Reorganizing School Lunch for a More Just and Sustainable Food System in the US

ABSTRACT

Public school lunch programs in the United States are contested political terrains shaped by government agencies, civil society activists, and agri-food companies. The particular organization of these programs has consequences for public health, social justice, and ecological sustainability. This contribution draws on political economy, critical food studies, and feminist economics to analyze the US National School Lunch Program, one of the world's oldest and largest government-sponsored school lunch programs. It makes visible the social and environmental costs of the “heat-and-serve” economy, where widely used metrics consider only the speed and volume of service as productive work. This study demonstrates that such a narrow understanding of the labor of lunch devalues care and undercuts the potential for school food provisioning to promote ecological and feminist goals. Further, it proposes a “high road” alternative and outlines an agenda for reorganizing school food provisioning to maximize care in all its dimensions.

KEYWORDS:

• Social reproduction
• care labor
• foodservice
• school food
• sustainable food systems
• social provisioning

JEL Codes:

• B54
• H4
• I3

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank all the foodservice professionals engaged in the work of feeding children at school, as well as the many activists who are fighting for a just and sustainable food system. In addition, we would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the participants of the workshop on Sustainability, Ecology, and Care hosted by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and the International Association for Feminist Economics for their helpful comments. Any remaining errors or oversights are our own. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, grant number 1256925.

Notes

1 Despite a federal mandate to feed all needy children free of charge, few African American children in racially segregated southern states and northern cities received any benefit from the federal allocations until the victories of the civil rights movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Levine 2008).

2 In the early days of the Trump administration, US Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue signed legislation rolling back key standards of the HHFKA that were particularly onerous for processed food manufacturers (that is, the whole grain requirement and sodium restrictions; USDA 2017a).

3 This includes both small regional firms and multinational corporations like Sodexo, Compass, and Aramark. These companies often hold contracts with other institutional purchasers (such as universities, hospitals, airports, and prisons).

4 Like other care providers, unionized school foodservice workers are not likely to exercise their bargaining power because withdrawing their services (that is, going on strike) puts the very people they care for at risk (Folbre 2001).

5 Notably, body burdens are higher for populations in the US compared to those in Europe and Asia (Hites 2004).

6 In addition, a mismatch in agricultural seasonality (most schools are not in session during the peak growing months of June–August) and issues of scale are also barriers that make it difficult for schools to shift their procurement to local farms.

7 According to a nationally representative survey, 88 percent of US adults support government-funded FTS programs (Reincke 2015).

8 The USDA awards up to US$5 million annually in competitive grants to support FTS programs (USDA 2016b), but the total NSLP budget exceeds US$12 billion.

9 Likewise, Saint Paul, Minnesota Public Schools and Chicago, Illinois Public Schools have also begun to prepare some recipes from scratch, which has resulted in greater autonomy to purchase local products and to use collective purchasing power to drive reforms further up the food chain (Stanley, Colasanti, and Conner 2012).

10 Notably, scholars have argued that the UN's embrace of public–private food partnerships allowed the corporate food regime to undermine public health in the Global South (Monteiro and Cannon 2012).

11 Empowering both the givers and receivers of paid care is a strategy for increasing the quality of jobs and services (Folbre 2006; Nakano Glenn 2012).

12 There is precedent for such arrangements within the history of the NSLP (see for instance the September 1971 issue of the School Foodservice Journal for a profile of elderly feeding programs administered by school foodservice departments).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Gaddis

Jennifer Gaddis is Assistant Professor in Civil Society and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research, teaching, and outreach focus on transitions to socially just and ecologically sustainable systems of production and consumption. The bulk of her work has been within the context of food systems, specifically school food programs and community-based food justice initiatives. She earned a PhD in Environmental Sociology from Yale University and a BS in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Amy K. Coplen

Amy K. Coplen is a PhD candidate in Urban Studies at Portland State University, working at the intersection of food systems, labor, and social justice to explore how race, class, and gender shape our urban environments. She earned a BS in Chemistry and a BA in American Studies from the University of New Mexico, and a Masters of Environmental Management from Yale University.