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59: What's Up With School Lunch? w/ Jennifer E. Gaddis
18 Plays5 years ago
I’ve always been perplexed by school lunch. It’s sort of taken as a part of school: a fairly bland looking, processed, mess that students deal with during the school day. Michael Moore in Where to Invade Next how ridiculous it was that the United States spends, on average, much more than other countries lunch programs, while not even serving fresh food.
It’s not uncommon to view any school’s lunch menu and see the same questionable offerings: chicken nuggets, french toast sticks, chicken sandwiches, hamburgers. And when I saw an ad for a new book, The Labor of Lunch by Jennifer E. Gaddis - I was thrilled to see an in-depth discussion on why school lunch is the way it is. It’s a chronicle of the history, social issues, and modern movement toward lunch reform.
Gaddis offers an incredibly detailed work. You can read our “book of the month” review here.
GUEST
Jennifer E. Gaddis, an assistant professor of Civil Society and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Gaddis focuses on a feminist perspective of food politics, with a special focus on school lunch programs.
RESOURCES
- Gaddis’ Book: The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools via the University of California Press (use 19V3712 for 30% off.)
- Jennifer E. Gaddis’ Website
- The Chef Ann Foundation
- Food Corps
- National Farm to School Network
FURTHER LISTENING
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:03
Speaker
Hello.
00:00:04
Speaker
Before we get started, I want to let you know that this podcast is brought to you by Human Restoration Project's fantastic patrons.
00:00:10
Speaker
All of this work, which includes free resources, materials, and this podcast is available for free due to our Patreon supporters, three of whom are Tracy Smith, Joshua Sloat, and Trent M. Kirkpatrick.
00:00:22
Speaker
Thank you for your ongoing support.
00:00:24
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
00:00:45
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Season 3, Episode 16 of Things Fall Apart, our podcast of the Human Restoration
School Lunches as a Social Justice Issue
00:00:51
Speaker
Project.
00:00:51
Speaker
My name is Chris McNutt and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio.
00:00:56
Speaker
Today's discussion is all about school lunch.
00:00:59
Speaker
I've always been perplexed by it.
00:01:01
Speaker
It's sort of taken as part of school, this fairly bland looking processed mess that students eat during the school day.
00:01:08
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.
00:01:21
Speaker
And it's not uncommon to view any school's lunch menu and see the same questionable offerings.
00:01:27
Speaker
There's chicken nuggets, French toast sticks, chicken sandwiches, hamburgers.
00:01:31
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.
00:01:41
Speaker
It's a chronicle of the history, the social issues, and just the modern movement of school lunch reform.
00:01:47
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.
00:01:56
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.
00:02:05
Speaker
The podcast isn't promoted, we just like the work and want to share it with people.
00:02:08
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
00:02:21
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.
History and Feminism in School Lunch Programs
00:02:38
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.
00:02:47
Speaker
It's always pretty much been the same thing, even when it was when I was growing up.
00:02:51
Speaker
However, you've kind of traced the history of school lunch for really over 100 years.
00:02:57
Speaker
So and there's a lot of different things that go into that.
00:03:00
Speaker
So could you talk about how school lunch has been connected to both just just in general, the United States historical problems?
00:03:10
Speaker
Yeah, for sure.
00:03:11
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.
00:03:26
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
00:03:39
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.
00:03:51
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...
00:04:03
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.
00:04:11
Speaker
So I think especially now as we've recognized that there's
00:04:15
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.
00:04:27
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.
00:04:45
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.
00:05:15
Speaker
to the country as a whole.
00:05:17
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.
00:05:30
Speaker
So there was this real concern about immigrant families in particular not being able to provide nutritious meals to their children.
00:05:38
Speaker
And there was also this concern that middle-class women had because this was kind of like
00:05:44
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.
00:05:53
Speaker
They need food.
00:05:53
Speaker
How do we make sure that they're fed?
00:05:56
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.
00:06:09
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.
00:06:25
Speaker
So those same kind of concerns that parents might have today when packing lunches, I think, were present then.
00:06:31
Speaker
And similarly, there were a lot of concerns around this issue of food safety.
