Celebrating the History of the School Lunch Program, Part 3

Celebrating the History of the School Lunch Program

Part 3

By Antonia Demas, Ph.D.

“We’ve Known since the 1940s that Kids Don’t Do Well in School When They’re Hungry”
[1] William Lambers October 8, 2018

Listen to Children

“The child’s own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting-point for all education.” -John Dewey

“I need to knead!” Ariel Demas, 1979

The national school lunch program (NSLP) has a long and often complicated history. It is the largest “feeding” program in the world and has taken years of political lobbying to make it a federal law which finally happened in 1946. The primary purpose is dual – to help farmers and feed children. How this is done often involves controversy. While the intention to achieve these goals is honorable, the time has come to create a new model and take an honest look at how we can improve, become more sustainable, and not put profits ahead of child welfare.

Currently, 77 % of young people who try to enlist in the military, are rejected due to malnutrition.[2] This malnutrition is the opposite of the reason the school lunch program began – to provide meals during the school day for hungry children. A third of students at that time were malnourished due to lack of food and currently over 3/4 of our students who try to enlist are rejected because they are overfed to the point of obesity or other issues related to excess calories. The implications of this trend present troubling issues for our national security.

While the school lunch program has succeeded in filling the bellies of kids, the foods fed to them have led to an epidemic of diet-related diseases such as diabetes and obesity. The problem today is not that these kids are “half-starved” from not enough food to eat during the school day but rather they are over fed with calorie laden foods often lacking in nutrients and high in fat content. The first revision of the school lunch program after a series of public hearing was to lower the fat content from 40% to 30%, a figure many thought was still too high. USDA held hearings to get a consensus from experts to see if this change was warranted.

When William Clinton was elected to replace George Bush as President there came a change in administration of the school lunch program nationally. Ellen Haas, founder and former director of the consumer action group, Public Voice, was appointed as Assistant Secretary of Agriculture in charge of Food and Consumer Affairs which oversees the school lunch program. Haas’s organization, Public Voice had a long record of being critical of the school lunch program because of the program’s high fat content and low nutrient density.

USDA Nutrition Hearings on School Lunch

Since the USDA had not been successful in meeting their own recommendations for implementing the dietary guidelines for school lunch (USDA: 1994), Haas held a series of hearings in four different regions of the country to listen to more than 350 experts and interested citizens. She also received written testimony from more than 2,000 people. Based upon the comments received, Haas proposed to change the laws regulating school lunch, laws that have been on the books since 1946 when the School Lunch Act was first initiated. Haas and the Secretary of Agriculture announced their School Meals Initiative for Healthy Children in June 1994. This initiative stated that all American public schools had until 1998 to conform to the dietary guidelines in their school lunch programs. It required among other things that the average fat content must be 30% or fewer calories from fat over the course of a week. This announcement created quite a bit of controversy; the Food Service Association, and the meat and dairy industries were upset over the proposed change. However, groups such as Public Voice that have long been critical of the nutritional quality of school meals, were impatient to see the changes in place.

The same initiative proposed new program regulations for the School Lunch Program. For the first time in 48 years, the School Lunch Program faced a major legal revision. The USDA’s School Meal Initiative for Healthy Kids was developed, after a year of input from the public, through hearings, meetings, and roundtable discussions, to determine ways to improve the school lunch program across the nation. The proposals include:

*By the 1998 school year, schools be required to serve meals that meet federal Dietary Guidelines: no more than 30 percent of calories from fat, and no more than 10 percent from saturated fat.

*Introduce a new, flexible, easy-to-use system of menu planning that will ensure that every school meal delivers the vitamins, minerals, and food energy that children need.

*Provide technical help to school food service staffs so they can meet the new standards.

*Teach children about nutrition so that they will choose foods that are good for them.

*Streamline the administration of school meals so that local school food service staffs can concentrate less on bureaucratic red tape and more on providing good food for their students (USDA: Sept. 1994).

This proposal was first published for public comment in June 1994 and became a federal mandate for all schools participating in the NSLP.

Unfortunately, few schools have been able to meet this mandate in terms of reducing the fat content below 30%, a figure many nutritionists feel is still too high. At the time of the proposed legislation, school meals nationally averaged 40% fat calories. Menus generally have changed little, serving the same meat-centered entrees. Rather than cut way back on animal foods, which are generally high in fat, and contain no fiber, the USDA has proposed that food service workers place cooked hamburger meat under the faucet to “wash away some of the fat calories.” This approach does not sufficiently reduce the fat and compromises taste. Meat at the center of the plate is no longer a viable choice, based upon contemporary knowledge about diet and its relationship to chronic disease as well as its contribution to climate change. There has not been an effective way for the USDA to monitor the amount of fat that is currently in school meals or to deal with some of the issues involved in producing it.

