August 20, 2020 • 39 mins
Tom Colicchio talks with "Free for All: Fixing School Food in America" author, Dr. Janet Poppendieck about the history and future of school lunch programs.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, this is a Citizen Chef and I'm Tom Calichio.
On this episode, we're exploring the history of food and
education in America. I'm talking to professor and author Dr
Janet Popadick, who's gonna show us how school lunch has changed,
you know, our hasn't across the decades, and we'll think
about what's in store for the future of the lunch
period in our schools. I was I was kind of lucky,
(00:24):
you know, when I was a kid going to school.
I went to a Catholic school and I, uh, you know,
there was a regulation where if you live close enough
to school, you can actually walk home and and have
your lunch at home. And I lived the block away
from school, and so my brothers and I would we
would go home for lunch. And also very fortunate that
my grandmother lived right next door, so we would go
(00:44):
to her house. And my grandmother, um was uh bipolar,
and when she was feeling well, she would just go
to town. You know, we would we would come home
and they would just be a feastly out and you know,
she made an amazing grilled cheese sandwich and I still
or tomato soup that she made everything from scratch, and
she would roast chicken and always some home bake pie
(01:06):
or cake or something. We would walk back to school
kind of full and take our time, and it was
just always a great memory. And you know, also not
only the great food, but we got to share a
lot of time with both grandparents sat during that little
lunch break. And then later on I went to public school,
and I had a great fortune of having my mother
prepare lunch for well not only me, but probably two
(01:27):
thousand other students. My mother managed a school cafeteria in Elizabeth,
New Jersey. You know, it was always great that that
I got to see my mother from time to time.
You know, I'd pop by and you know, see how
she was doing. And the downside was that if I
ever got in trouble, she knew right away. So but
it was it was a little later on, I think
I was in my thirties, maybe my father had passed
(01:48):
away already, and so my mother she started to complain
that that she was, you know, starting to you know,
our feet were hurting her. So I, you know, suggested
that maybe she's thinking about retiring, and you know, she
said thing that that that was just really profound and
and and really stuck with me for for a really
long time. In fact, it was much later on when
I became an advocate, and especially around school lunch, that
(02:09):
I remember this story and and I often repeated it
and if I was talking to members of Congress, are
anyone else trying to get my point across? When I
asked her, you know, to retire, she said, no, I
think I have a few years left. And I'll tell
you why. She said, I know a lot of the
kids who are coming in and out of my lunch
room that this is the only meal they're getting all day.
And I have to fight like hell right now to
(02:31):
make sure that we have fresh fruits and vegetables and
that we're cooking a lot of the food from scratch.
And my supervisor constantly pushing me to go to you know,
all pre prepared meals. We can cut payroll, and we
can you know, maybe cut down on some waste and
stuff like that. And she said, you know, I'm fighting
to make sure that these kids have healthy food. So
I have a few years left. And you know, again,
at the time, I didn't think much about it until
(02:52):
I started to become an activist, and I those words,
I remember those words. I remember what she said. And
and you know, now now we're looking at these cafeteria
workers very differently. I mean, they're on the front lines.
They are the essential workers. And in fact, in New
York and I'm sure many other cities and states and
towns when school, when when the kids went to distance learning,
those cafeteria workers still had to go to work. They
(03:14):
put themselves in danger because they still had a community
to feed. And so I didn't Again, I didn't really
think much about what my mom was doing. And then
it was just there was a job, and and but
now I realized that it was, you know, so much more.
And then more recently, you know, we've seen the stories
and the news of these kids who go through the
lunch line and they they've run out of money on
their cars, and lunch is taken away from them and
(03:36):
they're given a cold cheese sandwich. And you know, I
I talked to my mom about that recently, and she said, yeah,
that that would happen, and I would just let the
kids go through. And she said, you know, sometimes my
counts were off, my supervisors would give me a hard time,
but she said there was no way that I could
take food away, especially when I know these kids are hungry.
I couldn't take food away from these kids, and so
I would just let them go. This is also part
(03:58):
of the reason why I really truly believed that that
school should be free for all. It shouldn't be the
three tiered system that we have. And and I thought
the best person to have this discussion for for our
school lunch episode would be the woman who wrote the
book Free for All, and that is doctor Janet Popendick. Janet,
(04:18):
how you doing. I'm okay, Tom, How are you well?
You know, considering we're We're okay, We're okay. The hardest
thing these days is the distance learning for the kids.
That's that's that's UH challenging. I'm an older one that's
a college student, but he's getting by. UM. So we're
talking with Dr Janet pomit Dick. She is the UH
(04:43):
Senior Faculty Fellow at the Urban Food Policy Institute at
the City University of New York and also the author
of Sweet Charity, Free for All. In breadlines breadlines knee
deep in wheak, it was a slogan during the Great
Depression breadlines need deep in We are surely the handiwork
of foolish men. We we we do know each other. Um.
(05:04):
When my wife Lorie uh in her partner Christie Jacobson
um made the film A Place at the Table, Um,
you were one of the people that we relied on
to sort of explain uh various issues around hunger, especially
the school lunch program. And so I think that's where
I want to start. Um. Uh. You know, most people
(05:25):
who are um uh you know, don't don't sort are
aren't steeped in hunger and hunger related issues, and um
uh in in some ways to to alleviate hunger, they
don't think in terms of school uh, school breakfast, school lunch. Um.
You know the lunch room is one of those things
when you were a kid, you you kind of it
(05:47):
broke up your day. Um. You know you try to
avoid the food fight in most cases. Uh. If you
had access to outside, you you spent as little time
as possible as you can so you can run outside.
But you know, there are thirty million children who use
our school lunch program and a good amount of those kids,
UM that's the nutrition they get for the for the
(06:08):
entire day. So I just want to ask you briefly,
so how did the school lunch program start? Why did
it start, and then we'll talk a little bit about
about the challenges that we see today in school lunch
program So, school lunch programs in the United States date
back to the early years of the twentieth century UM,
when compulsory education began to be the norm UM in
(06:30):
the United States. UM. Many very poor families UM had
relied on the work of their children to help meet
the family budget, and when kids were required to be
in school, UM, poor families found themselves even less able
to meet their food needs. And so schools began providing
(06:53):
meals because kids were coming to school hungry. But this
was not a federal program in any way a perform
This was typically started by a charitable organization or a
voluntary group of some sort, and in large cities rapidly
taken over by municipal government. So there was a network
(07:13):
of these programs throughout the United States at the time
that the Great Depression hit, and again at that point
when children were visibly suffering from hunger and malnutrition and
families were desperate, school lunch programs expanded in a lot
of communities. In New York City, UM, the records show
(07:34):
that the teachers gave money to expand the school lunch
program to be able to include more children. The federal
government got involved because they had agricultural surpluses and needed
a way to dispose of them. UM. In the Great
Depression of the nineties. The farm economy had been in
(07:55):
trouble since the end of World War One. You know,
farmers expanded a bridge and planning during World War One.
They were getting high prices, there was huge demand. At
the end of the war, Congress canceled the war credits
that had enabled our European allies to purchase American farm products,
and the farm market collapsed and it never really recovered.
