Transcript
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Speaker: Hello and welcome to Season 3, Episode 16 of Things Fall Apart, our podcast of the Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: My name is Chris McNutt and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio.
Speaker: Today's discussion is all about school lunch.
Speaker: I've always been perplexed by it.
Speaker: It's sort of taken as part of school, this fairly bland looking processed mess that students eat during the school day.
Speaker: And I think a lot about Michael Moore in the documentary Where to Invade Next, where he shows how ridiculous it is that the United States spends on average more than other country school lunch programs while not even serving fresh food.
Speaker: And it's not uncommon to view any school's lunch menu and see the same questionable offerings.
Speaker: There's chicken nuggets, French toast sticks, chicken sandwiches, hamburgers.
Speaker: And when I saw this new book, The Labor of Lunch, written by Jennifer E. Gattis, I was thrilled to see this in-depth discussion on why school lunch is the way that it is.
Speaker: It's a chronicle of the history, the social issues, and just the modern movement of school lunch reform.
Speaker: Jennifer offers a complete in-depth look at what School Lunch is in fantastic detail, and you can find our review of the book on our website.
Speaker: Further, you can support the University of California Press, which is the small publisher that supports this work, by using the promo code found in our show notes, which offers 30% off.
Speaker: The podcast isn't promoted, we just like the work and want to share it with people.
Speaker: The teachers and students remember people who care about the actual new school that is used to walk through the day, and it's not going to be
Speaker: When it comes to your work, essentially, it's interesting because it's not only talking about just school lunch as a nutritional concept, but it's also talking about our economic inequalities, lunch's connection to quote unquote women's work, because it is historically a feminist cause.
Speaker: And, you know, for most people, including myself, when I think of school lunch, I think about lunch as pizza, chicken nuggets, hot dogs.
Speaker: It's always pretty much been the same thing, even when it was when I was growing up.
Speaker: However, you've kind of traced the history of school lunch for really over 100 years.
Speaker: So and there's a lot of different things that go into that.
Speaker: So could you talk about how school lunch has been connected to both just just in general, the United States historical problems?
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: Before I dig too deeply into that, I'll just mention, I think some people don't even really realize that the school lunch programs that they might see operating in their local schools are connected, oftentimes, not always, but most of the time to the National School Lunch Program, which was created in 1946.
Speaker: So one of the things I really wanted to do with this book is to help people understand not only the history of kind of what's happened since the 1940s, but also I wanted people to really take away this appreciation that
Speaker: This program didn't kind of spontaneously arise from nowhere, had a 50-year history that really relied on a lot of more local-level organizing, oftentimes organizing that was led by women.
Speaker: So I think one thing that is important to recognize is I kind of talk about school lunch through this lens of it being a feminist cause just because it's something that...
Speaker: If it's not taking place in schools, typically the people who would be the ones who would be preparing lunches for their kids would be women in their homes.
Speaker: So I think especially now as we've recognized that there's
Speaker: such a time scarcity for so many women who have not only joined the labor market, but who are still doing, you know, a disproportionate share of the domestic work at home.
Speaker: I think it's important for us to think about school lunch as an example of how in at least one point in time, we sort of succeeded as women in saying we actually want to have new kinds of public programs that collectivize the care work that we're doing in our homes and make it public instead of private.
Speaker: So I think that there's a number of ways that over the years, since the 1890s, when these experimental nonprofit school lunch programs first started popping up in urban areas around the country, that we can sort of see how various things like racism and patriarchal capitalism have really impacted the program and its ability to really provide the maximum possible benefit to kids and workers and families.
Speaker: to the country as a whole.
Speaker: So a little bit more specifically, I think during the progressive era, so in the 1890s through the early 1900s, when these programs were first starting, they were mostly charitable lunch programs that were set up to help poor children.
Speaker: So there was this real concern about immigrant families in particular not being able to provide nutritious meals to their children.
