More context on the "school lunches around the world" phenomenon

Both The Lunch Tray and Mother Jones (who quotes extensively from Siegel's blog on The Lunch Tray), give a compelling argument for why we need to be cautious about taking at face value the stories and web galleries that purport to show how fantastic other countries' school lunches are compared to those in the US.  I've been guilty of spreading these images, too, but as I have said, I don't really get the fascination.  Perhaps there's some notion that other countries haven't succumbed to processed food, that elsewhere they are holding onto their slow-produced, scratch-cooked meals featuring all sorts of real, organic food.  The two stories I referred to in the first sentence above remind us that this wishful thinking just isn't true.

In my travels looking at school food in Anglophone countries--England, Australia, and South Africa, there's certainly a lot of interest in getting kids better food.  But in all those places they struggle with the same Western diet we do.  Pizza in English cafeterias, even after all of Jamie Oliver's struggles.  Candy in Australian canteens and loads of hungry kids who get no subsidized lunch.  Variations of corn mush in township schools in South Africa.  In the private schools there they eat better, but still lots of access to junk.  That said, I've seen better versions of school food, too.

It's a good reminder that school food is complicated and suffers through local, national, and even transnational politics before it takes the form it does on the plate.  Picture galleries aside, the US has much to be proud of, and it has much to learn, as well.

School Lunches Around the World, but in Video Form

I have to admit, I've never quite understood the fascination in the media about school lunches around the world.  There are slideshows of them all over the place.  Why so much attention?  What do viewers take away from such compilations?  What I tend to take away is how much more real the food is outside of the US.  So much highly processed fare!

This one is interesting in that it is in video form, so you see the components put in place.  A well produced piece.

The New York Times Takes on Domino's Brand Loyalty Campaign

A newspaper article I'm quoted in on the use of school lunch data in the public vs. private school debate

Click here to read the story

School Lunch Identity Politics in a Boy's Backpack Choices

Lunchtime is sometimes just the venue for many other politics playing out in the social world of the school, quite apart from the food.  Here, a young "brony" is bullied and gets blamed for it because he crossed the acceptable bounds of masculinity.



School Bully Concerns - WLOS News13 - Top Stories

Thinking outside processed food in urban schools: What Minneapolis is Doing

Will Ferrell and Michelle Obama do a focus group

A refreshing perspective on controversies over throwing away lunches

I don't have any opinion on the veracity of her claims to why she was fired, but I do very much appreciate this principal's attitude toward what the lunch service is there for.  Particularly good moment when she says that it's about mindset, and that too many people look at these kids as "freeloaders" rather than kids who deserve to be fed.  It's a community problem in loads of communities, and I think she's right that we have to have conversations about how to fix this that aren't only about finances.

I know that the School Nutrition Association has been working hard on so-called "charge policies," and it's time that the USDA and Congress step up and work with them to come up with humane solutions.  Not that I want to give extreme conservatives another opportunity to call poor kids deadbeats, but hopefully the more reasonable voices will carry the day.  We adults need to solve this without involving the kids AT ALL--no hand stamps, no having to carry letters, no trays thrown away, no cheese sandwiches to punish them until the money comes in.  It's not their fault or their responsibility.

Georgia Congressman Kingston and hypocrisy

It's been a while since I posted, part of which I blame on being chair of my department these days.  But this video makes me want to post.  It makes me want to post for a lot of reasons.

First, I think this is good reporting.  Yes, it has a certain gimmicky flavor to it: "You don't like free lunches but you get them yourself!  Gotcha!"  But better than that, this report shines a light on the dealings that go on out of sight of the public for national politicians.  They spend thousands and thousands on lavish meals and get treated to lots more free.  Kingston doesn't want his constituents to know that.  It makes him look privileged, and that's quite different from what he wants to be seen as.

So what does he want to be seen as?  Well, I grew up white in the South myself, and I know race-baiting when I see it.  The coded message here is not anything to do with work ethic.  This message speaks to the resentments of middle class Southern whites who are constantly told by Republicans (and some Democrats) that their money is being taken by African Americans and Hispanics who are too lazy to work for themselves.  Never mind that the vast majority of the kids on free and reduced school meals have parents who work (and likely much harder than the Congressman).  Never mind that the middle-class white kids in the cafeteria didn't pay for their meals, either (their parents usually do).  No, we are meant to imagine a freeloading welfare queen's kid living it up on taxpayer-funded tater tots.

I personally hope that the Congressman isn't simply ignorant of the truth of the National School Lunch Program.  I think I prefer to believe he's being disingenuous, trying to curry favor with his resentful class of backers.  Surely he must know that the National School Lunch Program is named after a Senator from his own great state of Georgia, Richard B. Russell, one of the framers of the original legislation.  It was taken on by Russell and colleagues in the 1940s as a way to prop up Southern agriculture, which it still does.  Yes, that free lunch for kids is paying for the free lunches at a fair few agricultural industry corporate headquarters in Georgia.  Whenever they grow too many peanuts or pigs, rather than eating the losses in a financial sense, the surpluses gets taken off of their hands and sent to the mouths of hungry kids.