(08:18):
So when the Roosevelt administration came into power, UM, they
took steps to try to adjust the farm economy UM
to remove surpluses from the market, and then they had
a problem about what to do with them. They were
a public relations problem for the government because so many
people were hungry, and so they began donating for farm surpluses,
(08:41):
purchasing from farmers and donating for relief through the emergency
relief agencies, but also through schools and orphanages and other
institutions that served children. So This was when the federal
government got involved in UH in school lunch, and when
War two came along and some of the Depression era
(09:01):
relief programs were cut back UM, the Department of Agriculture
lobbied for keeping and expanding UM contributions to the school
meal programs because they were very worried that at the
end of the war they would have another post war
slump in agriculture comparable to what had happened after World
War One. So so essentially this wasn't about nutrition. This
(09:24):
was about finding a market for commodities. Well, I think
it was about both. For the schools, it was very
much about nutrition. The products they got from the federal
government enabled them to serve far more nutritious lunches than
they otherwise could have done. How's how's the school lunch program? How?
How has it changed since then? UH? Over the years?
If you can kind of walk through some of the
(09:45):
big changes that you've seen UM in the school launch program,
breakfast and lunch program over the years. The first sort
of big change, I guess you would say, was the
creation of a permanent program in the National School Lunch Act,
and that was lunch only until the mid nineteen sixties. UM.
Think about the sixties, think about the civil rights movement,
(10:06):
calling attention to poverty in America. UM. After Kennedy's assassination, Johnson,
looking for UM a new theme in a sense for
his presidency, declared the War on Poverty. And that was
a point at which people began paying some attention to
what was happening to poor children, and educators argued that
(10:28):
school lunch came too late in the day for a
lot of kids. The morning hours are crucial for learning UM.
And that's when the breakfast program was begun in the
mid sixties as a pilot program. By the early seventies,
it was available to all schools and any school could
operate a school breakfast program that wanted to. Then some
(10:52):
of the energy shifted to state and local advocates who
began to press states for legislation requiring schools within the
state to offer the breakfast program. And I know the
sequence in New York was first they required it in
cities with a population of more than a hundred thousand UM,
(11:12):
and gradually we got to school breakfast in almost all
the schools. So the school lunch program, it is, the
entire program is subsidizes, essentially a three tier program. Can
you can you explain? Okay, sure, I can do that.
And you know, if you want to go back a
little bit, when the School Lunch Act was passed in
ninety there was just sort of a vague requirement that
(11:37):
in order to get the federal contributions, schools had to
agree that they would feed free of charge any children
who were too poor to pay. But there were no
standards as to what constituted being too poor to pay.
And more importantly, there was no separate federal funding for
those UH meals that were served free to children. The
(12:01):
federal government made contributions some money and um commodities from
that were purchased on behalf of schools, and then it
was left up to the schools to figure out how
to cover the cost of the meals that were served free.
And so you ended up with the situation in which
schools in middle class communities, those schools that were built
(12:24):
for the baby booms when we became school age, were
built with cafeterias and kitchens and had enough paying children
to cover the meals for children who were too poor
to pay. But schools in very poor communities in the
first place. Many of them were old inner city schools
(12:46):
that had been built without kitchens and cafeterias, and others
were in rural areas and small towns where nearly everyone
was poor and there weren't enough paying children who could
pay enough to cover the cost of the meals for
children who were too poor to pay. So in the
mid nine sixties National Women's Coalition did a study UM
(13:11):
called Their Daily Bread of who was actually benefiting from
the school lunch program, and they found that only a
very small percentage of the nation's poor children where actually
had access to the program, It was primarily benefiting children
from the middle class UM. So this was the point
at which there began to be pressure for the federal
(13:32):
government to pick up the tab on the free meals.
And in nineteen seventies seventy one it was a whole
rend what nineteen pieces of legislation that addressed school meals.
But within those were legislation to guarantee reimbursement to the
(13:52):
schools for the meals served free UM if they were
served to children who qualified UM and nash a standards
for who qualified. So this is where you began to
get a three tier. As you said, system of free
lunches for children with incomes below a hundred and thirty
percent of the poverty level and reduced price lunches which
(14:16):
were very cheap. UM four children between a hundred and
pent of the poverty line, and at that point it
was a hundred and nine of the poverty line. Later
that got pushed down at the outside of the Reagan
administration two hundred and eight. But a group that we
might think of as near poor um qualified for the
(14:39):
reduced price and then all other children paid a full
price that was determined by their local school system. There
wasn't a national price. So in your book Free for All,
you you you uh make an argument for why school
launch should be free. Uh stigmas part of that, part
of that, But what what other arguments you lay out
(15:00):
in the book for making free school lunch avault to
all thirty million children who use school lunch rooms. Well,
first of all, we have about thirty million children have
been eating the school lunch, but we have fifty five
million children in school um, so part of the question
is okay, so what's happening to the other million children?
(15:22):
And we know that a lot of them are getting
by on a a package of chips and a soft
drink that they bring from home or pick up at
the corner store. That they're eating unhealthy foods in lieu
of a balanced, nutritious meal. UM. We know that a
(15:42):
lot of kids just forego lunch altogether, especially in um
situations where lunch may be scheduled towards the end of
the day or at the last period of the day.
They just get out early. UM. So, so that's one
reason to make it free for all, is so that
it can begin to reach the kids who have UM
(16:04):
not been participating. Secondly, the issue of stigma that I mentioned,
even for the kids who who needed the meal and
wanted it and decided to to eat it, even if
they were cheesed, that's no way to eat lunch. Lunch
in a school should be something that brings us together. Um.
(16:25):
Did you ever go to summer camp? Um? I did
not go to summer camp, but I uh, I did
eat lunch in the cafeteria most days if I wasn't
eating it in my coach's office. UM. But I also
would go to lunch room for another reason, and that
that would be to say hello to my mother who
managed a school cafeteria. Lunch program. Well, the reason I
asked you about lunch at summer camp is because if
(16:48):
for those was who did have the pleasure of summer
camp UM as children, meal time was something that everybody
looked forward to, it was a great kind of unifier.
And school meals could be that way to school meals
can be appointing the day when when people look forward
to seeing their friends and sharing a meal. But that's
(17:10):
not going to happen if people have been kind of
classified as you know, poor enough to eat free, reduced
price and full price. So that's a second kind of
reason for UM that I argue for universal free school meals.
Third is that I think it's our responsibility. The children
are in our care during those hours, we should feed them.
(17:40):
I guess, I guess the other I guess the other
argument one can make is is and this is not
for just feeding them, but for feeding them healthier foods
and mandating healthier foods. We saw under the Obama administration
the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act change some of those
standards in the school lunch program. And even though the
bill passed and it increased uh you know, took sugar
(18:00):
out of the school lunch program, and increased the amount
of whole weeks in the school lunch program, got rid
of vending machines. Uh. You know, in some cases, school
cafeterias are just an extension of uh fast food operations. UM.