Speaker: And there was also this concern that middle-class women had because this was kind of like
Speaker: a time when compulsory education was really increasing like in the U S. So it was, I think this concern about like, Oh, you know, our kids are in school all day.
Speaker: They need food.
Speaker: How do we make sure that they're fed?
Speaker: And there were these concerns that are very much, I think, similar to today and that, um, individual women were concerned with, okay, how do I make sure that I'm packing a healthy lunch and that it looks good.
Speaker: It tastes good and it like kind of travels in a way that makes sure that all the different components aren't just like mixing together or drying out or kind of becoming gross, you know, over the four or five hours that it might be sitting out before kids going to eat it.
Speaker: So those same kind of concerns that parents might have today when packing lunches, I think, were present then.
Speaker: And similarly, there were a lot of concerns around this issue of food safety.
Speaker: Like, how do we know that even the flour that we're buying to make bread or the bread maybe that we're buying from the bakery isn't using flour that has been cut with sawdust?
Speaker: So there were these real concerns about like what sort of additives or just in general kind of fraudulent practices might have been used at the time by the food industry to try to cheapen food in a way that would allow these companies essentially to profit more.
Speaker: So I think it's important to recognize that in the early years of this program, there were these real concerns about
Speaker: really this idea of trust within the food system, because I think that that's actually something that's really motivating a lot of contemporary school food reform efforts is this idea of, well, these big food companies have, you know, made chicken nuggets and pizza that has tons of preservatives and additives and things of that nature.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: One of the strongest trends right now is this notion of what people sometimes refer to as real food in schools.
Speaker: So this idea of cooking from scratch with more basic ingredients versus reheating these processed factory-made foods.
Speaker: So the same concerns were there 100 years ago, which for me is like just this totally shocking thing to uncover.
Speaker: But I think at the same time, there were these sort of darker strands of what then was referred to as Americanization.
Speaker: So because schools were a place where you could reach a lot of people at once, there were these ideas that there's kind of a particular way of eating that is American and it's superior to like
Speaker: more so like, I would say like food ways of immigrants.
Speaker: So it was really this idea that there's this particular kind of white way of eating, like white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and this very white way of behaving.
Speaker: And there were some lunch programs at the time that really in order to kind of curry favor with administrators who maybe really liked this idea of Americanization, like linked their
Speaker: school lunch programs very closely to this idea because they really needed sort of whatever they could to convince people that these lunch programs were a good idea.
Speaker: So I think that that's kind of like part of the sort of darker side.
Speaker: And then
Speaker: From the 1930s through the 1960s, I think one of the things we really see is that federal support for these nonprofit school-edge programs really disproportionately flowed to white middle-class Americans, which is true of a lot of the federal policies that helped build the racial wealth gap that we see today.
Speaker: And then during the late 1960s, a lot of anti-poverty groups and activist organizations, and again, women who kind of participated in these women's clubs,
Speaker: were very instrumental in uncovering and publicizing and politicizing the structural racism and economic discrimination that had really existed in the school lunch landscape during that time.
Speaker: They were able to win a right to free lunch in the early 1970s for poor children, and they were able to get some sort of kind of federal national standard for what actually it means to be poor.
Speaker: But I think one of the things that we see kind of happening at that point is there's this, you know, as more poor people are actually served by the program, the food quality quickly plummeted and school lunch began to be really stigmatized as welfare food.
Speaker: And from that point, I think when it became a lot more sort of racially and economically coded, there were a lot of middle class and upper middle class families who started to opt out of the program and instead look for alternatives, whether it be packing lunches for their kids or purchasing things on the a la carte line that were different from the federal school lunch.
Speaker: So when I grew up in the...
Speaker: late 1980s and 1990s when I was in school, I think there was a really huge difference between kids who qualified for free and reduced price launch and those who didn't.
Speaker: And it became really obvious to see this kind of segregation, like just spatially in cafeterias.
Speaker: And I think as more and more of middle class and upper middle class families
Speaker: really didn't see their children being served by this program, it became an easier political target.
