Its Broken and You’re Fixing It
Once upon a time I was in a doctoral program, planning on being a History Professor by the time I reached 30. Sitting in a library reading Latin turned out not to be my life’s calling, thank goodness, but I do get to wear the hat of ‘Choicelunch Historian’ when the opportunity arises.
Recently, Justin and I attended a reading by Amy Kalafa on school lunch advocacy and policy and we discussed the genesis of the National School Lunch Program. Parents angry that their kids are fed tater tots and canned green beans are right to be up in arms about the efficacy of our government’s involvement with school lunches. The system is broken, but the program began with good intentions.
In the midst of the Great Depression, Congress first started to feed kids in schools. School lunch was the only meal many kids were going to get-period. (Creamed corn and mystery meat looks pretty good compared to real hunger). The government aimed to kill two birds with one stone, by also creating a commodity program where farm surpluses (which were reducing the market value of crops) would be purchased by the government. These surpluses were then ‘donated’ back to schools to feed kids. Seemed like a pretty tidy solution.
Truman made the school lunch program universal in 1946 when the post-war military effectively argued that many recruits during the dark days of WWII were turned away from the service because they were malnourished and underfed. As in so many other areas, when national defense is threatened, money becomes available. The school lunch program, then, was put in place to fatten American kids up, literally.
Of course, the result 75 years later is that most school lunch is too caloric, it is devoid of real food, and it is dependent on commodity ‘donations’ (which many argue are simply lining the pockets of large agri-businesses, rather than enabling small family farms to thrive.) Add to the ingredient problems, labor issues, lack of working kitchens, withering education budgets, shrunken recess times and the absence of Home Ec. classes and we have the current calamity of ‘Public School Lunch as We Know It.’
This is the legacy that Choicelunch works to change. Parents, kids and schools know that our program is different. The perception, touted in the media, is that all school lunch is the same. You Choicelunch parents know the truth. You know we make menu decisions not based on what is available from the government food pantry. We source superior local ingredients our chefs prepare from scratch. Our food is nutrient-dense, using home-based recipes, not shelf-stable formulas produced by corporate food scientists. We build kitchens and create jobs not to fulfill union labor requirements, but to actually do the hard work of feeding our kids. Yes, our lunches are more expensive than the $2.68 that the government pays for National School Lunch Program meals but you parents know our food is real and our kids deserve better.
It’s time to write the next chapter in the book of school lunch and you Choicelunch parents are doing it. Every time a kid eats a Choicelunch at school, they are rewriting history.