00:06:36
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?
00:06:47
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.
Racial and Economic Disparities in School Lunches
00:07:05
Speaker
So I think it's important to recognize that in the early years of this program, there were these real concerns about
00:07:14
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.
00:07:31
Speaker
So,
00:07:32
Speaker
One of the strongest trends right now is this notion of what people sometimes refer to as real food in schools.
00:07:38
Speaker
So this idea of cooking from scratch with more basic ingredients versus reheating these processed factory-made foods.
00:07:46
Speaker
So the same concerns were there 100 years ago, which for me is like just this totally shocking thing to uncover.
00:07:54
Speaker
But I think at the same time, there were these sort of darker strands of what then was referred to as Americanization.
00:08:03
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
00:08:17
Speaker
more so like, I would say like food ways of immigrants.
00:08:21
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.
00:08:32
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
00:08:44
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.
00:08:55
Speaker
So I think that that's kind of like part of the sort of darker side.
00:09:00
Speaker
And then
00:09:01
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.
00:09:16
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,
00:09:28
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.
00:09:41
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.
00:09:57
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.
00:10:12
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.
School Lunch Menu Evolution and Legislation
00:10:39
Speaker
So when I grew up in the...
00:10:43
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.
00:10:54
Speaker
And it became really obvious to see this kind of segregation, like just spatially in cafeterias.
00:11:02
Speaker
And I think as more and more of middle class and upper middle class families
00:11:06
Speaker
really didn't see their children being served by this program, it became an easier political target.
00:11:12
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%.
00:11:28
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.
00:11:36
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.
00:11:49
Speaker
But that's a luxury that a lot of families don't have.
00:11:52
Speaker
So I think it's just really important that when we're thinking about these kind of policy changes,
00:11:57
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.
00:12:22
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.
00:12:29
Speaker
Like I was doing like research over this to throw it into an article I was writing, including your your work in there.
00:12:35
Speaker
And I was like, well, let's figure out what's on the lunch menu at the school down the street.
00:12:39
Speaker
And then I was like, well, is it the same in Iowa or in California or wherever I Google?
00:12:44
Speaker
And it's all the exact same foods, no matter really where I look.
00:12:48
Speaker
It's always the stereotypical like I'm.
00:12:50
Speaker
I remember from when I was in school, it's like the little wrapper kind of like chicken sandwich.
00:12:55
Speaker
That's just two pieces of bread and a piece of chicken, like very breaded chicken.
00:12:59
Speaker
Sometimes even just like they they know it's not going to be good.
00:13:03
Speaker
So that's things like the sloppy salad or like these like very non appetizing sounding foods.
00:13:09
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.
00:13:23
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
00:13:38
Speaker
There's like so many things that have just been sort of coded as like, this is what school lunch is.
00:13:42
Speaker
Like, this is good food.
00:13:44
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.
00:13:57
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
00:14:03
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.
00:14:11
Speaker
So it's hard to tell sometimes when you're just looking at the menu.
00:14:14
Speaker
So you kind of have to do like this deeper digging to understand like what's the food philosophy of the particular school.
00:14:21
Speaker
So are they using language surrounding like clean labels?
00:14:26
Speaker
Are they talking about what people sometimes refer to as ingredients of concern?
00:14:31
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.
00:14:42
Speaker
Are they talking about a farm to school program?
00:14:45
Speaker
Because there are actually a lot of, I think, improvements in schools.
00:14:48
Speaker
So it's important to recognize even
00:14:51
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.
00:15:08
Speaker
So that went into effect in 2012.
00:15:10
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.
00:15:17
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.
00:15:24
Speaker
And in general, things have actually gotten better.
00:15:26
Speaker
It's actually really interesting to note how complex it really is.
00:15:30
Speaker
Like, I mean, your work has like hundreds and hundreds of sources.
00:15:34
Speaker
Like it's incredibly complex to try to decipher everything.
00:15:38
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.
00:15:48
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
00:15:55
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.
00:16:06
Speaker
And particularly when it came to school lunch, she understood that.
00:16:11
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.