For shame, Congressman.  You're either uninformed, disingenuous, or miserly.  Rather than wrap it up in talk of trying to start a dialogue on work ethic, just get educated on why everyone took such offense at your statement.  And maybe hanging out in a school with their hungry kids would make you a better Congressman; after all, hanging out at your free swanky lunches with dignitaries and donors hasn't done the trick.


 

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England's new School Food Plan arrives

After a relatively short year of work, the "healthy" fast food restauranteurs behind the LEON chain in England, Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent, have released their government sponsored School Food Plan.  You can have a look at the basics in this video they produced:



In general, it's a surprisingly progressive result.  I say "surprisingly" because it's not the conservative backtracking that I think a lot of people initially feared.  You can read it for yourself at www.schoolfoodplan.com.  Here are some basic points:

• They want heads of schools rather than local education authorities (the school districts in US jargon) to be responsible for the meals service.
• The government has agreed to create a "specialist organization" to help schools do this. 
• Perhaps most surprisingly, they have recommended that universal free meals be given to all primary students.  The government has not agreed to this ("yet," they say).
• A simpler set of nutrition standards (only in draft form at the moment) will be made compulsory for all schools, including academies.  (This has been a point of contention, for the Secretary for Education Michael Gove had originally exempted these charter school-like schools from the nutritional standards that had been so painstakingly crafted since Jamie Oliver-inspired reforms.)  Importantly, they are recommending a return to food-based rather than nutrient-based standards, meaning that you count portions of a food type (meat, vegetables, fruit, etc.) instead of averaging meals that have enough vitamin A, iron, and so on. 
• "Breakfast Clubs" are to be set up in disadvantaged schools.
• The target will be getting school meal take-up to 70% in 5 years, as a way of making the program solvent and improving its quality.  They want to give packed lunches a bad name instead.
• Cooking will be a required subject for kids up to age 14.  This was announced several months ago.
• Ofsted inspections (basically, government evaluations of a school) will include the culture and behavior in the dining hall.
• A raft of new public relations campaigns and informational sources will be produced to improve the image of school food and to help school heads learn more about how to run their programs.

While these are mostly sensible and, as I said, even progressive outcomes, there is still much to be concerned about here.  Perhaps most troubling, the move to put heads in charge of the meals service continues a disturbing trend in the conservative push toward atomization of schools.  It can be seen in the push to make teachers negotiate contracts school-by-school, too.  If you want to make progressive reform impossible, this governance technique seems to say, just make the playing field diffuse; instead of installing reform nationally all at once, now school food reform has to happen at more than 22,000 schools one-by-one.  Moreover, school heads have a great deal on their plates already (so to speak); will they have the interest, time, energy, and training to do it justice?  Or will you get heads who only care about what is profitable?  Or, perhaps one who is radically libertarian and thinks kids should have free choice to eat what they like?

And, though nutritional standards will be mandatory (if, they make clear, it turns out they are simple enough to follow), they are rewriting the standards AGAIN, reinventing the wheel as it were on years of effort that has already taken place.  And the standards they have in draft form seem like a bit of a backslide.  Deep-fried foods twice a week.  Confections available during lunch.  Red meat "at least" twice a week.  One need only look at Marion Nestle's groundbreaking book Food Politics to understand the careful wording of these draft standards as avoiding "eat less" messages.

It is also heartening to see movement toward universally free meals.  Janet Poppendieck's book Free for All presents a fantastic argument for why this is the right idea for America's system, and I think it applies well to England, too.  BUT, this is the only recommendation they made to which the government didn't agree.  It's a victory that they made the argument publicly, though.  Now the conservatives at least have to defend why they won't do it.

My biggest impression—and I'll write more about this in the book I'm currently working on—is that this is exactly the kind of political cover that Michael Gove and the conservatives were hoping for.  They are basically reinventing the infrastructure they destroyed. Take, for example, the second bullet above.  They are going to create a "specialist organization" to help schools learn how to reform food.  They already had that in the School Foods Trust, which they defunded.  The Trust already had developed nutrition standards and conducted significant research.  All of that was wiped away in the post-election sweeping out of "QANGOs."  Now, though, the government are going to simply reinstall basically the same thing, and they get to act as if they invented it all. 

Hopefully, at least this will reinvigorate discussions of school food and make some positive difference.  As a progressive victory for better food, I say "We'll take it."  As a political spectacle, though, I find this a troubling sign of conservative governance techniques to come, and it is imperative that progressives develop responses.