And yet the whole time, UM, the president and and
and and Michelle Obama, they were under assault from the
(18:20):
right uh um sort of essentially saying we don't need
a nanny state, we don't need we don't need adults
to tell children how to eat, which I thought was
kind of strange, because I tell my children what they
should eat. Um. If I didn't tell them what they eat,
they eat candy all day and junk food. And in fact,
if I didn't tell them to take a shower at night,
they probably go, you know, weeks without showering either. So
(18:41):
you know, I think we are the adults in the room,
and we do have an obligation to our our children
to too. Yeah, you know, have standards and and and
make sure that they are getting the proper nourishment and
especially for uh, for kids who aren't getting that proper
nourishment at home. UM. So absolutely, And it's also a
matter of I I believe very strongly in the idea
(19:05):
of food education a much broader concept than just nutrition education,
because we have a lot of food miseducation that goes
on in our economy all the time, the advertisement of
of foods to children. So we are as a society
up against a lot of disinformation and misinformation and misleading presentations,
(19:28):
and we need our schools to be able to to
teach children not only what the nutrients are and what
they do for you and why you need them, but
to enjoy um a variety of healthy foods, and school
meal programs are one way to do that. And you
can't really integrate school food with the curriculum unless it's
(19:52):
available to everybody. And so that's another reason that I
think we really need to move to a universal model.
We're making making progress in New York. We are a
little by little. Um. It's funny. I was at a
panel discussion recently and there was a converse Um Collers
from from New York, who um uh started going on
and on about how bad school lunch was in New York,
(20:13):
and I kind of stopped him. I said, actually making
some pretty good progress here. It's not as bad as
you think it is. Um and um, But yeah, New
York is making some progress, but there's still um uh
you know, right, there's definitely a ways to go. But
we hear the news stories all you know, all the
time of kids who uh their money is run out
(20:35):
of their account and they get a cheese sandwich. Then
they get taken that a line and then they're really ostracized. Um.
And then and I wanted to ask you about this
because the reaction to that is there almost seems to
be a charl response where there are are various charities,
are are are people who are looking to do good,
(20:55):
who who think that they should just fund those accounts
for kids and and and then again we have h
a a charity uh response to an issue that we
shouldn't have in the first place. Um. And I know
this is something else that you you often write about
as well, is whether or not we should deal with
some of the these issues around hunger, um, you know,
(21:15):
through charteral response or a governmental response. Well, we could
get to that in a moment. But the the issue
you raise of the so called school lunch shaming, it's
really a fascinating one because in that case, the stigma
is attached not to the kids who get the free
lunch because their accounts don't run out. It's kids in
(21:36):
the reduced price lunch category and the full price lunch category.
And you know those standards of a hundred and thirty
percent of the poverty line, and it's the top for
reduced prices of the poverty line. We're established back when
the poverty line was a little more realistic, a little
(21:57):
closer to reality. The poverty line gets adjusted every year
for the cost of living, but it doesn't ever get
adjusted for changes in the way we live. So if
you think that was actually based on a study that
was done in the mid nineteen fifties that found out
that families spent about a third of their income on food.
(22:17):
So the idea was, if by allocating a third of
your income you couldn't um by a minimally adequate diet,
then you were officially poor. And now families on the
whole spend less than ten percent of their income on food.
So the whole way we spend our income has shifted.
(22:38):
Think about all the things that we need to spend
money on now that didn't exist in the mid nineteen fifties.
Those aren't luxuries, those are necessities. Right now, if you
want to be a participant in the economy if you
want to be able to get a job or you
need those things. So we have a situation in which
a lot of the kids who are not financially eligible
(23:01):
for UM for free or reduced price meals if they live,
especially if they live in high cost of living areas
where rents and mortgages are high, they don't always have
the money for ME for the meals. So another reason
to go with a universal approach is to make sure
(23:21):
those kids get included, but also to get out of
this situation where they're being, as you say, pulled out
of line and given a cheese sandwich or otherwise shamed
UM because their council brand. Yeah, that's that's the first
time I've heard that, because I think the average person,
even I mean I spent little time thinking about these things.
(23:42):
UM always sort of uh went to these are the
poorest of the people who are not UM funding their accounts.
But that's that's not the case because of the poorest
of the students are already getting free lunch. So UM,
that's something I didn't thought of. So we've we've enlarged
the pool of people who get to feel shame associated
with school lunch now and they're not just the kids
(24:03):
seating for free. But anyway, it's a it really is
a counterproductive, educationally, completely unsand situation. One of the things
you always hear from school principles is how much they
value parent engagement, how important it is for parents to
attend parent teacher conferences and come to events at the school.
(24:24):
If your account is in the red and you know
you're going to show up at school and be asked
to pay up, you know you're not coming to parent
teacher conferences or exhibit night or what have you. It's
it deters parents from engagement with the school. So let's
(24:48):
talk a little bit about the charity model and dealing
with hunger. I know, and sweet charity. This is something
that that you wrote about. I TH's a book that's
on my bookshelf. Um uh, why is the charity model
inadequate to deal with with issues of hunger and elnutrition
in America? Well, you know, there's both a kind of
(25:08):
moral philosophical argument and um reality and do the math argument.
When when we think of food charities, most of us
think of food banks and food pantries and soup kitchens,
and certainly Now food banks are are greatly in the news.
But at the height of the Great Recession, UM advocacy
(25:33):
organization called Bread for the World did some calculations and
calculated that if we think of assisted meals meals that
are served at soup kitchens or that are prepared from
groceries that are donated through a food pantry, out of
four meals that are assisted by the federal government through
(25:53):
the SNAP program or through school meals or the WICK program,
one in four assisted meals was assisted by private charity
and the other twenty three were provided through federal programs.
As the reliance on federal programs declined after the recession resolved,
(26:14):
that went down to about one in twelve. We we
provide about twelve times as much assistance through the federal
programs as we do through the private charity. Private charity
makes a difference. UM. If you're in need and you
turn to a food pantry, you in our system, you
definitely needed to be there, but they have had a
(26:37):
disproportionate share of the public consciousness. UM. If we want
to make sure that people eat, we need to increase
the SNAP benefit. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program formerly known
as Food stamps. UM. We need to reduce the barriers
to accessing SNAP that have been created, particularly the wounds
(26:57):
over the last several decades. UM. We need to get
over the idea that work requirements UM are the best
way to enable people to to UM start careers and work,
because work requirements in a program like SNAP don't work.
Very many people who work cannot document in a way
(27:20):
that's acceptable to a welfare office that they are working
twenty hours a week. But we have a a fascination
with the charitable approach. It's kind of romantic, and particularly
when it's tied to food that might otherwise go to waste. UM.
I have been very struck by the accounts in the
(27:44):
press of milk being poured out in the fields UM,
vegetables being plowed under or left unharvested, and the outcry
saying we need to get this food to the food banks,
and certainly infrastructure to do that. Yeah. No, I mean
we're not set up. Federal government has food purchasing infrastructure UM,
(28:06):
and they can expand it, and they have expanded it UM.
But the current Secretary of Agriculture seems to be hung
up on the idea of these prepacked boxes what's now
being called the Farmed a Family program, But it's very
much the harvest box that he proposed a couple of
years ago. Um, and it's not it's not an adequate response.
(28:29):
One of the ways in which SNAP is so much
better than a prepacked boxes that people can reflect the
needs and preferences of their own families. Well that and
there's also a system by which you can engage. Um.