Speaker: And one of the things that I think I certainly didn't know when I was a kid, but came to appreciate as I was doing this research is that in 1981, the Reagan administration basically cut the budget for school lunch by about 25%.
Speaker: So if I had any questions about why school lunch looked the way that it did when I was a kid, I think that that's definitely a part of the answer.
Speaker: And I think that I was fortunate in that I grew up in a household where my parents, you know, had the economic ability to provide a different kind of lunch for me if I wasn't happy with what existed in the school cafeteria.
Speaker: But that's a luxury that a lot of families don't have.
Speaker: So I think it's just really important that when we're thinking about these kind of policy changes,
Speaker: and this arc of history that we're really thinking about the people who really are dependent on this program and like recognizing that they too deserve, you know, a really healthy and like just genuinely positive lunch experience versus the kind of shame and sort of cast offs of like, you know, this is, this is good enough, but it's not great.
Speaker: School lunch has become something that's so status quo and something that's so commonplace that we don't really even question it anymore.
Speaker: Like I was doing like research over this to throw it into an article I was writing, including your your work in there.
Speaker: And I was like, well, let's figure out what's on the lunch menu at the school down the street.
Speaker: And then I was like, well, is it the same in Iowa or in California or wherever I Google?
Speaker: And it's all the exact same foods, no matter really where I look.
Speaker: It's always the stereotypical like I'm.
Speaker: I remember from when I was in school, it's like the little wrapper kind of like chicken sandwich.
Speaker: That's just two pieces of bread and a piece of chicken, like very breaded chicken.
Speaker: Sometimes even just like they they know it's not going to be good.
Speaker: So that's things like the sloppy salad or like these like very non appetizing sounding foods.
Speaker: It's funny that you bring that up because I do think that there's this kind of weird phenomenon with school lunch menus where I think you're absolutely right that when you read different menus, they might sound oftentimes like very much the same.
Speaker: But one of the things I learned in going around to a lot of different school kitchens and cafeterias is that you can't always tell exactly how good the food is from a nutritional standpoint or from a taste and appearance standpoint based on the menu because
Speaker: There's like so many things that have just been sort of coded as like, this is what school lunch is.
Speaker: Like, this is good food.
Speaker: But it might actually be like, in one district, a super highly processed chicken nugget that maybe has a lot of chemicals that I personally wouldn't want to be feeding children.
Speaker: And then in a different district, it might be that they're actually using whole muscle meat instead of chopped and formed meat and
Speaker: that it doesn't actually have any kinds of additives or fillers, that it's what people would refer to as being clean label.
Speaker: So it's hard to tell sometimes when you're just looking at the menu.
Speaker: So you kind of have to do like this deeper digging to understand like what's the food philosophy of the particular school.
Speaker: So are they using language surrounding like clean labels?
Speaker: Are they talking about what people sometimes refer to as ingredients of concern?
Speaker: So things like high fructose corn syrup and artificial additives and talking about removing those from the ingredients and the foods that they're purchasing for the schools.
Speaker: Are they talking about a farm to school program?
Speaker: Because there are actually a lot of, I think, improvements in schools.
Speaker: So it's important to recognize even
Speaker: I think from the time that I was in school versus now, even though I think that there's still a lot of problems with school lunch that we need to address, the actual nutritional content has gotten a lot better since the enactment of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.
Speaker: So that went into effect in 2012.
Speaker: And one of the big things that it did was it really increased the amount of whole grains and fresh fruits and vegetables in schools.
Speaker: So it's not to say that like the menus aren't still really problematic, but I just kind of wanted to flag that it's a little bit more complex.
Speaker: And in general, things have actually gotten better.
Speaker: It's actually really interesting to note how complex it really is.
Speaker: Like, I mean, your work has like hundreds and hundreds of sources.
Speaker: Like it's incredibly complex to try to decipher everything.