The mandate for nutrition education has not been effective in getting children to choose healthier foods nor has it been successfully put in place in a meaningful way. Most schools do not have a cohesive nutrition education curriculum in place. Materials provided for free by the meat and dairy industries are the most widely used “nutrition” education strategies in the classroom. These materials usually contain an inherent bias.

The USDA cautiously suggested that yogurt and soy might be acceptable protein foods. Legumes are a commodity food that is naturally low in fat and high in nutrients including protein. Legumes were not initially mentioned as an acceptable protein but are currently accepted as a plant – based commodity food that meets the protein requirement.

Schools have allowed a most disturbing trend to occur by outsourcing some of the meals with outside companies like Sodexho, so the meals aren’t cooked onsite and must be delivered to schools. They have also sometimes allowed franchises such as Pizza Hut[3] to deliver meals to schools. Child health is often compromised when this occurs, and it is short-sighted in terms of costs. The resulting health care costs down the road will be enormous. In addition, schools are allowing soda companies to put their vending machine in schools in exchange for funds for athletics. Exclusive contracts are made between the soda company and the school so that soda is readily available to the students.

The Eating Atmosphere of the School

Very little, if any attention in most schools has been given to the eating environment of the school. The cafeteria in most schools is a large room with long rectangular tables and hard seats. The walls are usually painted cinderblocks. This is typically the first opportunity for students to talk to each other as they eat their lunch, and they are usually allowed 15 minutes as the next class is herded through. The kids are anxious to go outside for recess which may or may not come before eating lunch. We need to look at the schedule to see which comes first – eating lunch or going outdoors to play on the playground.

There are monitors in the cafeteria, some with bullhorns, who circulate and try to keep the noise level down, usually without much success. When I did my Ph.D. research, I brought a decibel meter into the cafeteria and the noise level was equivalent to heavy traffic at rush hour. NY State currently has a law posted when entering a new town that the decibel level of each town must be 90 decibels or below. Clearly most school cafeterias are in violation of this law, and there are no consequences for not complying, however we need to find solutions for a calmer more civilized eating environment.

NY State Law

School Cafeteria

The walls of most school cafeterias are drab, and I view this as a missed opportunity for educating visual learners. In Baltimore we worked with an artist to design murals with the students using their artwork which supported the lesson from Food is Elementary about vitamins using the vital colors of whole foods. This is a fun way for students to remember the lesson, eat for color, and take pride in knowing this is something they helped create.

Food Studies Institute (FSI) has used food and art projects to demonstrate food and agricultural themes so visual learners will have their learning styles celebrated. FSI has developed different creative artistic venues to reinforce the abilities of visual learners and to collaborate with artists in the community. Below are a few examples.

Spoon Popkin mural in the making — Artist Spoon Popkin works with students to design and paint vitamin mural

Beans from around the world

Meals from around the world mural by Spoon Popkin, Baltimore

Dried bean mosaic, Kentucky

Students in NYC (P.S. 61 – 1999), beginning to paint a post in the school cafeteria of the Three Sisters – Corn, Beans, and Squash from Native American culture. Each of the 4 panels represent a different stage of development from planting the seed to the harvest–see other photos of the completed project which includes life under the soil and feeding the soil with organic materials.

Students working with artist Dan Burgevin to paint Native Foods in their Native Lands – a map of the world that shows where foods are indigenous – P.S. 61, NYC – 1999. Students learn geography among other issues by painting pictures of foods and their countries of origin.

R001-008 — Traditional agriculture around the world

Traditional agriculture from around the world – NYC PS 61 1999

Since the school lunch program became an Act of Congress in 1946, with its dual purpose of feeding kids and supporting farmers, it is important to understand the role agriculture has played and consider innovative strategies for the future.

Commodity foods

Commodity foods, also known as surplus foods, are available to schools for free to help defray the cost of school meals and to assist farmers by purchasing their surplus goods. Typically, these foods such as cheese and animal products are processed, but they change from year to year. When I did my Ph.D. research, I created recipes around the atypical unprocessed commodity foods such as bulgur wheat and legumes. The argument was always “the kids won’t eat the healthy commodity foods” which is true if they are not educated about them in a meaningful and sensory manner.

