Snow days: No Meals. Other Days: Poor Meals

TAKOMA PARK, Md. - As back-to-back snowstorms shuttered schools for the week across the mid-Atlantic states, parents fretted about lost learning time, administrators scheduled makeup days and teachers posted assignments online. But Marla Caplon worried about a more fundamental problem: How would students eat?

The two snowstorms that pummeled the region, leaving more than 3 feet of snow in some areas, deprived tens of thousands of children from Virginia to Pennsylvania of the free or reduced-price school lunch that may be their only nutritious meal of the day. The nonprofits that try to meet the need when school is not in session also closed their doors for much of the week, leaving many families looking at bare cupboards. And many parents working hourly jobs were unable to earn any money during the week, as the snow forced businesses to close.

Caplon is a food services supervisor for Montgomery County Public Schools, where about 43,000 [poor] children are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. Some also get breakfast, dinner and bags of staple foods to take home for the weekend. The snow days meant children would get none of that until Tuesday, because schools are closed Monday for Presidents Day.

--"Snow days mean less food for many students," Associated Press in msnbc.com (2.13.10)

It is dispiriting to our sense of social caring and public responsibility to acknowledge that large numbers of children from economically disadvantaged families must rely on the public school free lunch program for their breakfast and dinner, as well as their lunch. The family circumstances are varied and the reasons most often unsettling, challenging, and unhappy, at least. And when weather or misfortune closes schools, those children often go hungry. That is an unwelcome and unsatisfying condition for so many.

But it is the view of more and more nutitionists, doctors and researchers that the only thing near as bad as losing access to meals through the public school lunch programs is to actually consume a long-term diet of school cafeteria fare. It appears that researchers have now concluded what casual observers or consumers of school lunch programs have always known: the food is nutitionally poor and dangerous to the long-term heath of students who eat it. But the delivery--or vending--of school lunch and its alternatives has been taken to a whole new place in many schools. And the reasons are all too familiar. From an article in the Washington Monthly:

As Janet Poppendieck writes in Free for All: Fixing School Food in America, we live in "a new age in which a business model … permeate[s] school food." Where lunchrooms in the past treated children as lucky recipients, they now view them as customers whose business must be won. Vending machines light up the hallways, usually through an exclusive contractual arrangement between school or school district and a company like Coca-Cola or Pepsi. Fast-food operations like Subway and KFC set up shop in the food court, tempting away all the students with enough money to afford a hoagie or fried chicken strips. Alongside the traditional cafeteria meal are a la carte lines where burgers and French fries (and their unholy cousins, tater tots) glisten with grease under the lamplights, exempted in all their fatty glory from USDA nutritional requirements. Even those children who buy the standard hot meal eat mostly junk: pizza with fries hits all of the major food groups, if you define the groups expansively enough. As Ronald Reagan's USDA famously taught us, ketchup is, after all, a vegetable...

With the business approach to school food come money woes, and these permeate Poppendieck's excellent, informative, if occasionally dry book. School districts simply do not have the funds to make ends meet, and hence the drive toward vending machines and a la carte junk food lines. Under the National School Food Lunch Program, there are three tiers of school meals: free ones for the poorest children, reduced-price ones for those with somewhat greater means, and full-price meals for everyone else. All of the meals, including the full-price ones, are subsidized and therefore artificially cheap. And it is hard to break even when your most expensive meal costs $1.50, so school districts have increasingly turned to unregulated (and pricier) a la carte lines, the income from which goes straight back into the cafeteria program, and vending machines, which help fill out the schools' general discretionary budgets. Sell enough Twizzlers and you might be able to afford new uniforms for the marching band...

Poppendieck's survey of the broken school lunch program is sophisticated and nuanced, and her conclusions, which tend toward healthier food and greater funding, are generally sound, with one notable exception. She is far too easy on the USDA, which administers and regulates the school lunch program on the federal level. When the National School Lunch Act was passed in 1946, Congress described it as a way "to encourage the domestic consumption of nutritious agricultural commodities." Ever since, the school lunch program has been a captive and exclusive market for subsidized agribusiness products, like corn (and high-fructose corn syrup), meat, and dairy. Our farm system is propped up by the worst type of corporate welfare to the biggest industrial producers, and foisting their artery-clogging products on schoolchildren is the inevitable result of USDA's stewardship.

--"Unhappy Meals," a book review by Michael O'Donnell in Washington Monthly (January/February 2010) of Free for All: Fixing School Food in America, by Janet
Poppendiecks (University of California Press)

Mr. O'Donnell shares much more about this book, and about an important public service gone so wrong. And the more you understand it all, the financial challenges and incentives for schools and communities, the political and corporate roles involved, the more unsettled and politically impotent you may tend to feel as you add this failure to a growing list of political and public service disappointments and failures.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35384779/ns/weather/
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1001.odonnell.html

Eyes to See, Ears to Hear

Most people haven't really been watching or listening, have they? And why should they? The people they've been trafficking with probably haven't prepared them for it. They've had no expectation that the One who calls us may be trying to get their attention: waving His arms at them in the press of daily relationships and responsibilities, flashing His light in the soft, smiling eyes that pause and pass by, speaking in the voices of those who love and care, whispering to the heart that sighs, stirring in their very soul. They have not heard Him calling from all creation, the cycles of birth and death, change and renewal, nudging them to the questions of what is passing, what transcends, and what endures.

We are challenged with notions of humility and transcendence, challenged to understand ourselves as a passing experience, identity and consciousness which is somehow part of a greater Purpose and existence that endures. This understanding and peace, ever incomplete but continually unfolding, seems more often extended by invitation and accepted than pursued. And it appears that the more attentive we are to the unfolding, the more often we accept the invitations, the deeper, more intimate the journey becomes.

