Bettina Elias Siegel

One of the most dismaying aspects of the recent passage of new federal school meal standards was the collective caving by Congress to pressure from various food manufacturers seeking to protect profits.

The most notorious of these episodes was the fight over the continued classification of pizza as a school...

Yesterday's press conference held by Beef Products, Inc., attended by no less than three governors, two lieutenant governors, and the Under Secretary for Food Safety at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was a masterpiece of crisis management. I'm still working my way through the raw footage -- you can view it...

The beef industry is pushing back hard in the last few days against opposition to Lean Beef Trimmings, better known as "pink slime."  Yesterday the American Meat Institute released this video defending the product.

There is also a new message in beef industry communications, expressly raised in...

Last Tuesday I launched on my blog, The Lunch Tray, a Change.org petition to get "Boneless Lean Beef Trimmings" (BLBT), also known as "pink slime," out of school food. The response has been truly staggering -- over 222,000 people have signed on and that number continues...

My sixth grade daughter recently decided to join a soccer team, something she hasn't done since a brief flirtation with soccer back in the first grade. But I well remembered how the snacks at kids' soccer games back then (provided by the team's parents) usually consisted of pre-packaged junk food...

On my blog, The Lunch Tray, I made a series of 2012 New Year's resolutions which included trying out vegetarianism for one month (January). Here's the somewhat surprising journey I've taken since then, broken down into ten lessons I've learned:

Lesson One:  Meatless at Home = Piece...

On my blog, The Lunch Tray, I went on record long ago opposing the time-honored custom of bringing sugary birthday treats into school classrooms.

But a few weeks ago, a reader named Concerned Dad left this comment:

Well, my child's school is...

In the last two days many Lunch Tray readers have sent me links to this news story, which claims that a preschooler in a North Carolina school was forced by a state inspector to give up her packed lunch of a turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and...

Yesterday an interesting story in the New York Times NY/Region section caught my eye.

The new chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Joseph J. Lhota, has come under fire for opposing a bill in Albany which would ban eating on New York subways. The goal of the legislation is...

Last week I came across several news reports of a study that had me flummoxed.

The C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health claimed to have found a "possible association between school-based childhood obesity prevention programs and an increase in eating disorders among young children and adolescents."   The...

On Wednesday First Lady Michelle Obama, accompanied by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, released the final federal nutrition standards for school meals, representing the first major overhaul of school food requirements in over 15 years.

As with most products of the legislative process, the end result is messy...

Last month a Brooklyn nine-year-old named Jonathan Jewth tragically choked to death while eating meatballs in his school cafeteria. The New York Post, which first broke the story, reported that the lunchroom workers on duty at the time were unable to assist the boy. Said an eyewitness quoted...