00:16:22
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.
00:16:36
Speaker
Even though the whole concept of the school itself is socialist, if we want to get into semantics.
00:16:42
Speaker
But there's also like the idea of like, well, why don't you just bring your own lunch?
00:16:47
Speaker
Or why would we spend tax money on lunches when teacher class sizes are so large?
00:16:51
Speaker
Things like that.
00:16:52
Speaker
And what really stuck out to me more than anything else was that.
00:16:56
Speaker
she, Caroline Hunt, was basically disparaged by higher ed people in a very neoliberal way.
00:17:04
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?
00:17:16
Speaker
Or even now, there's the concept of schools are more focused on this idea.
00:17:20
Speaker
You need to be college ready or career ready.
00:17:22
Speaker
Which, in my opinion, is a neoliberal coding.
00:17:27
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.
Neoliberalism and Social Justice in Education
00:17:41
Speaker
They tend to go hand in hand if you do the first thing.
00:17:43
Speaker
So that's kind of a very roundabout way of asking, what are your thoughts on this concept of career and college readiness?
00:17:52
Speaker
And how do you see that factoring into the school lunch issue?
00:17:55
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question.
00:17:58
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.
00:18:06
Speaker
So she was the first home economics professor that we had, I think, in 1903 is when she started.
00:18:13
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.
00:18:24
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.
00:18:34
Speaker
So cooking and sewing and cooking is generally thought of as like, oh, you know, you...
00:18:40
Speaker
open a box and maybe add an egg.
00:18:42
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.
00:18:55
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
00:19:04
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.
00:19:19
Speaker
But there was always this little bit of tension between, well, on the one hand, it's actually important for us to bring
00:19:28
Speaker
this additional value to make people understand that household labor is actually important.
00:19:34
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.
00:19:41
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.
00:19:50
Speaker
So even this idea of how do we make household labor more efficient
00:19:54
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.
00:20:04
Speaker
So I think that as far as this kind of current career readiness, college readiness movement goes,
00:20:13
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.
00:20:34
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
00:20:41
Speaker
the power of their collective wealth.
00:20:43
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.
00:20:58
Speaker
So like testing water quality and stuff like that around Wisconsin and
00:21:03
Speaker
asking them to be involved in like the pure milk movement.
00:21:06
Speaker
So making sure that milk didn't have, you know, various kinds of things added to it or that it was sanitary.
00:21:13
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.
00:21:29
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
The Role and Perception of Lunch Ladies
00:21:45
Speaker
to be.
00:21:45
Speaker
And what you need to do is to find a way to kind of, you know, succeed within it.
00:21:51
Speaker
When I think what we really need to do is to be paying a lot more attention to
00:21:57
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.
00:22:16
Speaker
I love the fact that that is kind of the underlying idea when it comes to a book that's about school lunch.
00:22:24
Speaker
Not to downplay the whole point of the book, but it's interesting.
00:22:29
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.
00:22:46
Speaker
And kind of the...
00:22:48
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.
00:23:05
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.
00:23:12
Speaker
I also love the fact that men are starting to be called lunch laddies, which I think is brilliant.
00:23:17
Speaker
I absolutely love that.
00:23:19
Speaker
But I mean, the...
00:23:21
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.
00:23:27
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.
00:23:40
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.
00:23:55
Speaker
So how can then educators counteract that?
00:23:58
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.
00:24:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think that there's a few things that are important for people.
00:24:09
Speaker
Well, I'll mention a few kind of concrete ideas that people can engage in this issue.
00:24:13
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.
00:24:30
Speaker
But I think that one of the things that the book really tries to show is how,
00:24:36
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.
00:25:02
Speaker
So I think that
00:25:04
Speaker
it's important to understand not only that this kind of happened over time and really had a certain like
00:25:12
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.
00:25:24
Speaker
So I, in the book, try to talk about this through the lens of care.
00:25:28
Speaker
So I think that it's important for us to understand that they're actually part of our public care infrastructure.
00:25:34
Speaker
And they're not only providing direct care to students in terms of providing for their physical and emotional needs.
00:25:43
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.