Is this something to be proved or even pursued in a certain way? No; it's a matter of personal journey and experience, and very personal to each of us. Can I logically explain it to you? In part, perhaps, but not completely—and probably not satisfactorily. Is it all part of our purpose in life? Yes, it seems to be, although we can find many reasons to treat it as though it is not or try to ignore it altogether. Do we play a role with each other in this process? Yes, and a very important one. But sometimes we may only touch a responsive chord with others—and sometimes only inadvertently—and provide a sense of invitation or permission to listen and seek some understanding of that voice or apprehension. Beyond that, if asked, we can only share our own experiences and understandings, which are unlikely to be altogether the same as someone else's. That's the way it seems to me to be.

Not Heaven Yet

If for so many good reasons, I try to extend respect to others, I also want to receive respect in return. But that is not the way of the world, is it? Nor is it the way of many who claim Christianity—not even toward other Christian groups or traditions. To entrust that expectation of respect to others—including those who dislike or disagree with you—would appear to most folks as innocent or naive, even unwise and trust misplaced, wouldn't it?

But if not respect, then what about tolerance? Surely that is a reasonable expectation. As I posed the question in Out of the Box:

So, how about this: I'll live my life as well as I know how, and others can do the same. We will try, so far as we are able, to respect each other. But failing that, we will politely tolerate each other. Civility. I can live with that. How about you?

But even the guarded hopefulness you might struggle to infer from that question might be misplaced, even naïve, might it not? We are not nearly ready to see each other as one family of humanity, and certainly not as one family of God. It is not the way we've evolved genetically or been molded socially, culturally—or at least not most of us. As my pastor is wont to say, it's not heaven yet.

We are competitive and contentious as a species, and given too much to disagreement and argument. Not only are we contentious and disagreeable among our various nations, races or ethnicities, religions and ideologies, we are constantly disagreeable within them. We are continually in the process of finding reasons to distinguish or differentiate ourselves from others, lift ourselves above them or remove ourselves from them. This is an observable, predictable process, and we are too often unpleasant and hurtful in doing it. And it all breeds deep prejudice and discrimination, anger, even hatred. It's clearly not heaven yet.

A Responsible Market Economy

Deny it with rationalizations, or ignore it if you must. But there is a social responsibility that accrues, a moral obligation that must be continually honored in recognition of the generous provision made to the successful upper and middle classes by our open, competitive market economy. And it is owing to those unable to compete or defeated in the competition: the poor, the infirm, the unable. What's owing are the survival basics: health care, education, and a subsistence living for all.

Yes, this represents the higher sense of social responsibility that an advanced society acknowledges to its citizens, but it is also dictated by the more pragmatic concern for strengthening the labor and intellectual capital components of our economy--and ultimately reducing the cost of both.

College and the Well-Lived Life

Students come to universities with a remarkably materialistic view of what a college education can provide. It was not always thus. In the 1960s, entering freshmen were chiefly interested in developing values and a meaningful phi­losophy of life. Only 40 percent felt that making "a lot of money" was a "very important" goal. By the mid-70s, their priorities were reversed. Making "a lot of money" was now "very important" to 75 percent of entering students.

Since then, making money has continued to be the pre-­eminent reason for attending college. But much research has shown that people who set great store by becoming rich tend to be less happy than those who have other goals. If that is the case, most college freshmen are already on the wrong path to a full and satisfying life.

The widespread pre­occupation with making money has clearly left its mark on the undergraduate curriculum. To compete for applicants, col­leges have felt impelled to offer more vocational majors, and students have responded by gravitating increasingly to pro­grams that prepare them for higher-paid jobs. Three-fifths of all undergraduates in four-year colleges are pursuing vocational majors. Even liberal-arts concentrators may seek majors that look suspiciously like preprofes­sional programs for Ph.D.'s and academic careers.

--"College and the Well-Lived Life," by Derek Bok, Chronicle Review (1.31.10)

Derek Bok is the esteemed former president of Harvard University, and former dean of the Harvard Law School. He remains a professor at the university and a frequent writer on higher education in America. And he teaches a course on higher education policy at the Harvard Ed School, which I was privileged to take while in the doctoral program there. It was one of the most engaging, challenging courses I've taken, and marked by spirited discussions with Professor Bok. You could do that with him; he invited it and enjoyed it--even if he was quite self-satisfied that he had already sorted it all out, thank you very much.

But his concerns with directions in higher education were personal and deep. This had been his life, and he was highly idealistic about the purpose and value of a liberal arts education--about the development and holistic educational experience of the more complete, better-educated person. And nothing was of greater concern to him than that policy makers, universities, and educators, but more, families and students, would lose sight of this understanding and priority. How could we let slip away the understanding that a broad liberal arts education best prepares a student to be a thoughtful, discerning reader, effective writer, critical thinker, and more practiced problem solve--and with better understandings of how people function as individuals, groups, and societies?

For with that educational background, later vocational or professional training can more easily be pursued and practiced, and professional life more effectively, respectfully lived out. And more, life-long learning, well-informed reflection, and constant reassessment are more likely to continue and result in a more important and respected personal contribution to society. That's why a college education in the humanities, arts and sciences is still the most valuable education of all, the best foundation for the well-lived life.

As Close as They Dare

"Love is patient, love is kind. It is not arrogant or jealous; it does not brag or act unbecomingly. Love does not seek its own. It is not provoked, and does not take into account a wrong suffered. It does not rejoice in falsehood or wrongdoing, but rejoices in the the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. " --St. Paul, the Apostle (I Cor. 13.)

As for we mortals, some would hold this truth as close as they can, others only as close as they dare.