Michelle Obama's school dinners: America’s children have a message for the First Lady

US children have started an online protest against Michelle Obama's drive for healthy school meals by posting photos of their lunches. Simon Usborne on a taste for rebellion

Michelle Obama hasn't tweeted with her personal "–mo" sign-off for a fortnight, and would do well to avoid the site for a while, because American children are revolting. Photos of wholesome school dinners of the sort that the First Lady has campaigned to introduce are being flung back at her like stale bread rolls – and they don't look good.

"Had a very healthy lunch today," cried a teenage student called Hunter Whitney. His photo of a prison-issue plastic compartment tray reveals a red apple in one corner, and an unidentifiable dollop of brown sludge in the other. "The apple definitely made up for the mystery mush," he added.

By including the sarcastic hashtag #ThanksMichelleObama, students sharing similar photos of unappetising lunches have created a viral sensation. Images were being uploaded at a rate of a one per second at its peak, as morning news shows plucked the unwitting food critics from their cafeterias. Casey Shell got in early yesterday with a photo of what looks like a three-day-old chapati supporting two or three morsels of meat and a few grains of yellow rice ."School lunch in Hickory North Carolina! Terrible not enough!" Shell wrote, his grammar presumably affected by hunger.

Obama had not responded at the time of writing and could justifiably feel hard done by. While her husband's government yesterday published sweeping new rules that will require chain restaurants to publish calorie counts, Michelle has been channelling her gut-busting efforts into schools and beyond for years. In 2010, she launched the Let's Move! campaign in response to rising obesity rates. Two years later, she was a big player in the introduction of new standards for fruit, vegetable and whole-grain servings in schools, as well as maximum allowances of sodium, sugar and fat.

But as Sam Kass, the executive director of Let's Move!, told The Washington Post, how these guidelines look on the plate is ungovernable. "We don't dictate the food that schools serve – school districts do," he said. There were signs of rebellion early on. In 2012, several students and their parents complained about a new 850-calorie pupil maximum, which applied equally to 10 year olds and 17-year-olds. One enterprising group channelled their dismay into a parody of Fun's "We Are Young", with a music video called "We Are Hungry".

Dave Payne is the father of Martha, the Scottish pupil who became famous, also in 2012, for her one-girl campaign to document her school dinners. Via her Never Seconds blog, Martha, then 10, shared photos of her lunch each day with a review and a rating. The first showed a pizza square, one potato croquette and 29 pieces of sweet corn. "I need to concentrate all afternoon and I can't do it on 1 croquette," she wrote.

The blog took off, eventually scoring more than 10 million hits after an endorsement by Jamie Oliver, who called Martha's work "shocking but inspirational". Argyll and Bute Council attempted to censor Martha, turning her into an unlikely cause célèbre. The council later agreed to lift the ban on canteen photography.

Emboldened, Payne launched a page to raise money for Mary's Meals, a Scottish charity that runs school feeding projects in parts of the world where croquettes rarely feature. She travelled to meet children at a primary school in Malawi, and her Never Seconds JustGiving account has so far raised almost £150,000.

"She will be thrilled to see more pictures and more kids talking about food," Dave Payne said yesterday. "They are being given food that parents are paying for, by an industry that makes a lot of money for feeding kids, yet we can't see what they eat. I remember Martha saying to me that the food at school was terrible and I said, 'sure, sure,' but it's the photographs that proved it."