Three Companies Decide What American Kids Eat

Twenty-one point one percent. That is the share of American children between the ages of two and nineteen who had obesity during the most recent CDC measurement cycle, a record high published in early 2026 from a survey period running from August 2021 through August 2023. I have been sitting with that number for months, not because it shocked me exactly, but because sitting right next to it in my notes is a second number from a different country, and the distance between the two is what I keep returning to.

Japan’s childhood obesity rate, measured by the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration using World Health Organization BMI standards for children ages five through nineteen, comes out at roughly a fifth of the American figure. Before I go further with that comparison, I want to be clear about what it is and is not. The American number comes from the CDC’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which defines childhood obesity as falling above the 95th percentile on the CDC’s own growth charts. The NCD-RisC figure applies a stricter WHO threshold, measuring obesity as a body mass index more than two standard deviations above the median reference population. The two studies also use slightly different age bands. So the specific ratio is sensitive to your ruler. The gap between the two countries is real, and researchers across multiple methodologies have consistently found it to be substantial. I am just telling you how the numbers were made before I ask you to think about what they mean.

What they mean, I think, starts in the procurement office.

What Japan Built in 1954

Japan legally defined school lunch as a public institution before most American baby boomers had started elementary school. The School Lunch Act passed in 1954 and did something conceptually important that the American program never managed to do with the same consistency: it positioned the meal as part of the educational mission rather than a logistical problem to outsource. In 2005, the Basic Act on Shokuiku went further, making food education a legal requirement of the school day itself. The Ministry of Education’s own language for what school lunch is supposed to be is a “living teaching material.” That phrase is not marketing copy. It is official policy framing.

Here is what it looks like in practice. A licensed nutrition teacher, called an eiyo kyoshi, designs the menus to cover roughly one-third of a child’s daily nutritional needs, around 600 to 700 calories per meal with specific protein and fat targets. The government actively promotes local sourcing: in 2021, approximately 56 percent of ingredients in Japanese school lunches came from local farms. A rotating group of students puts on white aprons and masks, carries the food from the school kitchen into the classroom, portions it out for their classmates, and then cleans up afterwards. The teacher eats the same meal. There is no separate cafeteria, no line, no tray of processed food on a conveyor belt.

Today, 99.7 percent of Japanese public elementary schools and 98.2 percent of public junior high schools run this program. That is not a pilot. That is a system that has been running for seventy years.

How America Made Lunch a Purchasing Contract

The American school lunch program feeds tens of millions of children every day and has made genuine contributions to child nutrition, particularly for kids who rely on it for their most reliable meal. I want to be clear that I am not dismissing the people working inside the program. What I am examining is the structural logic that governs how the food gets bought.

Most school districts, roughly 87 percent according to a Government Accountability Office study of school meal program administration, run their own kitchens rather than outsourcing to a food service management company. But the procurement plumbing reaches nearly every school regardless of who runs the kitchen. When a school does use a management company, that company typically requires 100 percent of food purchases to flow through its approved supplier networks. Group purchasing organizations, which negotiate bulk contracts across thousands of institutions, typically require around 80 percent purchasing compliance from their members as a condition of participation. These are not suggestions. They are contract terms, and they determine what ends up in the cafeteria before a dietitian or a school board member has weighed in on anything.

Below those contract terms sits a heavily concentrated distribution layer. When the Federal Trade Commission moved to block the proposed merger of Sysco Corporation and US Foods in 2015, the FTC’s own complaint found that the combined company would hold approximately 75 percent of the national market for broadline food distribution. The court granted the injunction. The merger was abandoned. The concentration remained.

The Paper Trail of What This System Actually Costs

Concentrated markets with multi-year contracts and mandatory purchasing compliance produce predictable behavior. Three legal settlements documented some of it within a five-year period.

In July 2010, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced a $20 million settlement with Sodexo for failing to pass supplier rebates back to 21 school districts and the State University of New York system. The investigation found that on average, Sodexo had been receiving 14 percent rebates from its suppliers without acknowledging them to the schools whose food budgets those savings belonged to. In September 2012, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced an $18 million settlement with Compass Group USA for the same basic practice involving 39 New York schools and districts over seven years. In June 2015, the DC Office of the Attorney General announced a $19.4 million settlement with Chartwells over overcharging and service failures in DC Public Schools, including meals arriving late, portions running short, and food that arrived spoiled.

The USDA had already tried to close this gap. A 2007 final rule published in the Federal Register required all discounts, rebates, and credits received by food service management contractors to be returned to school food authority nonprofit accounts. All three of those settlements involved conduct that postdated the rule. A written requirement and an enforced requirement are different things.

The Farmer Who Cannot Get In

Set aside the management companies and the group purchasing organizations for a moment and consider the position of a local farmer who wants to sell directly to a school kitchen.

To get on an approved vendor list, that farmer typically needs between one and five million dollars in liability insurance and Good Agricultural Practices certification from a third-party auditor. The approval process can take up to six months. If an approved competitor already supplies a comparable product, the application is typically denied, full stop. The system does not just make it difficult to enter the supply chain. It makes entry effectively impossible for producers who are closest to the communities the schools serve.

For a farmer in Chester County or Lancaster County, two of the most productive agricultural regions in Pennsylvania, the cafeteria in a Philadelphia neighborhood forty miles away is legally and practically out of reach.

The Lever Philadelphia Can Pull

I work on these questions as a Senior Fellow for Food Economy and Policy at the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia, and I sit on Philadelphia City Council’s Food and Nutrition Security Task Force, a 25-member advisory body convened in 2024 to develop structural solutions to hunger in the city. Through my work with the Feed Philly Coalition, I have spent time with the families whose children eat the majority of their daily nutrition inside school walls.

The argument I keep making is not that Japan’s lower childhood obesity rate is caused by kyushoku, or that changing the procurement system would close a twenty-percentage-point gap by itself. Childhood obesity is shaped by income, neighborhood conditions, access to outdoor space, stress, sleep, the structure of a family’s work schedule, and dozens of other variables that no single policy decision touches alone. My argument is narrower: procurement is a lever that is actually within reach. Vendor lists, insurance thresholds, GAP certification requirements, group purchasing compliance terms, contract rebate language. Every one of those is a policy decision made by people. People can change them.

The Pennsylvania Farm to School Network is already doing the early work of connecting Pennsylvania producers to school food authorities across the state. Democratic state Rep. Danilo Burgos, who represents part of Philadelphia, introduced bipartisan legislation in 2026 to create a grant program for schools to buy food from Pennsylvania farms. My own high school has put in a school garden. These are real beginnings.

Japan answered the question of whether a government can build a serious school food system in 1954 and has been refining the answer ever since. The procurement contract that shaped American school food was also built by people, inside bureaucracies, with levers that can be pulled the other way. In Philadelphia in 2026, the people who sit near those levers exist. I know some of them. The question is whether we move.

Sources and references

About the Author

Harry Hayman is a Philadelphia-based entrepreneur, music producer, and cultural advocate. Through his work with the Feed Philly Coalition, he explores and documents the creative, culinary, and civic life of a city he believes is one of the most inspired places in America.