School Lunch: A Disaster of Epic Proportions

I have been angry about school lunches for a while. They are served to millions of children in this country every day, and for many children, lunch may be the only meal of the day. While we could be teaching children the importance of fresh, nutritional meals, we are instead serving them the same processed food they probably eat at home. School lunch is a missed teaching opportunity.

Jamie Oliver’s TED talk on teaching children about food recently got me thinking about this topic again. The video includes a clip of Jamie’s visit to a school in West Virginia where the children cannot identify onions, tomatoes, or beets by sight. How can we be sure children don’t like to eat vegetables if we can’t so much as tell them what they are? School lunch programs are often designed with a set of assumptions about what children do and don’t enjoy eating. Hot dogs, yes; carrot sticks, no; hamburgers, yes; quinoa, no. Why do we set such low standards for children? Why can’t we expect more of them? Surely kids in the nineteenth century ate what was placed in front of them. Processed food is a recent invention, and yet so many Americans are almost wholly dependent upon it for nutrition.

Few items on current school lunch menus would have been recognizable 100 years ago, and yet somehow children survived to adulthood. Surely they must have eaten something else. Something unprocessed, and, dare I say, natural? Food is central to culture, so what we serve children at school says a lot about us. About our desire for efficiency over quality; our willingness to do the bare minimum.

America has the potential to develop a great food culture. With immigrants from every corner of the world, we could be serving our children the most diverse menu on the planet. Instead, you find the same tired, apathetically-prepared items in cafeterias across the country. Instead of teaching children how food can nourish us and bring joy into our lives, we teach them the efficiency of the assembly line.

School lunch policies in America favor big business. While big business may be good at things like drilling oil and setting up cell phone networks, the corporate takeover of every aspect of American life has drained us of sentiment and endangers our culture. Children who cannot identify vegetables have no idea where those vegetables come from. For that matter, no one has any idea where the chickens constituting a nugget may have lived. We are in danger of losing our connection to the land and to other people. How many of us personally know a farmer or a buttermaker? Processed food affects more than our health. Our identity as a people is at stake. When we can no longer experience the joy of sharing a meal of real food with friends or family, when food becomes nothing more than calories scarfed down in front of the television, then we have lost something. The battle to restore American food culture has already begun in farmers markets and in upscale restaurants across the country. But if it is ever to become a mass movement, I think Jamie Oliver is correct in insisting that it starts in the schools.