Have they improved at all? Minnesota passed free school lunch for all, and my daughter will be starting school in a few years. Packing her a healthy lunch literally becomes the more expensive option.

The other problem is that if kids aren’t used to eating vegetables at home they might not eat them at school, and the schools don’t want to deal with increased waste / throwing.

Even in the UK in the 1980s, at the height of ghoulish neoliberal Thatcherism, there was a major controversy when she tried to stop giving free milk to kids in school (milk-snatcher they called her).

It derails where parents serve yoghurt drinks to babies (have seen that) or when they get accustomed to open the fridge for a drink (seen that also).

I bet government food recommendations was just the starting point, and concerns about cost and getting kids to actually eat it would have transformed any plan into something similar. Calories processed into pure forms (sugar and fat) are cheap. Grains are super cheap, which was a big part of why they were the backbone of dietary recommendations for so long - no use instructing people to eat something they can't afford.