After a long-fought battle with state and federal officials, a Londonderry High School pulled out of the National School Lunch Program after watching the failure of the restrictive school lunch regulations supported by First Lady Michelle Obama and federal officials. .

We can call it a win for food freedom, but the students can just get back to having meals they actually want to eat and school administrators no longer have to watch uneaten lunches piled up in the trash.

In a stomach-upsetting episode of government retribution, we see how one school district bravely took on Washington.

The 5,000-student school district pulled it’s high school out of the national program – forgoing federal aid but freeing itself to create its own menu. That prompted a state and federal officials to classify the school, which prepares meals for the entire district, as a “food processing” plant and thus subject to a host of regulations and strict inspections. According to the superintendant, the district would have had to hire new staff or build a new facility to prepare meals under this new classification.

Last week, a compromise was reached and the high school will not be classified as a plant. The district will have to beef up tracking and accounting everything to ensure that subsidized food isn't served in the high school, but the district won't have to hire staff or build a new facility.

Fox News reports on this win:

"With a little support from the news agencies, especially Fox, and some help from our two senators and a couple of congressmen, the USDA has backed off," said Londonderry Schools Business Administrator Peter Curro.

The problem, according to state and federal officials, was that food for the high school and meals for the district’s five other schools – which continue to participate in the subsidized program – were all stored and prepared in the high school’s kitchen…

The change in status would have meant a bunch of new rules and regulations, backed by periodic inspections. Greenberg said the district would have had to either hire another employee or, potentially, build a new facility for preparing meals bound for the town’s middle school and four elementary schools.

Surprisingly, state representatives on the right and left applauded Londonderry’s win:

Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., who wrote Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack asking him to intervene, praised the department for backing down.

“I am confident that local school districts in New Hampshire have the ability to both responsibly manage taxpayer dollars and implement proper nutrition guidelines for their students,” she said.

Even Democratic Gov. Jean Shaheen applauded the decision, taking a swipe at the bureaucracy’s original intentions.

“I’m very pleased that this new agreement allows the Londonderry School District to continue providing meals for its students without a host of unnecessary new rules,” Shaheen said.

The US Department of Agriculture which oversees federal food programs and onerous school lunch regulations has been rebuffed and they can’t take it. They claim Londonderry was a unique case, but they are probably fearful that other schools and school districts will follow their lead:

“USDA’s primary goal in providing technical assistance to the state of New Hampshire has always been to ensure that tax-payer funded resources – in this case food purchased through the National School Lunch Program for the district’s elementary and middle schools – are used appropriately," [USDA spokeswoman Brooke] Hardison said in a statement. "Our team met with the New Hampshire Departments of Education and Administrative Services on Oct. 23, and we are pleased that this situation was able to be resolved quickly so that the district can continue to utilize USDA foods in meals prepared for the middle and elementary schools, which remain in the National School Lunch Program.”

Students can now enjoy a snack room, coffee bar, a frozen-yogurt machine and soon a salad bar. These are all courtesy of their decision to pull out from under the thumbs of federal bureaucrats.

The only way the ending of the story could get better is for other schools to follow suit. We hope they’re paying attention. They can defeat the bureaucratic beast, it just requires a commitment to independence.