Healthy students perform better. Poor nutrition and inadequate physical activity can affect not only academic achievement, but also other factors such as absenteeism, classroom behavior, ability to concentrate, self-esteem, cognitive performance, and test scores. This toolkit provides information to help make schools the model for healthier…

This guide is designed to help school food service managers to control food costs as they plan their menus. The guide contains: (1) menu planning tips and procedures related specifically to economy; (2) instructions for precosting recipes, individual food items and complete menus, estimating costs of USDA donated foods and of condiments,…

In 1994, Congress passed the Healthy Meals for Healthy Americans Act, requiring that Child Nutrition Programs comply with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and meet nutrient standards. In 1995, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) issued new regulations to define how the Dietary Guidelines would be applied to school meals, called the…

Prepared for food manufacturers, this publication contains instructions for calculating the contribution that a meat or poultry product makes toward the meal pattern requirements of child nutrition programs. It also contains instructions on how to apply for and obtain the approval for a label containing a child nutrition statement. These…

This manual establishes policies and procedures for the Child Nutrition (CN) Labeling Program, a voluntary federal program run by the United States Department of Agriculture. The program is responsible for reviewing a product formulation to determine the contribution a single serving of that product makes toward the child nutrition meal pattern…

In recognition of the fact that food is an important step in the educational process and in order to generate new child nutrition programs in communities across the nation (especially in rural communities with significant numbers of migrant farmworkers' children), basic information is presented about four federally funded child nutrition programs.…