You know what, what's the likelihood of the problem right
now with with milking thrown out and and eggs being broken,
(28:51):
is just the market to disappear if you sell into uh,
you know, a market that that supplies restaurants and hotel
and in college campuses, you've lost that market. And the
and the packers can't really turn on a dime and
start and start, you know, repackaging products for uh, for supermarkets.
Uh right, and right right going through there, there's two
(29:14):
kind of food systems in this country. One is one
goes through supermarkets to feed households and the other one
goes into institutional feeding and and the two really don't
work together very well. And and so um, yeah, yeah,
I've read some of the things that you've been writing
about this and and I've been talking about this as
well and so but but the Snap program again, if
you just fund the Snap program, make it easier. I mean,
(29:36):
one thing I just it makes me crazy is when
you see all these lines of people lining up for
food pantry, people who never thought a million years that
they would need this kind of help. Um, they should
have people in those lines signing them up for Snap. Uh,
there should be outreach there. Um. Most of these people
don't even know there's a Snap program. And I know
how it works and what that does. Again, there's a system,
(29:57):
but we have feeding people. It's a supermarket. You you you
have food, and people go there with money, and the
system works really really well if you have money. And
so right now people just need money. Um, are are
are are Snap? And so we know the system actually works.
But in terms of getting food that is has to
be repacked into the marketplace, that that's a little more difficult.
(30:19):
And I'm concerned that the companies that were rewarded some
of these contracts actually get the food from the farm
to a distribution, you know, into into alternative distributions. A
lot of these companies have absolutely no experience at all
doing this, and there's a catering company or party planning
company that got a thirty six million dollar contract. And
(30:39):
this is what I think happens when you rely on
UH private sector and charity to take care of some
of the society's UH problems. When something big like this happens,
the government is just not prepared to to step in.
There there is no plan, right. You know. The other
thing that strikes me there isn't in the farm bill
a farm to school program UM where communities UH as
(31:01):
certain percentage of the fool that food that's in the
school lunch programs should come from local farmers. But it
always seems to me if there's something missing in between,
because most school lunch programs that the cooks aren't cooking
and processing food anymore, they're just reheating food. UM. In fact,
a lot of school lunch programs, a lot of school cafeterias,
they no longer have cooking equipment, they have reheating equipment. UM.
And so that pieces that pieces missing. And it seems
(31:23):
to me, if we really want to UM, you know,
create a program where where local farmers can can find
a market in their in their local schools, there has
to be a place where that food could be processed,
especially since so much of that food is grown in
the summer when school is really not in session, And
so if there were regional processing facilities that can take
that food minimally processed, that meaning blanch peas and blanch
(31:46):
carrots and and freeze them um, then we actually would
have a true farm to school to school program. Do
you have any any thoughts on that at all? Well,
I think that there are very good reasons for schools
to have the capacity to cook. So if I were
doing a green New Deal infrastructure investment to create new
(32:09):
jobs to replace some of the jobs that will be
permanently gone after the pandemic because of changes in the
way we live, I think building school kitchens and cafeterias
might be um a part of my infrastructure project. There
could certainly be regional processing facilities UM like you just described,
(32:30):
and they would be better, I think, than the current
system of relying heavily on you know, orders through distributors
that can be getting the stuff from anywhere in the
nation and in some cases outside it. UM. But you
lose the educational value of the farm to school connection,
(32:52):
which has been very much part of the farm to
school projects. Where farmers come into the classroom to speak
and kids go on field trips to the farm. Um.
And it was intended as not just a way to
create local markets for farmers, although that's a big motivator,
but also a way to help with the food education
(33:15):
project that I was talking about earlier. Because we are
so divorced from our food supply most of us, we
literally don't know where our food comes from. And in
a future where we had a more ecologically resilient food system,
I think we would have much shorter supply chains and
(33:37):
UM the capacity to value farms and farming and the
contribution of farming two UM to local communities. I think
that is part of what farm to school programs were
hoping to teach. Do you think we'll see a time
when when school is free for all and we have
healthier food? Uh? This food that goes even beyond what
(34:00):
was in the Hungry Healthy Kids Food Act, When we're
seeing the cafeteria is being used not only to feed
our children uh nutritious food, but also used as a classroom.
Do do you actually think that can happen? And um,
do you think that possibly because this this current pandemic
(34:20):
has really exposed the weaknesses in so many systems. Do
you think there's an opportunity UM that one day we'll
see that. So the quick answer is yes, can or could?
I'm not ready to say will or shall um? And
(34:41):
do you describe a cafeteria in the east end of
Long Island where the kids run the the cafeteria. I
visited one UM in Devonport, California. UM Fixing the school
lunch Preparing the lunch was a class that kids signed
up four and it was a very small school, a
(35:03):
hundred kids and there were about twenty five graders and
they were divided into five teams of four for the
five days of the week, and each team planned a
meal and prepared it and served it, and the fourth
graders UM set the tables and picked flowers in the
school garden and decorated them and was absolutely wonderful. UM system.
(35:25):
The Ross School in Long Island was one that I
visited before I before I started to write Free for All,
and it had a profound effect on me. I left thinking, Okay,
this is a private school, but this is what I
want for all our children. And you know, John Dewey
was promoting this at the turn of the twentieth century,
(35:47):
in the early twentieth century having kids tent gardens and
prepare food and and fix the school meals. So it's
absolutely possible. Um. It's an issue of our priorities, UM,
and our vision and the power of the food corporations
who currently benefit. I mean, we have the system we
(36:10):
do now in part because of the organizations, the corporations
that have benefitted from it. UM. So I don't think
we'll get to a new vision without without a struggle. UM.
I'd like to read you something that someone sent me, UM,
and you'll you'll see the relevance in in a moment.
(36:32):
This is an undutted roy from an upcoming book called
The Pandemic is a portal. Nothing could be worse than
a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to
break with the past and imagine their world anew. This
one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway
between one world and the next. We can choose to
(36:53):
walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred,
our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas are dead
rivers and smoky skies behind us, or we can walk
through lightly with little luggage, ready to imagine another world
and ready to fight for it. I was very moved
when someone sent me that, because I think the pandemic
(37:16):
is such a challenge to all of us, and we're
all coping with how to maintain our own functioning and
mental health and the situation of our loved ones. And
we have this sense that the world will be very
different once this is behind us. But what are we
(37:37):
doing now to try to make it the world that
we want it to be? And I think school food
is a a profoundly important arena in which to be imagining,
you know, how we want things to be. On the
other side of that portal, well, I think there are
plenty of people like you who are providing the vision
(37:59):
for what a better world can look like. And hopefully
now we may have a more receptive government and population
to uh and you know, hopefully the ground is a
little more fertile on it was two months ago. Um,
so I guess we'll leave it there. Um. I'm talking
to Dr Janet Popendick. She is a senior faculty fellow
at the Urban Food Policy Institue at the City University
(38:21):
of New York and author of Sweet charity Free for All.
Thank you for for for for joining us, and uh
hopefully we'll we'll we'll find a better way. So thank you,
thanks bye bye again, a very special thanks to Dr
Janet Popendick and always a shout out to a place
(38:42):
at the table. A Citizen Chef is a production of
I Heart Media. Christopher Howcyotis is our executive producer, Jesselyn
Shields is our researcher, and Gabrielle Collins is our producer.
