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What’s for Lunch?
Posted on Thu, February 26, 2009 by Jerusha Klemperer
3 Comments | Categories: Farms and Farming, Policy, School Food, Take Action,
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This week we have been focusing on the Farm to College efforts around the country. Today, we shift our focus to K-12, where what is served in the lunchroom is also a) up for grabs and b) vitally important. Been in a school cafeteria lately? If you have you’ve seen that it is dominated by junk food, and reheated calorie-laden, carb-o-rific meals. A horrible school lunch is a lost nutritional/health opportunity, and a lost educational opportunity.
Last week you may recall that Debra Eschmeyer wrote a letter to Michelle Obama, letting her know about the upcoming reauthorization of the Childhood Nutrition Act, and calling for her interest and participation (the Childhood Nutrition Act establishes the guidelines for school lunch among other things). In order to take advantage of this moment, today as we post this, the Community Food Security Coalition, the National Farm to School Network, and School Food FOCUS are holding briefings on the Hill—with both the House and the Senate—to make the case for “supporting policy solutions that restore the right of all children to access good food in school; that educate and inform communities about healthy food and its impact on the wellbeing of children; and that connect farmers, school districts, food service companies, and great ideas to the food system delivering school lunch.” To read their excellent CNR briefing, click here and stay tuned for outcomes and reporting back on their day on the Hill.
Also, make sure you read Alice Waters’ and Katrina Heron’s Op-Ed in last week’s NY Times, in which they call for a radical overhaul of the school lunch program, saying “without healthy food (and cooks and kitchens to prepare it), increased financing will only create a larger junk-food distribution system. We need to scrap the current system and start from scratch. Washington needs to give schools enough money to cook and serve unprocessed foods that are produced without pesticides or chemical fertilizers. When possible, these foods should be locally grown.”
Member Comments
From Trent McNair on Fri, February 27, 2009
Hooray! Parents need to stand up and shout that they want this! It’s a tragedy to see what is in a schools freezer, not to mention the corporate junk food that has found it’s way into the cafeteria. My wife Linda and I have been advocates for changing school lunch programs for some time - so much so that we expanded our organic nursery to include organic seed starting kits that teach kids to grow and eat their own organic food. We also make it really easy to switch from magazine/candy/chocolate style fundraisers to our educational kits. Even the kids that don’t normally ‘like’ vegetables end up eating things that they are proud to grow and call their own. Let’s hope that we see some changes coming from the hill!
From Trent McNair on Fri, February 27, 2009
Sorry for the second post - my wife felt that it might be a good idea to post the url for our website: http://www.myfirstorganics.com
From Bear Braumoeller on Sat, March 07, 2009
The Waters and Heron op-ed is spot-on, but I fear that many people will stop reading when, after having read “In 2007, the program cost around $9 billion, a figure widely acknowledged as inadequate to cover food costs,” they get to the part that says, “How much would it cost to feed 30 million American schoolchildren a wholesome meal? It could be done for about $5 per child, or roughly $27 billion a year, plus a one-time investment in real kitchens. Yes, that sounds expensive.”
Yes, it does. More than tripling the cost of school lunch programs to improve food quality in a recession is a hard sell, made harder by the potential air of elitism that it will have in some minds (the inevitable implication of existing school lunches “not being good enough”).
A more productive tack to take might be to point out that the current school lunch system is vastly more expensive than the $9 billion price tag suggests. It defers costs, in the form of higher health-care costs down the road, and it hides present costs in the form of massive subsidies to the agricultural interests that provide school lunches. If we had a better sense of the true cost of school lunches in today’s system, it would be far more than $9 billion per year… and $27 billion wouldn’t seem all that bad by comparison.
