GADSDEN, Ala. – Hey, Michelle Obama: Don’t mess with our biscuits.

That’s the message students at Etowah County Schools are sending as officials struggle to get youngsters to acclimate to “healthy” federal school food restrictions championed by first lady Michelle Obama, the Associated Press reports.

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Etowah Child Nutrition Program Director Laura Parker recently told members of the school board students can’t stand the whole grain biscuits mandated by the federal government, and hopes to seek permission from the state to revert to selling the tasty, flaky biscuits they’re used to, according to the news service.

“They’ve revolted, really,” Parker said.

“They’ve become accustomed to whole-grain pasta and the pizza,” she said. “But the biscuits …”

Students are undoubtedly frustrated because they’re now paying more for food they don’t like as much, a result of the more expensive foods now required as part of the Healthy and Hunger Free Kids Act, which imposed limits on calories, sugar, fat, sodium and other elements of school food.

It’s been the same story is schools across the country with more than 1.2 million students dropping out of the National School Lunch Program since the restrictions went into effect in 2012, a trend that has devastated lunch room revenues.

Hundreds of school districts have opted to ditch the national lunch and breakfast programs and forfeit federal subsidies that come with the programs in an effort to salvage lunch sales and serve students foods they’ll actually buy and eat.

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“The food cost and labor cost has gone up, so the meal prices have gone up,” Parker said. “We are not in the business to make money, but we have to maintain a fiscally responsible budget.”

Parker told board members the number of meals served at Etowah schools declined this year for the first time, and believes the whole-grain biscuits are to blame.

Parker wants to increase the price on staff lunches from $2.75 to $3 to help cover the costs of the federal food requirements, she said.

She also wants district leaders to launch a marketing campaign to encourage more students to eat Michelle Obama lunches, The Gadsden Times reports.

But students in Etowah schools aren’t the only ones objecting to whole-wheat biscuits.

“There are some people who will not eat a whole grain biscuit because it does not look like the biscuit that grandma has made them throughout the years,” North Carolina’s Haywood County School Associate Superintendent Bill Nolte told The Citizen-Times.

Haywood schools was the first district in North Carolina to secure a waiver from the state to bring back buttermilk biscuits, but Haywood thinks there are other big problems with the federal food restrictions that need to be addressed, as well.

The Healthy and Hunger-Free Kids Act requires all students to take a fruit or vegetable, whether they eat it or not, and that’s creating a lot of food waste, he said.

“We’re spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars every day throwing away perfectly good food,” Nolte said. “And what we would like to do is not be punished if we put the fruit on the line and let the student pick it up. If they want the banana or the apple or the pear or whatever the fruit is, they can pick it up and eat it.”

Forcing food on students isn’t the answer, he said, and it’s not working in North Carolina.

“It’s a fine line because we want to expose children to more fresh fruits and vegetables, but forcing them to take something that they absolutely will not consume is not achieving the goal,” he said.

The Citizen-Times reports that “Over the last two years, school cafeterias (in North Carolina) served 12.6 million fewer meals, a 5 percent decline, according to Lynn Harvey, chief of school nutrition services for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.”