Noah Diedrich is a reporter with Community News Service, part of the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.
Artificial dyes found in processed and pre-packaged foods sold in schools are the target of a recent bill in the Vermont Senate.
The bill, introduced by Sen. Ginny Lyons, D-Chittenden-Southeast, is modeled after California’s 2024 School Food Safety Act. While California’s bill goes a bit farther by banning food items that exceed set amounts of sugar and fat from being sold in lunchrooms, both pieces of legislation set their sights on dyes added to food—such as Red 40, Blue 1 and Yellow 5.
S. 26 would bar schools from serving food and beverages with any amount of the dyes.
Recent research suggests the six manmade dyes covered in the bill may have unpalatable upshots, including inattention and hyperactivity in kids.
“This makes a whole lot of sense to eliminate those food dyes that have significant health consequences, and especially for kids,” Lyons said.
Lindsey Hedges, public information officer for the Vermont Agency of Education, said in an email that many food manufacturers are already taking steps to remove the dyes from their products due to California’s recent bill.
“We do not think that Vermont school meals programs would have difficulty finding products that met the restrictions if the bill were to pass,” Hedges said.
The agency conducts routine reviews of about 30 schools per year, examining their lunch menus, ingredient labels and recipes. Hedges said those assessments rarely find food dyes in the meals themselves, which are typically cooked from scratch.
Rather, items with the dyes are mostly found in vending machines, school stores or through a la carte options, she said.
To be sold in schools, foods must meet certain nutrition requirements, and food manufacturers often make versions of their products to be sold to schools, formulated with child nutrition in mind, Hedges said.
“These items are subject to minimum nutritional standards set by the federal Smart Snack requirements,” she said, referring to a common name for a set of Obama-era rules. “With California’s recent ban, we are no longer seeing food dyes in many of these products.”
Some local school nutrition directors are not so sure. Karyl Kent, treasurer and former president for the School Nutrition Association of Vermont, said her organization is in full support of Lyons’ measure.
“We really encourage that our legislators are bringing this up and voicing concern for our safety in school foods and for the health of our kids,” Kent said.
Pre-packaged and processed food options contain more artificial food dyes than any ingredient in school lunches, Kent said. Think Gatorade, Doritos or M&M’s.
Kent believes Vermont is at the forefront of an effort that encourages school districts to collaborate with local agriculture markets. As a plus, that dynamic helps cafeterias to divorce themselves from food and drink that contain dyes that can harm children.
“We’re kind of on the leading edge of the local foods movement,” she said. “So naturally, we’re looking to move away from those types of products.”
Two state programs help promote that emphasis on local foods: the 2023 universal school meals act and the Local Foods Incentive Grant, created by a 2021 law. One benefit of the grant, Kent said, is that schools can rely less on vending machines, which are installed to bring in more revenue for the school.
Since schools can make that revenue through reimbursements for sourcing meal ingredients locally, they can shed their a la carte options as a result, Kent said.
“With the increase in participation in universal school meals and because of our scratch cooking, we’ve increased our revenue from our reimbursements,” she said. “So we rely less on these outside sales.”
Kent, who is also the nutrition director for Mount Mansfield Unified Union School District, said her district sources from farms in New Haven and Huntington to make nutritiously diverse meals like jerk chicken or to provide ingredients for panini bars.
“The more we can move towards scratch cooking, the better we are,” she said.
Kent previously worked in the Lamoille North Supervisory Union, which she said eliminated a la carte sales completely.
“It wasn’t equitable, and it was more labor for us,” she said. After the change, “we did not rely on that revenue anymore,” she said.
Lamoille North isn’t a unique case — Essex Westford School District also quashed a la carte sales and Kent is currently working toward the same in Mount Mansfield Unified, she said.
“We’re working on cleaning up our food system, making it more local and healthier for kids,” Kent said.
The proposal in the Legislature arrived after the Food and Drug Administration enacted a ban on Red 3 in food on Jan. 15. The dye is used in candy, cakes and other sweet treats to give the products a bright, cherry-red hue — and had been banned for use in cosmetics for decades because research linked it to cancer in rats.
The federal ban came as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a critic of dyes in foods, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as health secretary, overseeing the department that houses the FDA.
Lyons, the bill sponsor, said she worries about Kennedy’s recent confirmation as the nation’s new top health official because he is a noted vaccine skeptic who lacks any medical background.
“It’s time for all of us to be very, very aware of what we can do to prevent chronic illness and do that as far upstream as we can get,” she said. “We’ve got to keep an eye on our own kids in our own state.”
Despite his mistrust of some accepted medical practices, Kennedy has signaled his support for further research into food additives and aligning the federal ingredient standards with those of the European Union.
In Vermont, though, S.26 has so far taken a backseat this biennium, Lyons said.
“Obviously, everyone is preoccupied with property taxes,” she said. “A bill like this takes second row.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Food dyes linked to unappetizing effects could be banned from school meals.