School Lunch Momentum of Sorts

The New York Times ran a piece this week on the policy momentum behind giving children healthier school lunch options, which has champions in the White House and the Senate pushing to add $0.70 per lunch to the federal lunch budget. They highlight the work of Sen. Gillibrand (D-NY), who's gone beyond asking only for more to be spent to asking that it be spent better:

... “If you feed a kid chicken nuggets and canned peas and Doritos and canned fruit as a school lunch or you feed him grilled chicken, steamed broccoli and fresh fruits and a whole grain roll, the difference is night and day,” Senator Gillibrand said.

As part of this year’s work on the Child Nutrition Act, Senator Gillibrand is co-sponsoring legislation that would ban trans fat in cafeteria kitchens and give the Department of Agriculture more power to set tougher federal nutrition requirements for the lightly regulated à la carte program in schools. ...

In recent years however, federal reimbursement hasn't kept up with rising costs associated with providing school lunches, meaning that schools are often taking a loss on lousy food.

School lunches also have to vie for student's attention with 'competitive' foods of minimal nutritional value, such as candy bars. If the cafeteria staff get creative, they must face a student body that's been acclimated to lousy fast food, rarely get home cooked meals, and consequently don't recognize even a freshly made blackberry cobbler as food. Student rejection of prepared lunch options puts lunch budgets deeper in the red, pressuring menus to look more like the fast food restaurant menus that form the template of expectation when children think of 'food.'

In short, the foods marketed to children in general, and offered as competitive options in schools in particular, range from the nutritionally destructive to the merely low quality. But they've been engineered to taste good and hit all the right food addiction buttons, so there's that.

Further, as Tom Laskawy writes at Beyond Green, there's a structural impediment in the USDA to offering healthy lunches, and that impediment is a commodity purchase program whose main dumping ground is the nation's captive audience of school children.

These discussions always remind me of a classmate and fairly recent high school graduate, let's call him Joe, from four years back when I returned to college. My mom was a homemaker who cooked from a fairly traditional template that she picked up from her grandmother and most of my acquaintances now are either of the slightly older demographic who were more likely to have similar food choices at home and foodies (both urban and rural) who can be revolted by the mere mention of a McDonald's. Which is to say that turning down blackberry cobbler without a good reason is just strange to me and so I turn to Joe as a reminder that not everyone grew up that way.

Joe had been raised on pizza (cheese or pepperoni only, please), tater tots, fries, hamburgers and iirc, macaroni and cheese. He was afraid of other types of food and wouldn't try them. I remember suggesting a taco at one point, a ground beef taco with lettuce and tomatoes, that I'd wrongly thought was close enough to having a hamburger as to make no particular difference. Well, Joe would have none of it. Tacos were just too strange sounding.

As a kid, I was also rather fond of the hamburgers and cheese pizza served at school. They beat the heck out of mushy, canned green beans, anyway. But having tried other kinds of food, they weren't all I would agree to eat, nor what I'd have always preferred to eat. I'd had options Joe never dreamed of. Options that made our tastes in food mutually incomprehensible, indeed, almost incommensurable, to each other.

Are the values of finding markets for US farm products and feeding children good food equally hard to translate into a common goal? Are good intentions at the federal level going to be consumed by mere price inflation? Are school kids going to be doomed to choosing between canned fruit and a 'fresh' fruit option that consists of the battery acid oranges and mealy apples that even I remember turning my nose up at? (The fresh fruit at school was never as good as what my mom brought home from the grocery store. I never realized how lucky that made me.)

I don't know. But I do know that it's going to take years, if ever, to fix school food. Kids can't vote and their parents often have a hard enough time trying to make sure they're well served educationally and have roofs over their heads to consistently take on the lousy food they're given. Particularly concerned parents often just opt out and do what they can to send their kids to school with a decent lunchbag.

All of which makes this a paramount political problem that transcends any 'consumer choice' response to a gross market failure. And I do mean gross in the literal sense.

(Photo credit: erin.kkr on Flickr.)