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
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