viz.

Image Credit: screen capture from JamieOliver.com

In last week's post, I introduced chef Jamie Oliver's campaign for real ("proper") food in the US (complete with its own ABC television reality show), and I discussed Oliver's plea that we, as a country, begin cooking real food (as opposed to eating industrial food) in our kitchens at home. For many Americans, busy schedules and limited cooking experience make this call for planning, buying, prepping and cooking scratch food at home a rather tall order, but even this potentially daunting lifestyle change looks like (forgive the pun) a piece of cake compared with the second half of Oliver's initiative: providing scratch meals twice daily in public schools. More on Oliver, Chef Ann Cooper, mind-boggling bureaucracy, and hurculean tasks after the break.

If you've been watching Oliver's Food Revolution or if you've ever heard Ann Cooper talk about anything anywhere, you know that school lunches in America must follow nutritional guidelines set by the USDA and that, according to those guidelines, chicken nuggets, tater tots, chocolate milk and canned fruit salad constitute a healthy meal while Oliver's baked chicken does not. If you haven't heard Ann Cooper (former chef for, among other people, Hillary Clinton, former head of the school food program in Berkley, California, and interim nutrition director for the Boulder Valley school district in Colorado), her 2007 talk posted on TED.com is a good representative piece.

Cooper brings up two points in this talk that are crucial for rethinking and reforming our school lunch programs: first, the role of USDA and food subsidies in determining what we feed school children, and, two, the importance of what children learn about food every day they step into the school cafeteria.

Chef Cooper is not alone in her concern about the USDA's role in the federal school lunch program. White House chef Sam Kass has also become well known for criticizing a system that puts the Agriculture Department (whose chief priority is providing markets for American agricultural goods) in charge of such an important aspect of childhood nutrition. Before being lured to D.C. by the Obama administration, Kass ran a private chef business in Chicago and held regular meetings at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museaum. Addams was, of course, a Progressive Era reformer who ran Hull-House in the midst of Chicago's sprawling slums and tenements and advocated for (among other reforms that underly what we now consider basic human rights in this country) food and water purity laws; Kass used the dining room at Hull House (a space with historical connections not only to Addams but also Upton Sinclair and other reformers) as a theatrical setting for open discussions about reforming the food system of the United States. A New York Times column from last January quoted Chef Kass from one of his "Rethinking Soup" meetings in which he accuses the USDA of using school children as a market for dumping surplus production: "The National School Lunch program also serves another vital role in our agricultural system. The government subsidizes various agricultural industries, creating overproduction in commodities such as beef, pork and dairy. This overproduction depresses prices, endangering the vitality of producers. The U.S. government purchases the overproduction it has stimulated and then disposes of the excess by giving it to schools." The National School Lunch program, he argues, is more concerned with disposing of commodities than it is with feeding children. If we don't start investing money to feed kids nutritious food, then we're going to end up spending more on their diabetes- and obesity-related illnesses (CDC predicts that, given today's food environment, 1 in 3 children born in 2000 will develop diabetes).

Whether or not we accept the sinister pictures of USDA program offered by Kass and Cooper, the fact is that most food provided through the Federal commodity program is industrial processed food high in fats and high-fructose corn syrup (and, like most of the dietary landscape of America, monstrously shaped by federal subsidies of corn and soy). Given the federal governments new vested interest in the long-term health of the American people, we can hope that it will give a higher priority to the nutritional value of the National School Lunch program. The most recent version of the Child Nutrition Act gives us some reasons to hope for a positive change even while falling far short of what child nutrition activists say we need to fix the system.

I have not seen Jamie Oliver directly address issues of subsidized non-nutrient food and the influence of the USDA. Given that he is not a US citizen and is running his advocacy campaign largely within unspoken rules of naitonal hospitality, that is probably a good rhetorical decision. American's probably would not enjoy listening to Oliver bash USDA any more than Brits wanted to hear American pundits lob accusatiosn at NHS. He does, however, provide plenty of links from his website to Cooper's, and it is hard to click a mouse on her page without coming across a critique of USDA in one form or another. 

Oliver does explicitly share Cooper's concern with what we might call the "hidden curriculum" of school lunches. Near the beginning of her TED talk, Cooper points out that we send our kids off to school and tell them to pay attention and learn something. Their education does not stop at the lunch room door, and, in Cooper's words, "When you feed kids bad food, that's what they're learning." If we continue treating food the way we treat it in schools, we can't expect kids to know anything about a healthy, sustainable (in that it can sustain their lives) diet. We teach them to be dependent on non-nutrient, fat- salt- and sugar-laden industrial foods.

Two moments from the second installment of Oliver's program stood out to me in the context of food education. The first, a vegetable pop-quiz he gives to a group of first graders, is in the video below.

I could understand young kids not recognizing the whole beet or confusing cauliflower and broccoli, but it was shocking to see a roomful of six and seven year olds who couldn't identify tomatoes and potatoes (Dan Quayle couldn't SPELL potato, but at least he knew what one was). To the credit of the teacher, she took Oliver's visit as a teachable moment and, the next day, the kids had no problem recognizing eggplants, etc. (It doesn't seem to me that schools should need to teach kids "This is what tomatoes look like," but if kids don't see real food in the cafeteria, and if their kitchens at home are full of processed, industrial food, then where else will they learn it?)

The second food-education moment that stood out to me revolved around forks. Oliver prepares a meal for the students that can't be eaten with fingers or spoons, and the kitchen staff refuse to pull the knives and forks out of storage. While pleading with the administrator for cutlery, Oliver asks the school staff if they want to "bring up a nation of kids that only use thier fingers and a spoon." Some of the dispute has to do, of course, with American fears of litigation and weapons in schools, but, beyond the culture clash, Oliver has a tremendously important point. You can't eat real food with just your fingers and a spoon; you can, however, eat all varieties of industrial products and fast food with no utensils at all. What are we teaching children to eat, and how are we conditioning them to think about food if they go to school and eat all their meals with their hands? Oliver talks the school staff into at least trying out silverware as an experiment, and the segment ends in one of his first small victories of the series: he not only gets the kids proper utensils for proper food, he manages to get the principal and other school staff to interact with the kids during their lunch, encouraging them to try new foods and teaching them how to use their knife and fork. Lunch was, for a moment anyways, a positive, human, social interaction.

Significant change in the School Lunch Program will take much, much more than these token improvements. Federal beaurocracy, school district budgets, staffing shortages and equipment limitations present a daunting series of obstacles to feeding school kids real food for lunch. Oliver and Cooper have both created online tools to help. Cooper's TheLunchBox.org aims at being, eventually, a one-stop online toolkit for school lunch reform, and it houses resources for everyone from school administrators and kitchen staff to parents, students and concerned members of the community. Oliver's personal website hosts recipes for schools alongside those he provides for families to cook at home, and he also lists a number of other resources available to schools and parents (including, not surprisingly, Cooper's Lunch Box). Each site also encourages you to contact your elected officials (here and here) aiming to capitalize on the Child Nutrition Act's renewal this year (the law is reviewed every five years). Local schools and school districts will need governmental and community support if they are going to cook something for school kids.