Don't forget to rate us and we'll we'll see you
next time. Thank you,
Hey, this is a Citizen Chef and I'm Tom Calichio.
On this episode, we're exploring the history of food and
education in America. I'm talking to professor and author Dr
Janet Popadick, who's gonna show us how school lunch has changed,
you know, our hasn't across the decades, and we'll think
about what's in store for the future of the lunch
period in our schools. I was I was kind of lucky,
(00:24):
you know, when I was a kid going to school.
I went to a Catholic school and I, uh, you know,
there was a regulation where if you live close enough
to school, you can actually walk home and and have
your lunch at home. And I lived the block away
from school, and so my brothers and I would we
would go home for lunch. And also very fortunate that
my grandmother lived right next door, so we would go
(00:44):
to her house. And my grandmother, um was uh bipolar,
and when she was feeling well, she would just go
to town. You know, we would we would come home
and they would just be a feastly out and you know,
she made an amazing grilled cheese sandwich and I still
or tomato soup that she made everything from scratch, and
she would roast chicken and always some home bake pie
(01:06):
or cake or something. We would walk back to school
kind of full and take our time, and it was
just always a great memory. And you know, also not
only the great food, but we got to share a
lot of time with both grandparents sat during that little
lunch break. And then later on I went to public school,
and I had a great fortune of having my mother
prepare lunch for well not only me, but probably two
(01:27):
thousand other students. My mother managed a school cafeteria in Elizabeth,
New Jersey. You know, it was always great that that
I got to see my mother from time to time.
You know, I'd pop by and you know, see how
she was doing. And the downside was that if I
ever got in trouble, she knew right away. So but
it was it was a little later on, I think
I was in my thirties, maybe my father had passed
(01:48):
away already, and so my mother she started to complain
that that she was, you know, starting to you know,
our feet were hurting her. So I, you know, suggested
that maybe she's thinking about retiring, and you know, she
said thing that that that was just really profound and
and and really stuck with me for for a really
long time. In fact, it was much later on when
I became an advocate, and especially around school lunch, that
(02:09):
I remember this story and and I often repeated it
and if I was talking to members of Congress, are
anyone else trying to get my point across? When I
asked her, you know, to retire, she said, no, I
think I have a few years left. And I'll tell
you why. She said, I know a lot of the
kids who are coming in and out of my lunch
room that this is the only meal they're getting all day.
And I have to fight like hell right now to
(02:31):
make sure that we have fresh fruits and vegetables and
that we're cooking a lot of the food from scratch.
And my supervisor constantly pushing me to go to you know,
all pre prepared meals. We can cut payroll, and we
can you know, maybe cut down on some waste and
stuff like that. And she said, you know, I'm fighting
to make sure that these kids have healthy food. So
I have a few years left. And you know, again,
at the time, I didn't think much about it until
(02:52):
I started to become an activist, and I those words,
I remember those words. I remember what she said. And
and you know, now now we're looking at these cafeteria
workers very differently. I mean, they're on the front lines.
They are the essential workers. And in fact, in New
York and I'm sure many other cities and states and
towns when school, when when the kids went to distance learning,
those cafeteria workers still had to go to work. They
(03:14):
put themselves in danger because they still had a community
to feed. And so I didn't Again, I didn't really
think much about what my mom was doing. And then
it was just there was a job, and and but
now I realized that it was, you know, so much more.
And then more recently, you know, we've seen the stories
and the news of these kids who go through the
lunch line and they they've run out of money on
their cars, and lunch is taken away from them and
(03:36):
they're given a cold cheese sandwich. And you know, I
I talked to my mom about that recently, and she said, yeah,
that that would happen, and I would just let the
kids go through. And she said, you know, sometimes my
counts were off, my supervisors would give me a hard time,
but she said there was no way that I could
take food away, especially when I know these kids are hungry.
I couldn't take food away from these kids, and so
I would just let them go. This is also part
(03:58):
of the reason why I really truly believed that that
school should be free for all. It shouldn't be the
three tiered system that we have. And and I thought
the best person to have this discussion for for our
school lunch episode would be the woman who wrote the
book Free for All, and that is doctor Janet Popendick. Janet,
(04:18):
how you doing. I'm okay, Tom, How are you well?
You know, considering we're We're okay, We're okay. The hardest
thing these days is the distance learning for the kids.
That's that's that's UH challenging. I'm an older one that's
a college student, but he's getting by. UM. So we're
talking with Dr Janet pomit Dick. She is the UH
(04:43):
Senior Faculty Fellow at the Urban Food Policy Institute at
the City University of New York and also the author
of Sweet Charity, Free for All. In breadlines breadlines knee
deep in wheak, it was a slogan during the Great
Depression breadlines need deep in We are surely the handiwork
of foolish men. We we we do know each other. Um.
(05:04):
When my wife Lorie uh in her partner Christie Jacobson
um made the film A Place at the Table, Um,
you were one of the people that we relied on
to sort of explain uh various issues around hunger, especially
the school lunch program. And so I think that's where
I want to start. Um. Uh. You know, most people
(05:25):
who are um uh you know, don't don't sort are
aren't steeped in hunger and hunger related issues, and um
uh in in some ways to to alleviate hunger, they
don't think in terms of school uh, school breakfast, school lunch. Um.
You know the lunch room is one of those things
when you were a kid, you you kind of it
(05:47):
broke up your day. Um. You know you try to
avoid the food fight in most cases. Uh. If you
had access to outside, you you spent as little time
as possible as you can so you can run outside.
But you know, there are thirty million children who use
our school lunch program and a good amount of those kids,
UM that's the nutrition they get for the for the
(06:08):
entire day. So I just want to ask you briefly,
so how did the school lunch program start? Why did
it start, and then we'll talk a little bit about
about the challenges that we see today in school lunch
program So, school lunch programs in the United States date
back to the early years of the twentieth century UM,
when compulsory education began to be the norm UM in
(06:30):
the United States. UM. Many very poor families UM had
relied on the work of their children to help meet
the family budget, and when kids were required to be
in school, UM, poor families found themselves even less able
to meet their food needs. And so schools began providing
(06:53):
meals because kids were coming to school hungry. But this
was not a federal program in any way a perform
This was typically started by a charitable organization or a
voluntary group of some sort, and in large cities rapidly
taken over by municipal government. So there was a network
(07:13):
of these programs throughout the United States at the time
that the Great Depression hit, and again at that point
when children were visibly suffering from hunger and malnutrition and
families were desperate, school lunch programs expanded in a lot
of communities. In New York City, UM, the records show
(07:34):
that the teachers gave money to expand the school lunch
program to be able to include more children. The federal
government got involved because they had agricultural surpluses and needed
a way to dispose of them. UM. In the Great
Depression of the nineties. The farm economy had been in
(07:55):
trouble since the end of World War One. You know,
farmers expanded a bridge and planning during World War One.
They were getting high prices, there was huge demand. At
the end of the war, Congress canceled the war credits
that had enabled our European allies to purchase American farm products,
and the farm market collapsed and it never really recovered.