Speaker: And it's really interesting to note that the things that you're talking about in this book, it's the same as what's going on across the entire country, no matter what time period you're looking at.
Speaker: And as you were talking about just now, a lot of the arguments of the past on the exact same as the arguments that are being made
Speaker: In this moment, like, for example, there's a part where you're talking about how Caroline Hunt, who was a child rights activist, she was a feminist, she talked about social justice.
Speaker: And particularly when it came to school lunch, she understood that.
Speaker: Lunch is more of a social justice issue than anything else, as in it's important that the poor have the same opportunities as the rich when it comes to eating a healthy, sustainable meal.
Speaker: The kind of argument going on at the time was, which is the exact same argument that's going on now, is that when you are trying to feed everyone in this manner, it will first off, I guess the argument today would be that it's socialist as it was in the 60s.
Speaker: Even though the whole concept of the school itself is socialist, if we want to get into semantics.
Speaker: But there's also like the idea of like, well, why don't you just bring your own lunch?
Speaker: Or why would we spend tax money on lunches when teacher class sizes are so large?
Speaker: Things like that.
Speaker: And what really stuck out to me more than anything else was that.
Speaker: she, Caroline Hunt, was basically disparaged by higher ed people in a very neoliberal way.
Speaker: Like they basically said, you know, why are you focusing on social justice when it's really a issue of teaching them sewing or how to cook or like basically career readiness at that time period for for women?
Speaker: Or even now, there's the concept of schools are more focused on this idea.
Speaker: You need to be college ready or career ready.
Speaker: Which, in my opinion, is a neoliberal coding.
Speaker: When you say that, you're basically saying we need to drill students to be college ready in, in my opinion, inhumane style AP classes instead of focusing on a child's well-being first and then worrying about college and career second.
Speaker: They tend to go hand in hand if you do the first thing.
Speaker: So that's kind of a very roundabout way of asking, what are your thoughts on this concept of career and college readiness?
Speaker: And how do you see that factoring into the school lunch issue?
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question.
Speaker: And the first thing I actually want to flag is that Caroline Hunt was the very first professor in the department where I currently am at UW Madison.
Speaker: So she was the first home economics professor that we had, I think, in 1903 is when she started.
Speaker: Her story in the book is because I find that so many of my students, so I'm now in a small department called Civil Society and Community Studies, which is part of the School of Human Ecology.
Speaker: And I think so many of my students have this idea, if they have any idea whatsoever of what home economics is, what they think of is exactly those kinds of like manual skills.
Speaker: So cooking and sewing and cooking is generally thought of as like, oh, you know, you...
Speaker: open a box and maybe add an egg.
Speaker: That's kind of like, you know, what you would have learned to do in a lot of home economics classes if they were sponsored by any kind of food company or if your school got any kind of, you know, resources from those kinds of companies.
Speaker: So it's really important for me to make sure that they understand that home economics as it was originally envisioned by the field's early founders was
Speaker: was very much motivated by this idea of how do we actually work together to promote the social good for everyone versus this idea of how do we just make household labor more efficient.
Speaker: But there was always this little bit of tension between, well, on the one hand, it's actually important for us to bring
Speaker: this additional value to make people understand that household labor is actually important.
Speaker: But on the other hand, we exist within a system that has assigned the majority of that labor to people who identify as women.
Speaker: So if we want women to have more power in the political and economic sphere, then we have to find a way to actually reduce the amount of time that they're spending on these things.
Speaker: So even this idea of how do we make household labor more efficient
Speaker: Part of it initially had this kind of political bent to it in terms of thinking about how do we actually make space for women to participate in things outside of the home.
Speaker: So I think that as far as this kind of current career readiness, college readiness movement goes,
Speaker: I think that it's really preparing people to fit within an existing system and particularly to be workers within a capitalist society that's oftentimes quite oppressive and exploitive of people who have limited power within that system instead of preparing kids to build the futures that they actually want to live in.
