Reaching USDA guidelines with vegetarian and vegan options
Many school don’t provide vegetarian/vegan food choices because the calorie count for many of those foods are too low, and they don’t have enough fat in them. While that is true for some and maybe most meals that is not true for all.
Using current USDA school lunch requirements it is easy to create vegetarian options for school lunches by simply using alternative protein providers.
Examples are shown in the table below:
Using this chart it is easy to see that you can use vegetarian supplements and still meet requirements for the food served.
The USDA provides standards for a school lunch to follow, but nowhere in those standards does it say that a school is required to serve a vegetarian meal daily.
There is no law or USDA regulation that requires schools to offer a vegetarian or vegan meal every day, meaning that the schools don’t have to provide vegetarian meals daily. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t.