“Á La Carte” is today’s catch-all phrase for the school cafeteria’s non-USDA lunch line, which doesn't meet USDA nutrition standards.

It’s the relatively new, other cafeteria line that sells fast food and other high-fat, high-sugar concoctions, along with dozens of snack cakes and cookies, chips, ice cream novelties and sugared drinks in whopping bottles. In most cases, there are no rules nor limits in terms of what kids can buy, and call lunch.

Unlike the USDA lunch, these items have no nutrition standards to meet. But they deliver profits to cash-starved schools -- at 100% markup -- while the USDA reimburses schools only $2.14 for an entire meal.

Even given the food commodities schools receive to defray food costs, there’s no profit in it. So over the past decade, the majority of schools have given in and in the eyes of most health professionals, sold out. 

In 1999, 95% of California high schools surveyed were offering branded fast food as á la carte entree items at lunch. At 71% of these schools, fast food accounted for 70% of total food sales.

Per the Centers for Disease Control, a la carte items served in U.S. schools ...

	Á la carte "entrees" (pizza, burgers, etc.) - 56.2%
	Á la carte french fries - 40%
	Baked goods that aren’t low-fat - 60%

How does fast food pizza, for example, compare to the cafeteria’s version? In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the school lunch pizza, at 375 calories, had half the calories of the fast food version.

But how did it come to this?

How It Started. And When. And Where.

According to Greg Critser in his landmark book, Fat Land, it was simple.

While fast food companies had long been trying to get into schools, they couldn’t meet the USDA’s school lunch nutrition standards and refused to reformulate products in order to sell in schools.

But in the early 1990s, a group of enterprising Pizza Hut salespeople asked: “Why not -- instead of trying to qualify...find a way to sell the pizzas outside of the federally regulated cafeterias -- out on the lawn, or on the playground?” They took the idea to several large school districts and Los Angeles Unified embraced it, because they saw they could make some money and probably sell more lunches with a branded product.

From there, the floodgates opened, as branded “food carts” showed up at club meetings, sports events and  eventually, school cafeterias. School administrators considered it a win-win situation. But they overlooked the overconsumption of calories their enterprise represented.

Few students today receive nutritional education at school.

And the presence of virtually nutrition-free, calorie-dense sugary drinks and junk food in schools provide an implied endorsement of their place in students’ daily lives.

This “mixed message” is yet another reason for looking into what schools are offering students -- since it varies widely from school district to district and from school to school.

For each healthy product aimed at kids, there are 10 “nutritional disasters” with high levels of saturated fat, sugar or salt (considered an underestimate, since the total didn’t include candy, soft drinks or chips).