Do you cook for your family?
You know it isn't always easy to please everyone.
Well, imagine cooking two meals a day for a couple thousand children.

That what schools have to do and they must also follow strict government guidelines while doing it.

New USDA federal nutrition guidelines, which include a new food pyramid, could soon impact what your children eat at school.
Schools will likely have to limit processed foods, that includes packaged foods that contain a lot of salt or sugar and focus more on fresh fruits and vegetables.

21 News reached out to a variety of school districts in the valley and they say they haven't heard any new guidelines just yet, but food service supervisors at one of the largest districts in the valley believe the changes won't be that drastic over what they currently serve.

"We have been meeting the guidelines for years. They have been slowly decreasing all the added sugars in all of our products. our sodium levels have decreased almost every year. We already have all whole grains in several of our buildings and we already meet with our proteins so it's really already where we are," said Boardman schools food service supervisor, Beth Habeger.

To get away from processed foods school kitchen will need to make more lunches from scratch and not a lot of districts have the equipment or personnel for that.

"Generally every kitchen is looking to do more scratch cooking or speed scratch cooking to get away from those processed foods as much as possible," said Habeger.

Boardman plans to buy some newer equipment for their kitchens to help with that process.
Processed foods, like pizza or mac and cheese are cheaper and usually come ready-made. Making food from scratch requires more ingredients, prep and time.

Those increased costs will mean more expensive school lunches.

"Come up with meals that draw the kids in. if the kids aren't coming in to buy we don't have money to keep feeding them so keeping them coming and interested in what we are doing is the biggest challenge we have," said Haberger.

Boardman's food supervisor thinks it will take a few years for new guidelines to be implemented. In that time schools are hoping for more federal funding to make that transition easier to swallow.