Food Becomes Curriculum in School Lunch Revolution

By Tom Philpott, Grist.org. Posted January 30, 2007.

Even the most intractable pathology can disappear, sometimes relatively quickly. A sign above a water fountain proclaiming "no coloreds" would cause any American to flinch today. Just half a century ago throughout the South, such abominations formed a banal part of the built landscape.

I got to thinking about deep-rooted problems and rapid change a few days ago while talking with Ann Cooper, a former star chef who now proudly styles herself a "renegade lunch lady."

Cooper is on a mission to transform the nation's abysmal school-lunch system. I met her for a cup of coffee in Asheville, N.C., where she was promoting her new book Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children. After our conversation, I began to wonder if the idea of pumping kids full of flavorless, nutritionally suspect convenience food at school might soon become as socially unacceptable as Jim Crow-style racism.

Cooper has certainly taken on a daunting task. She currently serves as nutrition director of the Berkeley Unified School System, a 16-school, 9,000-student outfit in California. When she took the job in 2005, she found that the district's food-service system had completely retreated from actual cooking. "When I arrived, 100 percent of the food arrived in plastic, was reheated in plastic, and served to the kids in plastic," she says.

Overcoming an absurdly stringent budget and severely limited cooking infrastructure within school cafeterias, she has already eliminated what she calls "plastic food" and is now serving fresh, made-from-scratch meals.

But she has no intention of stopping there. She would like to overthrow the logic that has made school cafeterias conduits through which convenience-food manufacturers reach children's impressionable palates.

That job won't be easy. Few school districts can afford to hire a skilled chef with a sterling resume (Culinary Institute of America, a celebrated run as executive chef at Vermont's Putney Inn) to oversee a cooking revolution. In fact, the Berkeley system can only afford to fund Cooper's salary through a three-year grant from the Chez Panisse Foundation.

For less-lucky school districts, the situation is grave. As Cooper puts it in Lunch Lessons, "a full 78 percent of the schools in America do not actually meet the USDA's nutritional guidelines." It's no wonder, really: Cooper says school cafeterias have $2.40 per day to spend on each kid -- 70 percent of which goes to payroll and overhead. That leaves 72 cents to spend on ingredients.

Given those Dickensian financial constraints, it's also no wonder that over the last 30 years, schools have replaced trained cooks with de-skilled workers and abandoned cooking for reheating.

All in all, Cooper told me, the U.S. spends about $7 billion per year on school lunches -- roughly equal to a month's worth of military expenditures in Iraq.

The comparison is not merely rhetorical. As budget deficits mount and the president keeps escalating -- pardon me, augmenting -- the nation's commitments to the deadly sinkhole that has become Iraq, it's going to become harder and harder to find money to improve the dismal state of school lunches.

Penny Wise, Dollar Poor

Although money that could be boosting school-lunch budgets is now vainly being dumped into Iraq, defense planners once saw great value in childhood nutrition. In fact, Cooper reports, the school-lunch program grew out of national-security concerns.

According to Cooper, it started during World War II, when military planners discovered that widespread malnutrition among the nation's youth was hampering their ability to fight effectively. In the initial post-war decades, the school-lunch program worked pretty well, Cooper says. "There were actually real people cooking food from scratch in every public school in the country," she adds. "And no one thought about charging -- meals were free for every kid."

But economic crisis in the mid-1970s galvanized the backlash against New Deal programs that continues to grip U.S. politics to this day. As kitchen equipment installed in the 1940s and 1950s began to decay, Congress didn't allot money to replace it. Skilled cooks -- the "lunch ladies" Cooper harks back to -- reached retirement age, and their jobs went unfilled. School kitchens gradually turned into reheating centers staffed by button-pushers, not cooks, and school districts began to outsource food preparation to a booming convenience-food industry, which was just then discovering the wonders of high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated fat.

Fast-forward 30 years, and we've completed a vicious circle. If the school-lunch program started from an urgent need to counter rampant malnutrition, it now needs a complete overhaul to combat a new scourge: surging diabetes and obesity rates.

See more stories tagged with: school lunch, nutrition

Grist staff writer Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

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