The other day a mother friend of mine sent me a link to a photo that really should have been accompanied by a cautionary note. Warning: This photo might have been taken in a school cafeteria, or it might show an autopsy in progress; you are strongly advised not to click during your lunch hour.
The link led to the blog Whatsforschoollunch.blogspot.com, to a post consisting of a photo resembling nothing so much as the fake guts you’d find at a homemade haunted house: an open bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos drizzled with cheese, the puffs entrail-red, sauce clinging to them in fatty globs, a white plastic fork center frame. To cop a phrase that’s all over the reality shows right now, a hot mess. A note at the bottom of the post explained that this silvery bag of grossness was purchased by a student in the “competitive foods line” at his school. Chances are — and we’ll get back to this in a moment — that as a fellow resident of Lake Wobegon you’ve never heard of a competitive foods line. I sure hadn’t until I picked up the recently released Free for All: Fixing School Food in America, by Janet Poppendieck, where I learned that many schools, in an effort to subsidize their regular lunch programs, set up a separate, faster-moving for-profit cafeteria line where they sell junk food.
Apparently, the lines are usually so popular they end up undermining the rest of the food-service program. Not surprisingly, many kids prefer the fast-food-style offerings. Some use them because they don’t have enough of a lunch period to wait in the regular lines, which quickly acquire the stigma of being for free and reduced-price lunch kids.
As someone who writes about schools and education for several news outlets, I tour a lot of schools and eat a lot of school lunches. And I can’t honestly say I’ve ever seen anything like this in a Minnesota school. I’m sure some nudnik out there will write in to prove me wrong, but I even called around to give myself a gut check and I couldn’t find a competitive foods line.
There are exceptions. I’m still traumatized by the memory of a tray of egg rolls sitting out at a Minneapolis Public School I was visiting. Assume for a moment they were tasty when fresh, hours before lunch. Wrapped in plastic and left to coagulate for a few hours — surprise! — anything deep-fried will end up chewy and limpid. Sometimes one should simply admit a total failure of imagination and start over.
But mostly what I see are earnest attempts to make kid staples a little healthier. We still rely on pizza, nuggets, and anything noodle- or rice-based, but it’s a lot less fatty and salty, and heavier on the whole grains and fresh ingredients than in the past or, according to Poppendieck, lots of other places. I routinely run into salad bars, yogurt, and paper cups bearing fresh strawberries and kiwis and plums.
A couple of years ago I got to tour the main kitchen for St. Paul Public Schools’ award-winning nutrition program, and we should all eat so well. I saw fresh whole wheat French bread baking, tasted pilaf-like whole grain salads, and looked at the raw building blocks for crowd-pleasing rice and pasta bars — all prepared on a budget of about 90 cents per student and in accordance with a Byzantine thicket of regulations that date to the days when we were trying to fatten up poor kids.
St. Paul is to be commended. Those rules present perennial challenges, such as meeting minimum calorie thresholds without exceeding maximum ceilings for fat. Adding sugar to a meal is usually the cheapest way for an impoverished school district to resolve this, Poppendieck notes: “The children don’t need it, especially if they are making use of the soda machine located just outside the cafeteria door, but it is the least expensive way to bring the meals into compliance.”
A few more fun facts about the conditions under which our lunch ladies labor: You know those surplus agricultural products the Feds buy to keep farm prices up? Know where they end up? Public schools.
Wonder why there’s so much chocolate and strawberry milk on offer? Our government buys up a lot of milk, and requires schools to move a certain amount. Sugar = quota met.
Mystery meat — the mystery being where did it come from and how was it processed? — makes up a hefty chunk of the surplus commodities schools rely on to balance budgets. “Several years ago, USDA became concerned enough about E. coli outbreaks traceable to commodity meats that it began offering schools irradiated meat as a means to reduce the likelihood of an outbreak,” notes Poppendieck.
Want more fun facts about how shoddily we, as a body politic, have chosen to treat our children? Check out Susan Levine’s dense, authoritative School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program. My bet is the more you read, the more you’ll cheer. Minnesota’s school nutrition departments don’t do so badly. There are almost always deli sandwiches, no one’s trying to pass ketchup off as a vegetable, and if little Jacob and Emily won’t eat the cauliflower — well, if we’re being honest they don’t eat it at home either, do they?
Yet you can’t swing a jicama stick these days without hitting some high-profile someone who’s launched an initiative to improve school lunch. Michelle Obama wants more produce on those trays (but somehow can’t convince her husband and his congressional pals to pony up a little more cash for the schools she’s pressuring). TV chef Jamie Oliver wants to ban fries. Local sustainable movement godmother Alice Waters wants kids to grow their own. The list goes on.
It’s admirable, and it will indeed be a great day for America when there’s an organic black bean enchilada at the center of every segmented plastic tray. While we work toward giving school and farm kissing familiarity with one another, however, what if we spent just a little time making the lunchroom a more pleasant place?
I don’t know when you last ate with your child, but if you have, you know that the 20 minutes most kids get are an exercise in the survival of the fittest. Food and taunts fly at top decibel while the adults disappear to quieter realms. Any non-bully with two brain cells to rub together knows to rush through the best bits of the meal and out onto the playground as quickly as possible.
You know how the so-called experts are always telling us that the family meal, with its place settings and take-turns conversation, is crucial to building kids’ characters? I daresay if the grownups were forced to stay and take a place at the head of the table things would improve radically on every front, and fast. This is the way lunch is served in France: Family style, with “lunch teachers” presiding over every table like Mom and Dad. In fact, I’d go so far as to bet if you put a St. Paul school pizza, with its whole wheat crust and low-fat pepperoni, in the center of a convivial table you’d be hard-pressed to know it was school lunch.
Just a thought.
Beth Hawkins is a Minneapolis writer.