(08:18):
So when the Roosevelt administration came into power, UM, they
took steps to try to adjust the farm economy UM
to remove surpluses from the market, and then they had
a problem about what to do with them. They were
a public relations problem for the government because so many
people were hungry, and so they began donating for farm surpluses,
(08:41):
purchasing from farmers and donating for relief through the emergency
relief agencies, but also through schools and orphanages and other
institutions that served children. So This was when the federal
government got involved in UH in school lunch, and when
War two came along and some of the Depression era
(09:01):
relief programs were cut back UM, the Department of Agriculture
lobbied for keeping and expanding UM contributions to the school
meal programs because they were very worried that at the
end of the war they would have another post war
slump in agriculture comparable to what had happened after World
War One. So so essentially this wasn't about nutrition. This
(09:24):
was about finding a market for commodities. Well, I think
it was about both. For the schools, it was very
much about nutrition. The products they got from the federal
government enabled them to serve far more nutritious lunches than
they otherwise could have done. How's how's the school lunch program? How?
How has it changed since then? UH? Over the years?
If you can kind of walk through some of the
(09:45):
big changes that you've seen UM in the school launch program,
breakfast and lunch program over the years. The first sort
of big change, I guess you would say, was the
creation of a permanent program in the National School Lunch Act,
and that was lunch only until the mid nineteen sixties. UM.
Think about the sixties, think about the civil rights movement,
(10:06):
calling attention to poverty in America. UM. After Kennedy's assassination, Johnson,
looking for UM a new theme in a sense for
his presidency, declared the War on Poverty. And that was
a point at which people began paying some attention to
what was happening to poor children, and educators argued that
(10:28):
school lunch came too late in the day for a
lot of kids. The morning hours are crucial for learning UM.
And that's when the breakfast program was begun in the
mid sixties as a pilot program. By the early seventies,
it was available to all schools and any school could
operate a school breakfast program that wanted to. Then some
(10:52):
of the energy shifted to state and local advocates who
began to press states for legislation requiring schools within the
state to offer the breakfast program. And I know the
sequence in New York was first they required it in
cities with a population of more than a hundred thousand UM,
(11:12):
and gradually we got to school breakfast in almost all
the schools. So the school lunch program, it is, the
entire program is subsidizes, essentially a three tier program. Can
you can you explain? Okay, sure, I can do that.
And you know, if you want to go back a
little bit, when the School Lunch Act was passed in
ninety there was just sort of a vague requirement that
(11:37):
in order to get the federal contributions, schools had to
agree that they would feed free of charge any children
who were too poor to pay. But there were no
standards as to what constituted being too poor to pay.
And more importantly, there was no separate federal funding for
those UH meals that were served free to children. The
(12:01):
federal government made contributions some money and um commodities from
that were purchased on behalf of schools, and then it
was left up to the schools to figure out how
to cover the cost of the meals that were served free.
And so you ended up with the situation in which
schools in middle class communities, those schools that were built
(12:24):
for the baby booms when we became school age, were
built with cafeterias and kitchens and had enough paying children
to cover the meals for children who were too poor
to pay. But schools in very poor communities in the
first place. Many of them were old inner city schools
(12:46):
that had been built without kitchens and cafeterias, and others
were in rural areas and small towns where nearly everyone
was poor and there weren't enough paying children who could
pay enough to cover the cost of the meals for
children who were too poor to pay. So in the
mid nine sixties National Women's Coalition did a study UM
(13:11):
called Their Daily Bread of who was actually benefiting from
the school lunch program, and they found that only a
very small percentage of the nation's poor children where actually
had access to the program, It was primarily benefiting children
from the middle class UM. So this was the point
at which there began to be pressure for the federal
(13:32):
government to pick up the tab on the free meals.
And in nineteen seventies seventy one it was a whole
rend what nineteen pieces of legislation that addressed school meals.
But within those were legislation to guarantee reimbursement to the
(13:52):
schools for the meals served free UM if they were
served to children who qualified UM and nash a standards
for who qualified. So this is where you began to
get a three tier. As you said, system of free
lunches for children with incomes below a hundred and thirty
percent of the poverty level and reduced price lunches which
(14:16):
were very cheap. UM four children between a hundred and
pent of the poverty line, and at that point it
was a hundred and nine of the poverty line. Later
that got pushed down at the outside of the Reagan
administration two hundred and eight. But a group that we
might think of as near poor um qualified for the
(14:39):
reduced price and then all other children paid a full
price that was determined by their local school system. There
wasn't a national price. So in your book Free for All,
you you you uh make an argument for why school
launch should be free. Uh stigmas part of that, part
of that, But what what other arguments you lay out
(15:00):
in the book for making free school lunch avault to
all thirty million children who use school lunch rooms. Well,
first of all, we have about thirty million children have
been eating the school lunch, but we have fifty five
million children in school um, so part of the question
is okay, so what's happening to the other million children?
(15:22):
And we know that a lot of them are getting
by on a a package of chips and a soft
drink that they bring from home or pick up at
the corner store. That they're eating unhealthy foods in lieu
of a balanced, nutritious meal. UM. We know that a
(15:42):
lot of kids just forego lunch altogether, especially in um
situations where lunch may be scheduled towards the end of
the day or at the last period of the day.
They just get out early. UM. So, so that's one
reason to make it free for all, is so that
it can begin to reach the kids who have UM
(16:04):
not been participating. Secondly, the issue of stigma that I mentioned,
even for the kids who who needed the meal and
wanted it and decided to to eat it, even if
they were cheesed, that's no way to eat lunch. Lunch
in a school should be something that brings us together. Um.
(16:25):
Did you ever go to summer camp? Um? I did
not go to summer camp, but I uh, I did
eat lunch in the cafeteria most days if I wasn't
eating it in my coach's office. UM. But I also
would go to lunch room for another reason, and that
that would be to say hello to my mother who
managed a school cafeteria. Lunch program. Well, the reason I
asked you about lunch at summer camp is because if
(16:48):
for those was who did have the pleasure of summer
camp UM as children, meal time was something that everybody
looked forward to, it was a great kind of unifier.
And school meals could be that way to school meals
can be appointing the day when when people look forward
to seeing their friends and sharing a meal. But that's
(17:10):
not going to happen if people have been kind of
classified as you know, poor enough to eat free, reduced
price and full price. So that's a second kind of
reason for UM that I argue for universal free school meals.
Third is that I think it's our responsibility. The children
are in our care during those hours, we should feed them.
(17:40):
I guess, I guess the other I guess the other
argument one can make is is and this is not
for just feeding them, but for feeding them healthier foods
and mandating healthier foods. We saw under the Obama administration
the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act change some of those
standards in the school lunch program. And even though the
bill passed and it increased uh you know, took sugar
(18:00):
out of the school lunch program, and increased the amount
of whole weeks in the school lunch program, got rid
of vending machines. Uh. You know, in some cases, school
cafeterias are just an extension of uh fast food operations. UM.
