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Putting the School in School Lunch
By Deborah Lehmann —
Here’s a bit of history about school meals: before the National School Lunch Program received permanent funding in 1946, advocates tried to move the initiative from the USDA to the Department of Education.
In a Senate hearing in 1944, the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee argued that the USDA’s program was “a very fine piece of work,” but that a permanent program should operate “under the more intimate supervision of the Office of Education.” A spokesperson from the National Education Association told Senators that school meals are “more than feeding children” and that nutrition should be “fundamental in the educational program.”
By the mid-1940s, however, school lunch programs were well established within the USDA. The department had invested money and staff in planning menus and distributing food. What’s more, representatives from southern farm states viewed the program primarily as an aid to rural agricultural communities and promised to support a permanent lunch program only if it remained in the USDA.
Fast forward to February 2009, when I visited Michael Marrocco in his cafeteria in Cranston, Rhode Island. While Marrocco complies with all the state and federal regulations for school meals, his lunchroom is anything but educational. His menu that day included chicken nuggets, pizza, hot dogs, fried mozzarella sticks, cheeseburgers and chicken parm sandwiches. One girl told me her typical lunch was hot Cheetos from the snack bar and a bottle of water. Health is important, she said, but “it’s mainly about the overweight thing.”
None of this is surprising when you look at the way meal programs are set up. Sure, it’s the National SCHOOL Lunch Program. But when Congress rejected calls to place school meals under the Department of Education, it drew a clear line between the cafeteria and the classroom.
So while Marrocco’s program runs out of the Cranston School District, it’s really not a school program at all. “We need to be here because it’s a mandated program,” he told me. “But unless there’s a problem, they don’t ever call me. They just had an event where they invited all the teachers. They didn’t invite food service. We’re not part of the school.”
Unlike teachers, food service staff don’t receive paychecks from the district. Their money comes out of program revenue. School cafeterias are essentially independent businesses, and as far as districts are concerned, they can do what they want provided they meet the federal nutrition regulations and stay out of the general fund. “We’re like our own little island in the sea,” said Cathy Giannini, who runs the meal program in Soquel, California.
You can see this right from your computer. Try looking for lunch menus online, and oftentimes you’ll find the link to the meal program on the district’s business services page. The lunchroom is just not part of the educational sphere.
One of the things I hear over and over again when I talk to cafeteria managers is that it takes education to get kids to eat well. You can offer lentil soup or pasta primavera or tofu with vegetables, but students aren’t familiar with those dishes like they’re familiar with chicken nuggets. Unless they learn what those foods taste like, where they come from and why they’re healthy, they won’t buy them or eat them.
A number of meal program directors told me they’d love to teach students about nutrition and introduce new foods. But they have about 20 minutes to serve a whole lunchroom of kids and make sure those kids can finish eating before they head out to recess. That leaves little time for lessons about fruits and vegetables.
It’s not much better in the classroom, where teachers are so focused on test scores that they’re hesitant to give up instructional minutes to teach kids about healthy eating. When I visited a cafeteria in Livermore, California, Director Barbara Lee said she feels like the nutrition lessons she gives students are “behind the back of the principal.”
Washington lawmakers are starting to realize that one of the keys to health reform is going to be diet-related prevention, especially in children. Nutrition regulations for school food will help, certainly. But until we put the school in school lunch, it’s going to be hard to raise a generation of health-conscious American students.
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