AUGUSTINE, Fla. – Brothers Bryce and Zachary Brandvold are fed up with the federal government.

The 15-year-old sophomores at St. Augustine High School contend that lunch regulations imposed on public schools through the Healthy and Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 – First Lady Michelle Obama’s pet project to overhaul school foods – resulted in lunches going from bad to worse, and they’re hoping to take their message to the USDA, the St. Augustine Record reports.

The duo partnered with a friend, St. Augustine High senior Daniel Carter, to collect the 100,000 signatures necessary to confront the agency over the federal school food policy, which they show is unnecessary and broadly unpopular with students across the country.

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“We thought the other lunches were bad, but these are worse,” Carter told the news site.

“The bottom line is government shouldn’t be involved in what we eat,” Zach said. “Having the First Lady controlling what we eat is not the answer. It just means more food in the trash.”

“This affects every single student that goes to a public school,” Bryce said. “We don’t have a choice of what to eat.”

The brothers are mostly correct, but hundreds of school districts in numerous states have opted to forego their federal school lunch funding to serve students food they’ll actually eat, most after witnessing sales plummet with the new federal restrictions on calories, fat, sodium, whole grain and other nutritional aspects.

The increasing number of schools dropping out of the National School Lunch Program, as well as a 1.2 million student decline in participation since the new rules went into effect in 2012, are detailed in a Government Accountability Office report, the St. Augustine teens point out.

So the students started an online petition at Change.org to collect 100,000 signatures necessary to confront the USDA.

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“The new plan is lower sodium, low sugar and fresher options like fruits and vegetables,” Zach told the Record. “The reality is that it’s canned stuff, or it’s frozen and goes straight into the oven. Pretty much all they have to do is heat it up.”

The St. Augustine students certainly aren’t the only ones looking to file a complaint about the federal school food policy.

Northwestern High School ninth grader Ariel Bollnow told the Kokomo Tribune she’d like to “have a long talk” with Michelle Obama about the changes.

“They took away the fried chicken. They took away all the good food and gave us healthy food,” Bollnow said.

The most recent round of regulations, which restrict nutritional elements of school snacks, have been the biggest headache, Northwestern food services director Renee Hullinger said.

“With the new regulations on all foods sold in schools, the nutrition stipulations are so strict that our hands are tied in what we can sell,” she told the Tribune. “The government made all these changes, but they didn’t give us money to do the job.”

Hullinger said the district’s snack options were cut drastically by the federal edicts, and despite attempts by food suppliers to comply with the regulations, the situation is still causing problems.

“Manufacturers have worked as quickly as they could to change to meet these new regulations. There’s so few foods meeting these regulations, and we’re trying to get them,” she told the news site. “A lot of these foods weren’t available at the beginning of the school year.”

“Our vending has plummeted,” Hullinger said.

At the nearby Kokomo School Corp. the high school lost most of its outside venders because of the new restrictions, school officials told the Tribune, but Pizza Hut has come through.

“They really worked well with us on more than a year of planning to get an acceptable (product),” Kokomo food services director Jack Lazar said. “Where the venders are running into trouble is the sodium or the saturated fat.”