And yet the whole time, UM, the president and and
and and Michelle Obama, they were under assault from the
(18:20):
right uh um sort of essentially saying we don't need
a nanny state, we don't need we don't need adults
to tell children how to eat, which I thought was
kind of strange, because I tell my children what they
should eat. Um. If I didn't tell them what they eat,
they eat candy all day and junk food. And in fact,
if I didn't tell them to take a shower at night,
they probably go, you know, weeks without showering either. So
(18:41):
you know, I think we are the adults in the room,
and we do have an obligation to our our children
to too. Yeah, you know, have standards and and and
make sure that they are getting the proper nourishment and
especially for uh, for kids who aren't getting that proper
nourishment at home. UM. So absolutely, And it's also a
matter of I I believe very strongly in the idea
(19:05):
of food education a much broader concept than just nutrition education,
because we have a lot of food miseducation that goes
on in our economy all the time, the advertisement of
of foods to children. So we are as a society
up against a lot of disinformation and misinformation and misleading presentations,
(19:28):
and we need our schools to be able to to
teach children not only what the nutrients are and what
they do for you and why you need them, but
to enjoy um a variety of healthy foods, and school
meal programs are one way to do that. And you
can't really integrate school food with the curriculum unless it's
(19:52):
available to everybody. And so that's another reason that I
think we really need to move to a universal model.
We're making making progress in New York. We are a
little by little. Um. It's funny. I was at a
panel discussion recently and there was a converse Um Collers
from from New York, who um uh started going on
and on about how bad school lunch was in New York,
(20:13):
and I kind of stopped him. I said, actually making
some pretty good progress here. It's not as bad as
you think it is. Um and um, But yeah, New
York is making some progress, but there's still um uh
you know, right, there's definitely a ways to go. But
we hear the news stories all you know, all the
time of kids who uh their money is run out
(20:35):
of their account and they get a cheese sandwich. Then
they get taken that a line and then they're really ostracized. Um.
And then and I wanted to ask you about this
because the reaction to that is there almost seems to
be a charl response where there are are various charities,
are are are people who are looking to do good,
(20:55):
who who think that they should just fund those accounts
for kids and and and then again we have h
a a charity uh response to an issue that we
shouldn't have in the first place. Um. And I know
this is something else that you you often write about
as well, is whether or not we should deal with
some of the these issues around hunger, um, you know,
(21:15):
through charteral response or a governmental response. Well, we could
get to that in a moment. But the the issue
you raise of the so called school lunch shaming, it's
really a fascinating one because in that case, the stigma
is attached not to the kids who get the free
lunch because their accounts don't run out. It's kids in
(21:36):
the reduced price lunch category and the full price lunch category.
And you know those standards of a hundred and thirty
percent of the poverty line, and it's the top for
reduced prices of the poverty line. We're established back when
the poverty line was a little more realistic, a little
(21:57):
closer to reality. The poverty line gets adjusted every year
for the cost of living, but it doesn't ever get
adjusted for changes in the way we live. So if
you think that was actually based on a study that
was done in the mid nineteen fifties that found out
that families spent about a third of their income on food.
(22:17):
So the idea was, if by allocating a third of
your income you couldn't um by a minimally adequate diet,
then you were officially poor. And now families on the
whole spend less than ten percent of their income on food.
So the whole way we spend our income has shifted.
(22:38):
Think about all the things that we need to spend
money on now that didn't exist in the mid nineteen fifties.
Those aren't luxuries, those are necessities. Right now, if you
want to be a participant in the economy if you
want to be able to get a job or you
need those things. So we have a situation in which
a lot of the kids who are not financially eligible
(23:01):
for UM for free or reduced price meals if they live,
especially if they live in high cost of living areas
where rents and mortgages are high, they don't always have
the money for ME for the meals. So another reason
to go with a universal approach is to make sure
(23:21):
those kids get included, but also to get out of
this situation where they're being, as you say, pulled out
of line and given a cheese sandwich or otherwise shamed
UM because their council brand. Yeah, that's that's the first
time I've heard that, because I think the average person,
even I mean I spent little time thinking about these things.
(23:42):
UM always sort of uh went to these are the
poorest of the people who are not UM funding their accounts.
But that's that's not the case because of the poorest
of the students are already getting free lunch. So UM,
that's something I didn't thought of. So we've we've enlarged
the pool of people who get to feel shame associated
with school lunch now and they're not just the kids
(24:03):
seating for free. But anyway, it's a it really is
a counterproductive, educationally, completely unsand situation. One of the things
you always hear from school principles is how much they
value parent engagement, how important it is for parents to
attend parent teacher conferences and come to events at the school.
(24:24):
If your account is in the red and you know
you're going to show up at school and be asked
to pay up, you know you're not coming to parent
teacher conferences or exhibit night or what have you. It's
it deters parents from engagement with the school. So let's
(24:48):
talk a little bit about the charity model and dealing
with hunger. I know, and sweet charity. This is something
that that you wrote about. I TH's a book that's
on my bookshelf. Um uh, why is the charity model
inadequate to deal with with issues of hunger and elnutrition
in America? Well, you know, there's both a kind of
(25:08):
moral philosophical argument and um reality and do the math argument.
When when we think of food charities, most of us
think of food banks and food pantries and soup kitchens,
and certainly Now food banks are are greatly in the news.
But at the height of the Great Recession, UM advocacy
(25:33):
organization called Bread for the World did some calculations and
calculated that if we think of assisted meals meals that
are served at soup kitchens or that are prepared from
groceries that are donated through a food pantry, out of
four meals that are assisted by the federal government through
(25:53):
the SNAP program or through school meals or the WICK program,
one in four assisted meals was assisted by private charity
and the other twenty three were provided through federal programs.
As the reliance on federal programs declined after the recession resolved,
(26:14):
that went down to about one in twelve. We we
provide about twelve times as much assistance through the federal
programs as we do through the private charity. Private charity
makes a difference. UM. If you're in need and you
turn to a food pantry, you in our system, you
definitely needed to be there, but they have had a
(26:37):
disproportionate share of the public consciousness. UM. If we want
to make sure that people eat, we need to increase
the SNAP benefit. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program formerly known
as Food stamps. UM. We need to reduce the barriers
to accessing SNAP that have been created, particularly the wounds
(26:57):
over the last several decades. UM. We need to get
over the idea that work requirements UM are the best
way to enable people to to UM start careers and work,
because work requirements in a program like SNAP don't work.
Very many people who work cannot document in a way
(27:20):
that's acceptable to a welfare office that they are working
twenty hours a week. But we have a a fascination
with the charitable approach. It's kind of romantic, and particularly
when it's tied to food that might otherwise go to waste. UM.
I have been very struck by the accounts in the
(27:44):
press of milk being poured out in the fields UM,
vegetables being plowed under or left unharvested, and the outcry
saying we need to get this food to the food banks,
and certainly infrastructure to do that. Yeah. No, I mean
we're not set up. Federal government has food purchasing infrastructure UM,
(28:06):
and they can expand it, and they have expanded it UM.
But the current Secretary of Agriculture seems to be hung
up on the idea of these prepacked boxes what's now
being called the Farmed a Family program, But it's very
much the harvest box that he proposed a couple of
years ago. Um, and it's not it's not an adequate response.
(28:29):
One of the ways in which SNAP is so much
better than a prepacked boxes that people can reflect the
needs and preferences of their own families. Well that and
there's also a system by which you can engage. Um.
You know what, what's the likelihood of the problem right
now with with milking thrown out and and eggs being broken,
(28:51):
is just the market to disappear if you sell into uh,
you know, a market that that supplies restaurants and hotel
and in college campuses, you've lost that market. And the
and the packers can't really turn on a dime and
start and start, you know, repackaging products for uh, for supermarkets.