Speaker: So I kind of see the type of educational work that Caroline Hunt was doing where she was really trying to get people to understand how
Speaker: the power of their collective wealth.
Speaker: So doing things like, you know, staging boycotts of companies that maybe had bad labor or environmental practices, or she was also teaching people how to do what we might now call like citizen science.
Speaker: So like testing water quality and stuff like that around Wisconsin and
Speaker: asking them to be involved in like the pure milk movement.
Speaker: So making sure that milk didn't have, you know, various kinds of things added to it or that it was sanitary.
Speaker: So she was really trying to help people develop skills where they could participate in not only voicing what kind of political and economic systems they wanted to live in, but also have some additional layer of transparency and accountability.
Speaker: So I think that, you know, within this idea of career readiness and college readiness today, it has the same kind of disempowering effect of really teaching people that what you need to do is fit within this existing system because this is always how it's going to be.
Speaker: And what you need to do is to find a way to kind of, you know, succeed within it.
Speaker: When I think what we really need to do is to be paying a lot more attention to
Speaker: not just these like very short-sighted ideas of what creates value in a person's life or economic value in a society, but to instead think more in the long-term and from a more holistic standpoint about, you know, what people's potential might be in really making the world a better place versus just, you know, profiting corporations.
Speaker: I love the fact that that is kind of the underlying idea when it comes to a book that's about school lunch.
Speaker: Not to downplay the whole point of the book, but it's interesting.
Speaker: The underlying idea is really a critique of society in general and all the different issues that go into, especially America, like this neoliberal, corporatist, racist, sexist, et cetera, society, and trying to find ways in order to fix that.
Speaker: And kind of the...
Speaker: The solution that you offer, or I guess the thesis of the book, gets into promoting the work of women, particularly lunch ladies, which is one of my standout points of the book is where you talk about how many lunch ladies like women.
Speaker: the terminology lunch lady, even though it might be seen at first as kind of a demeaning term because of how it tends to be portrayed.
Speaker: I also love the fact that men are starting to be called lunch laddies, which I think is brilliant.
Speaker: I absolutely love that.
Speaker: But I mean, the...
Speaker: When we want to promote women as a lunch lady, we want lunch ladies to have this power in forming their own school lunches.
Speaker: There is that stereotype of I think of like the Simpsons or any cartoon where the lunch lady tends to be kind of like a non socially socially.
Speaker: I don't know if it's the right word, but they're portrayed in a very negative light, which leads to us being able to easily critique lunch ladies as not being like a legitimate worker or not be a whole person or not really be someone who knows what they're doing.
Speaker: So how can then educators counteract that?
Speaker: Because what you're talking about in the book is that it couldn't be further from the truth that lunch ladies actually do have the capability of order to change the system.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that there's a few things that are important for people.
Speaker: Well, I'll mention a few kind of concrete ideas that people can engage in this issue.
Speaker: But I think as kind of background knowledge, there's some important things to recognize that it might look today as if this job has been de-skilled, especially if we're thinking about specifically the job as something that involves cooking.
Speaker: But I think that one of the things that the book really tries to show is how,
Speaker: This really happened not because people who are involved in school food service and specifically lunch ladies wanted it to, but it was kind of the influence of a lot of these big food companies and the extreme financial pressures that local food service departments were under that really led to the shift away from cooking from scratch to just reheating factory-made food.
Speaker: So I think that
Speaker: it's important to understand not only that this kind of happened over time and really had a certain like
Speaker: politics behind it, but also that the cooking side of things and even the serving side of things is only one aspect of the work that school cafeteria workers do.
Speaker: So I, in the book, try to talk about this through the lens of care.
Speaker: So I think that it's important for us to understand that they're actually part of our public care infrastructure.
Speaker: And they're not only providing direct care to students in terms of providing for their physical and emotional needs.
Speaker: And I say emotional in that it can be anything as simple as knowing the kids' names and being kind to them when they walk through the lunch line.
