An Act relative to healthy school lunches

This bill is really interesting because it doesn't explicitly require that school's serve plant-based foods. Instead, it sets severe limits on the amount of cholesterol and saturated fat that school meals can contain, and minimums on fiber content. Therefore, it effectively requires that schools serve plant-based foods without explicitly doing so. 

It takes a health perspective, rather than a climate or animal perspective. It never uses terms like plant-based, vegan, or vegetarian. As a result, many people who would have been opposed to the idea of plant-based school lunches were supportive of the bill because it would create healthier school lunches.

This bill, however, acts as a means of restricting animal-based foods, as opposed to expanding access to plant-based foods. While one isn't inherently better than the other, and there is a time and a place for both, when you're starting a new campaign, people generally respond better to requests for increased plant-based options than they do to restricting animal-based options. In the eyes of a food services director, expanding plant-based options caters to a new market without taking away from an existing market, while restricting animal-based options, even though it still expands plant-based options, is viewed as taking away from the students who want to eat animals. It's seen as trying to shut down a large and active program as opposed to expanding it. Yes, it's mostly about framing, but it still makes a difference. Framing a campaign as expanding plant-based options rather than reducing animal-based options can also help with the way the campaign is received by students. People don't like to feel like they're having something taken away from them. Many students will opt for the plant-based option, even when there is also an animal-based option available. Especially if the plant-based option isn't labeled plant-based.