Uh right, and right right going through there, there's two
(29:14):
kind of food systems in this country. One is one
goes through supermarkets to feed households and the other one
goes into institutional feeding and and the two really don't
work together very well. And and so um, yeah, yeah,
I've read some of the things that you've been writing
about this and and I've been talking about this as
well and so but but the Snap program again, if
you just fund the Snap program, make it easier. I mean,
(29:36):
one thing I just it makes me crazy is when
you see all these lines of people lining up for
food pantry, people who never thought a million years that
they would need this kind of help. Um, they should
have people in those lines signing them up for Snap. Uh,
there should be outreach there. Um. Most of these people
don't even know there's a Snap program. And I know
how it works and what that does. Again, there's a system,
(29:57):
but we have feeding people. It's a supermarket. You you you
have food, and people go there with money, and the
system works really really well if you have money. And
so right now people just need money. Um, are are
are are Snap? And so we know the system actually works.
But in terms of getting food that is has to
be repacked into the marketplace, that that's a little more difficult.
(30:19):
And I'm concerned that the companies that were rewarded some
of these contracts actually get the food from the farm
to a distribution, you know, into into alternative distributions. A
lot of these companies have absolutely no experience at all
doing this, and there's a catering company or party planning
company that got a thirty six million dollar contract. And
(30:39):
this is what I think happens when you rely on
UH private sector and charity to take care of some
of the society's UH problems. When something big like this happens,
the government is just not prepared to to step in.
There there is no plan, right. You know. The other
thing that strikes me there isn't in the farm bill
a farm to school program UM where communities UH as
(31:01):
certain percentage of the fool that food that's in the
school lunch programs should come from local farmers. But it
always seems to me if there's something missing in between,
because most school lunch programs that the cooks aren't cooking
and processing food anymore, they're just reheating food. UM. In fact,
a lot of school lunch programs, a lot of school cafeterias,
they no longer have cooking equipment, they have reheating equipment. UM.
And so that pieces that pieces missing. And it seems
(31:23):
to me, if we really want to UM, you know,
create a program where where local farmers can can find
a market in their in their local schools, there has
to be a place where that food could be processed,
especially since so much of that food is grown in
the summer when school is really not in session, And
so if there were regional processing facilities that can take
that food minimally processed, that meaning blanch peas and blanch
(31:46):
carrots and and freeze them um, then we actually would
have a true farm to school to school program. Do
you have any any thoughts on that at all? Well,
I think that there are very good reasons for schools
to have the capacity to cook. So if I were
doing a green New Deal infrastructure investment to create new
(32:09):
jobs to replace some of the jobs that will be
permanently gone after the pandemic because of changes in the
way we live, I think building school kitchens and cafeterias
might be um a part of my infrastructure project. There
could certainly be regional processing facilities UM like you just described,
(32:30):
and they would be better, I think, than the current
system of relying heavily on you know, orders through distributors
that can be getting the stuff from anywhere in the
nation and in some cases outside it. UM. But you
lose the educational value of the farm to school connection,
(32:52):
which has been very much part of the farm to
school projects. Where farmers come into the classroom to speak
and kids go on field trips to the farm. Um.
And it was intended as not just a way to
create local markets for farmers, although that's a big motivator,
but also a way to help with the food education
(33:15):
project that I was talking about earlier. Because we are
so divorced from our food supply most of us, we
literally don't know where our food comes from. And in
a future where we had a more ecologically resilient food system,
I think we would have much shorter supply chains and
(33:37):
UM the capacity to value farms and farming and the
contribution of farming two UM to local communities. I think
that is part of what farm to school programs were
hoping to teach. Do you think we'll see a time
when when school is free for all and we have
healthier food? Uh? This food that goes even beyond what
(34:00):
was in the Hungry Healthy Kids Food Act, When we're
seeing the cafeteria is being used not only to feed
our children uh nutritious food, but also used as a classroom.
Do do you actually think that can happen? And um,
do you think that possibly because this this current pandemic
(34:20):
has really exposed the weaknesses in so many systems. Do
you think there's an opportunity UM that one day we'll
see that. So the quick answer is yes, can or could?
I'm not ready to say will or shall um? And
(34:41):
do you describe a cafeteria in the east end of
Long Island where the kids run the the cafeteria. I
visited one UM in Devonport, California. UM Fixing the school
lunch Preparing the lunch was a class that kids signed
up four and it was a very small school, a
(35:03):
hundred kids and there were about twenty five graders and
they were divided into five teams of four for the
five days of the week, and each team planned a
meal and prepared it and served it, and the fourth
graders UM set the tables and picked flowers in the
school garden and decorated them and was absolutely wonderful. UM system.
(35:25):
The Ross School in Long Island was one that I
visited before I before I started to write Free for All,
and it had a profound effect on me. I left thinking, Okay,
this is a private school, but this is what I
want for all our children. And you know, John Dewey
was promoting this at the turn of the twentieth century,
(35:47):
in the early twentieth century having kids tent gardens and
prepare food and and fix the school meals. So it's
absolutely possible. Um. It's an issue of our priorities, UM,
and our vision and the power of the food corporations
who currently benefit. I mean, we have the system we
(36:10):
do now in part because of the organizations, the corporations
that have benefitted from it. UM. So I don't think
we'll get to a new vision without without a struggle. UM.
I'd like to read you something that someone sent me, UM,
and you'll you'll see the relevance in in a moment.
(36:32):
This is an undutted roy from an upcoming book called
The Pandemic is a portal. Nothing could be worse than
a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to
break with the past and imagine their world anew. This
one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway
between one world and the next. We can choose to
(36:53):
walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred,
our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas are dead
rivers and smoky skies behind us, or we can walk
through lightly with little luggage, ready to imagine another world
and ready to fight for it. I was very moved
when someone sent me that, because I think the pandemic
(37:16):
is such a challenge to all of us, and we're
all coping with how to maintain our own functioning and
mental health and the situation of our loved ones. And
we have this sense that the world will be very
different once this is behind us. But what are we
(37:37):
doing now to try to make it the world that
we want it to be? And I think school food
is a a profoundly important arena in which to be imagining,
you know, how we want things to be. On the
other side of that portal, well, I think there are
plenty of people like you who are providing the vision
(37:59):
for what a better world can look like. And hopefully
now we may have a more receptive government and population
to uh and you know, hopefully the ground is a
little more fertile on it was two months ago. Um,
so I guess we'll leave it there. Um. I'm talking
to Dr Janet Popendick. She is a senior faculty fellow
at the Urban Food Policy Institue at the City University
(38:21):
of New York and author of Sweet charity Free for All.
Thank you for for for for joining us, and uh
hopefully we'll we'll we'll find a better way. So thank you,
thanks bye bye again, a very special thanks to Dr
Janet Popendick and always a shout out to a place
(38:42):
at the table. A Citizen Chef is a production of
I Heart Media. Christopher Howcyotis is our executive producer, Jesselyn
Shields is our researcher, and Gabrielle Collins is our producer.
Don't forget to rate us and we'll we'll see you
next time. Thank you,
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