The effort is backed by an uneasy alliance between the right-wing Make America Healthy Again movement and progressives, both motivated by concerns over food safety.

The issue of food safety has prompted a major political realignment since the start of the second Trump administration, with the right-wing Make America Healthy Again movement forming an uneasy alliance with progressives to rid the nation’s food system of ultra-processed snacks, sweets, lunch meats and other products. Public schools are their first target.

According to tracking by Healthy Eating Research, a national nonprofit, lawmakers in at least 32 states have introduced legislation to limit or eliminate ultra-processed foods in school meals. UPFs are typically characterized by profitability, convenience and use of ingredients never found in a supermarket.

In California and Arizona, the bills have already become law. Arizona’s statute defines UPFs fairly narrowly, calling out just 11 ingredients. But California’s is very broad, including almost any food item with an ingredient created or separated in a lab — from nonnatural coloring additives to stabilizers to flavor enhancers.

That could make the country’s most populous state the test case for what future students are served.

California is allowing its law a fairly long implementation. By July 1, 2029, all public schools there must begin to phase out UPFs; by July 1, 2032, those foods will be banned entirely. Based on the experience of some California schools that have, of their own accord, already decided to make this change, it’s a needed runway.

The Santa Ana Unified School District, which serves some 36,000 students in Orange County, started in 2021 by rolling out its new approach at one of its high schools. Five years later, the eighthcampus is finallyg on. The district didn’t set about trying to eliminate UPFs, per se.

Parents were asking about the nutritional contents of school meals, and Goddard — who has worked in the food services industry since he was 15 — decided the best thing to do was to divest from prepared meals and their opaque ingredient lists and move toward actually cooking food for students, from real ingredients, in on-site kitchens.

“We never really thought of this or treated this as processed versus unprocessed,” he said. “We simply wanted to cook more things from raw, from scratch, and that dovetails or complements this new law, this new push to ban ultra-processed foods.”The biggest challenges that Santa Ana faced are the same ones that experts say school districts across the country will grapple with in the coming years: affordability and capacity.

Santa Ana is pretty lucky in this regard. In California, public schools get $6 per meal served — and have access to the country’s largest agricultural industry. Because of state subsidies that compound on top of federal funds, that’s more than what is available to school districts in most other parts of the country.

“We’re bringing in raw proteins, we’re bringing in raw grains, raw flour,” Goddard said. “We currently buy from 14 small local family farms for fresh produce, everything from citrus to stone fruits, vegetables, stuff like that. The primary source of our budget is the federal and state reimbursement. In California, we are spoiled, and we still have an uphill battle.”

Then there is capacity. “Ideally, you want schools to shift to more scratch cooking. However, a lot of schools don’t necessarily have the kitchen. They might not have the staff. They might not have the equipment,” Taillie said.

Indeed, Goddard said there was a training curve to get employees who’d long been microwaving prepared meals used to simmering beans and chopping veggies. But, he said, “we had kitchens and highly talented, highly motivated people.”

Some of the strongest voices in the national conversation about UPFs are controversial.

There’s the Trump administration’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in the past has claimed that the nation’s food supply has been allowed to “mass poison” children. The department he leads has for months been weighing actions that could push the industry to reformulate some ultra-processed foods.

Other voices have come from outside of government. Author Jessica Reed Kraus, conservative commentator Alex Clark and blogger Vani Hari, who helped make the issue a central tenet in Kennedy’s agenda, are hugely influential both in the public sphere on social media and on Capitol Hill in Washington. Like him, they also have a history of telling their followers that vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they aim to prevent — a position with no basis in scientific research.

But a “plethora of studies” does support the many concerns about ultra-processed foods, Taillie said. “Ultra-processed foods are leading to immediate health harms, but then also setting [children] up for a pattern of eating that will track into later in life and create higher chronic disease risk in adulthood as well.”As it turns out, kids also like made-from-scratch food better. At a recent visit to Saddleback High School in Santa Ana, a member of the district’s food program was listening to what the students had to say about their cafeteria’s UPF-free meals. “We don’t want to miss lunch,” one told him. The reason? “Dude, the food here is amazing.”