Fed up.
Any education reporter knows that the best place to talk to kids freely is the lunchroom. Especially during the two years I immersed myself in schools for a book project, I have eaten a lot of school lunches. At home I buy sides of beef from a farmer I know, who during her cows’ short lives cares for them to the point of practically singing them nursery rhymes, and I pay the Whole Foods or farmers market premium for produce that actually tastes like produce. But when I am reporting I have no problem eating meals in which every item is some form of yellow or beige. According to USA Today, I would be better off at KFC. No doubt. I never feel good after eating school food.
So I wonder what will happen, medically and otherwise, to Mrs. Q, the anonymous teacher who is eating her school’s lunches every day for a year and blogging about it. First off, I hope that if school administrators find out who she is, they don’t give her crap (well, aside from the crap they give her in the cafeteria), because this is a terrific idea. It is more important than Morgan Spurlock’s experiment, because eating at McDonald’s is a choice and for most children eating school lunch is not. Second, I don’t have a death wish for this brave woman, but I would love to see her highlight breakfast too. Just because you fortify a honey bun with enough vitamins to qualify it for the free breakfast program does not make it a remotely good way to start the day. Hungry kids are a captive audience. They don’t need organic kale, but how about Cheerios?
posted by Linda Perlstein at
4:08 PM
5 Comments:
Every kid will tell you: School food sucks.
Here in San Francisco, the federal subsidy for low-income students allows about $1 per meal for the food itself, after the costs of labor and overhead. And our district has to keep the cost of lunch for students who don't qualify for subsidized lunch low, because the threshold for qualifying is cruelly low here in one of the nation's highest-cost-of-living cities. The solution, obviously, is to provide enough funding to serve quality food.
San Francisco school food activists made this 3-minute video, featuring real live SFUSD students in a real live SFUSD cafeteria, to illustrate the problem and the solution.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QEeaZ7nQb8
More than 30 million students get their lunch through the National School Lunch Program; most qualify for free or reduced-price meals, paid for by the federal government. But the money the government provides for a free lunch is just $2.68, and that has to pay not only for the food but also the full cost of labor (including benefits and retirement benefits), plus expenses like garbage collection, pest control, utilities, and office staff to process meal applications. With labor and overhead eating up more than half of the typical cafeteria budget, schools are left with only about $1 to spend on food. Is it any wonder that cafeterias serve cheap processed carnival food? It’s all they can afford, and kids like it.
Every so often you hear about a school district with a visionary student nutrition leader who manages to serve fresh vegetables (perhaps grown on school property) and organic meat and milk, but these are outliers, and always - ALWAYS - if you investigate how they do it, it turns out that there is an additional funding stream to supplement the federal money. There might be a supportive community willing to tax itself to raise money for building a central kitchen to do scratch cooking, or an Alice Waters-type benefactor willing to open her checkbook and underwrite the extra costs, but these few superstar programs always have extra resources not available to most schools. All around the country, too many cafeterias are forced to rely on corn dogs, tater tots and canned fruit, because the money provided by Congress is not enough to buy the fresh wholesome food that students need to achieve their best in school and maintain good health.
The regulations governing child nutrition programs are so complex that one San Francisco city official recently told USDA staff that they "sound like they are designed to keep us from feeding kids." The regulations also make it far easier for school cafeterias to use highly processed food rather than fresh ingredients. The system needs to be revamped, minimizing regulations to make it more user friendly, while emphasizing fresh whole food like apples, not apple turnovers.
Every five years, Congress overhauls the Child Nutrition Act, which sets the level of funding for school meals. The Child Nutrition Act was supposed to have been reauthorized in 2009 but Congress, grappling with health care, kicked it forward into the new year, and will be taking up the reauthorization this spring.
Fed up with low quality school food? Speak up and let Congress know how you feel. There has never been a better time for anyone who has a student, knows a student, is a student or ever was a student to speak up for better school meals. Visit www.sfusdfood.org and click
It is A CHOICE to eat school meals, whether you qualify for free meals or not. I do know people whose children qualify for free meals at school but CHOOSE to home-educate them. It's a CHOICE. Some people actually make big sacrifices for their choices, too.
I think schools should be about educating children, not being their parents. I have no problem with temporary food stamps as charity given to people on hard times, but the school lunch thing strikes me as an industry in and of itself. (As does the "qualifying" items in the WIC program, but another post.) I think all of these things should be incorporated into the FOOD STAMPS program; otherwise, you have a not-so-subtle coercion to send poor children to public schools rather than keeping them home or otherwise privately educating them.
I enjoyed the school lunch blog you linked to very much. Three dollars does seem a bit steep for the food served, but aside from the "steak" served one day, it didn't seem too awful. Personally, I send my older children to school with peanut butter sandwiches, one snack and a drink every day. They get bored with it, but just *imagine* the cost if I had all of my older children in school and feeding them lunch. $12 PER DAY without the extras like ice cream? $60 PER WEEK? No way.
Mrs. C., the National School Lunch Program is technically run by the USDA, not the schools, though obviously it requires significant school district resources too. It was started right after World War II after many recruits and draftees were found to be malnourished when they showed up to report for duty -- so national security was a prime motivator.
As with everything else in education, it's more complicated than it seems.
By the way, I have a friend who's the cafeteria manager in an elite private school in the San Francisco Bay Area (Sean Penn's kids attend, for example). The lunch entree there is $6, but it's a la carte, and with extras, she says most students spend about $15/day on their top-quality school lunch.
Caroline, for that kinda money, I'd be hiring a private tutor to accompany my children on our glamourous vacations. :)
$15... per day... wow.
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