What the Raise the Tray petition is actually asking for

The ask is straightforward. ButcherBox — alongside Compassion in World Farming and a coalition of nonprofits, farms, and food companies — is calling on USDA Secretary Rollins to do two things:

Set quality standards for meat and seafood in the National School Lunch Program, the same way the USDA has already done for grains, vegetables, and sodium.
Prohibit meat produced with antibiotics from being served in school lunch programs.

That's it. Not asking schools to go farm-to-table overnight. Not demanding the impossible. Just setting a floor. Tell suppliers that if they want a federal contract to feed American children, the animals that become that food can't be raised on a steady diet of drugs that are eroding one of the most important tools in modern medicine.

Parents assume school meals meet a basic standard, but when it comes to meat, there isn’t one. Setting clear quality standards is long overdue. If we can regulate sugar and sodium, we can absolutely draw a line on how animals are raised and what ends up on our kids’ plates. - Julia Johnson, Head of Farmer Advocacy and Policy, Compassion in World Farming U.S.

The open letter also points out something worth underlining: sourcing antibiotic-free meat from American producers directly supports the USDA's own Buy American provision and boosts domestic farmers raising animals the right way. A common sense ask.

Sign the petition. Read the letter. Share both.

More than 26,000 people have already signed the Raise the Tray petition, directed to Secretary Rollins, who has the authority to make this change. The open letter has been signed by everyone from small regenerative farms to major food companies to university-based public health researchers — a rare coalition that signals this isn't a fringe issue.

If you care about where antibiotic resistance is headed, sign it. If you care about what factory farming conditions do to animals, sign it. If you just want the government to hold school lunch protein to the same standard it holds school lunch bread, sign it.

Sign the petition here.

The bar is on the ground. We're kindly asking them to pick it up.