re not American.’” The US is the world’s largest importer of bananas – which only grow in tropical climates – sourcing almost all of the fruit sold in the country from Central and South America.

Jessica Shelley, director of student dining services for Cincinnati public schools, said that next year she will have to remove bananas from her lunch program and cut breakfast servings of them to twice a week.

The Farm Bill, if it passes in its current form, will compel her school system to make these changes. The latest version, passed by the House of Representatives and awaiting response from the Senate, seeks to further curtail purchases of foreign-produced foods.

Restrictions on non-US food purchases for school meals are not new; a Buy American mandate was added to the National School Lunch Act in 1998. Originally, school food administrators had to buy US products “to the maximum extent possible”, which went undefined for years. Exceptions were made for foods that were federally listed as “nonavailable” – items relevant to school meals are bananas, mandarin oranges, canned pineapple, coconut and bulk spices. Other exceptions are foreign-sourced foods that cost less than their domestic counterparts, like fruit juices, some of which are supplied to schools through the commodities program of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

In 2024, the Buy American provision was amended to initiate a phase-in, in which a 10% cap on foods produced outside the US would be in place through 2026. It reduced the cap to 8% through mid-2031, which is why Shelley is concerned about next year’s bananas. By the 2031-32 school year, the cap would drop to 5%.

That approach, said Ogden, was meant to “allow more time to gather current information on what sorts of foods school nutrition directors couldn’t access from American producers”. The data would ideally “shape USDA strategy with growers/producers on how to eventually meet this demand” domestically, she said.

However, the House version of the Farm Bill abolishes the phase-in starting the next full school calendar year after the bill is enacted – possibly as soon as 2026-27 – and knocks the cap straight down to 5%. Karen Spangler, policy director at the National Farm to School Network, called this “nuts”, since school food professionals may plan meals and order ingredients up to a full year in advance.

These changes will affect the National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs, which serve billions of meals to US children every year. As the school nutrition directors who translate federal guidance into menus point out, these are the healthiest foods many kids are likely to eat on any given day, essential to helping them thrive in their studies.

Although schools can still source items from the nonavailable list, they all count towards the cap. Under the newly written House Farm Bill, the USDA would be required to make its own list of unavailable products that would not count towards that cap. But although this might mean bananas could still be served, Spangler fears it would create a confusing two-tiered system that risks school food directors unwittingly running “afoul of the rule”.

It’s not just bananas that are at risk of being axed from school meals due to these constraints. “We have to serve kids a dark green vegetable, and broccoli is one of the great vegetables we can do,” said Martin. “But you can’t get American frozen broccoli. A lot of the fish we get is not American. Diced peaches are from China.”

In some instances, the problem isn’t that these foods do not originate in the US; it’s that the cost of American-sourced broccoli, fish and peaches is prohibitively expensive. While distributors selling to schools try to keep their own costs low and their supply constant, sometimes foreign-sourced items are the most affordable.

Changes to the Buy American mandate, which disproportionately affect produce and other whole foods, could endanger decades-long efforts to ensure school meals not only stave off hunger but also provide adequate, delicious nutrition. In some school systems, dishes like overnight oats topped with shredded carrots and coconut, scratch-cooked salmon burgers, and local root vegetables roasted with herbs and spices have supplanted less-than-compelling cafeteria offerings such as canned green beans, fish fingers, or the mac and cheese that one elementary-school student said “tastes like nothing”.

A changed Buy American mandate would also bring more work for school nutrition directors, who are responsible for documenting that they’re in compliance with the rule.

“Introducing a new, different system of what ‘counts’ and an immediately tighter cap, without additional resources, creates an unnecessary burden” on these professionals, Spangler said, especially since there’s already “a lack of transparency in the food system”, she said. “It’s tough to ask them to single-handedly turn that around or document each step of it on top of doing their regular jobs.”

The Trump administration has created other hurdles to getting fresh, nutritious and affordable foods into school meals. The new dietary guidelines center animal protein, and this could eventually affect what school nutrition directors will have to serve at breakfast and lunch. Meat is a budget-buster, and there is no federal plan to increase the amount of money for school meal purchases. The US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has called for schools to serve kids “real”, not ultra-processed, foods. But many schools lack full-service kitchens for scratch cooking, and USDA grants to buy equipment are too scant to meet the need.

Additionally, in March 2025, the USDA terminated the Local Food for Schools (LFS) program, which allocated $660m to help schools and childcare facilities source fresh products from local farmers. This has had impacts on schoolchildren who may have looked forward to fresh local strawberries in May; switching to frozen berries is “a palate change, and school nutrition directors are at the mercy of what kids like and don’t like”, said Spangler. “It’s a big lift to put forward a menu that kids – the most notoriously picky eaters – will be enthusiastic about.” Abolishing the LFS program also created a financial strain for farmers who suddenly find themselves without a once-reliable market.

All these changes, along with that potential 5% cap on non-US food, mean that school food professionals will find it harder to serve children wholesome meals. “School nutrition directors completely, 100% support American and local growers – in fact, we invest almost $6m into purchasing local produce and items from Ohio Proud manufacturers,” said Cincinnati’s Shelly, referring to the state program that promotes locally produced food. “At a time where policy is rightly focused on reducing ultra-processed foods, setting policy that will reduce a school’s ability to procure and serve a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables seems counterintuitive.”

As the Senate gets ready to mark up its version of the Farm Bill this month, “there’s definitely an opportunity for them to think meaningfully and critically about what would need to happen to actually reach the goal of, with a few exceptions, sourcing fully domestically”, said Spangler. “We know for a fact that that includes more support for local purchasing and more support for local producers.” Whether that support will be forthcoming remains to be seen.