I deliberately used these foods in my research and recipes to show that it was an educational problem, and the kids were being sensible to reject foods that they knew little or nothing about. I put the unusual healthy foods in the Food is Elementary curriculum, related the themes to other cultures and the academic disciplines, and made the activities enjoyable. The students in the intervention group (half of the school population of approximately 600 students) ate up to 20 times as much of the unfamiliar food as the control group who rarely ate any of the new recipe. All students were served the new food at lunch, and volunteers weighed it before and after students (including control students) went through the lunch line, so we know exactly how much of the food the students ate and were able to compare the two groups – intervention and control.

Most of the commodity foods are produced on large farms and sent to a regional distribution site after processing. I propose that we subsidize the small organic farmer who lives in the area where the school is located to cut transportation and other costs and make if affordable for schools to get more fresh agricultural products on their menu.

The USDA publishes a list of commodity foods available each year subject to change. For the 2023 – 2024 school year please check out their website:

https://www.ncagr.gov/fooddist/documents/PAL_REQUEST_FOR-USDA-FOODS-2023-2024-WEB.pdf

With climate change spiraling out of control, we need to take a serious look at the role of animal foods’ Most people have been unaware of the contribution animal agriculture has played in terms of climate change. One of the most significant actions people can take to mitigate climate change is to quit eating meat or use it primarily as a condiment.

In a recently published study, 2022, “Replacing animal agriculture and shifting to a plant-based diet could drastically curb greenhouse gas emissions” the authors stated: “Phasing out animal agriculture represents “our best and most immediate chance to reverse the trajectory of climate change,” according to a new model developed by scientists from Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley. “If animal agriculture were phased out over 15 years and all other greenhouse-gas emissions were to continue unabated, the phase-out would create a 30-year pause in net greenhouse gas emissions and offset almost 70 percent of the heating effect of those emissions through the end of the century.”[4] The most immediate and significant change the average person can do to mitigate climate change is to quit eating meat, at least for most meals.

Climate Change

Dr. David Pimentel, the brilliant late ecologist from Cornell, used fossil fuel consumption for producing food in terms of the real costs to the environment He figured out the calories of energy required to grow and transport food and compared this to the calories of energy one received after eating the food that was dependent on fossil fuels to produce. As a stunning example, he used iceberg lettuce as an example of our false sense of what the subsidies do to deflate the actual costs of food production.

For example, iceberg lettuce is 95% water and if one eats it outside of its growing area (usually CA) and purchases it in winter in the northeast, it takes approximately 4,140 calories of fossil fuel per head to transport it from the west coast to the east coast, and another 750 calories of fossil fuel to irrigate each head. If one were to eat the entire head of iceberg lettuce, the total number of food calories consumed is 110 so one is primarily eating water and fiber. When one looks at additional uses of fossil fuels to produce a head of iceberg lettuce such as soil preparation, planting, harvesting, washing, packaging, and preparing to put it on a refrigerated truck to transport it to another refrigerated space for sale, the cost per head would be prohibitive. The consumer rarely thinks about these issues because iceberg lettuce is currently inexpensive to purchase because of the subsidies but all of that is starting to change at a rapid rate as we recognize the costs to our environment.

Pimentel Example:

Iceberg Lettuce – 95% water

95% water (USDA)
110 kcal of food energy (USDA)
750 kcal of fossil energy to produce using irrigation
4,140 kcal of fuel per head to transport from CA to NY (Pimentel)

The average food has travelled 1,500 miles before it reaches our table.

Reducing energy inputs in the US Food System
Pimentel et al,

Does it make sense to use all this fossil fuel to transport a product that is 95% water? Because of subsidies we get a false sense of the true costs of food production. Nevertheless, plant-based foods generally require far fewer fossil fuel and other resources than animal foods. With interest in eating locally and developing school gardens, on the rise any people can grow their own produce or preserve it like our relatives from the past often did.

Our dietary contributions to Climate Change and the imbalance in resources different foods require is becoming more dramatic all over the world and is real. Our lack of attention to our wastefulness in the foods we eat if we are not primarily plant-based, and the resources animal-based foods consume is making it worse. We should be eating a primarily plant-based diet not only for our health but also for the health of the planet. For example:

Water in US Food Production

Plant vs. Animal Protein
1 kg of animal protein requires
100 times
more water to produce than 1 kg of plant protein

Animal water requirements include water for grain, hay, foraging, and drinking

World Consumption Patterns
2 Billion people live on meat-based diet
4 Billion people live on plant-based diet

Fossil energy for Animal Protein Production:
25 kcal energy: 1 kcal protein

Fossil energy for Plant Protein Production
2.2 kcal energy: 1 kcal protein

Fossil fuel use for animal protein production is approximately 11 times greater (Pimintel & Pimentel)

US Livestock Feeding

US livestock consume 7 times fore grain than US human population

Grains consumed by US livestock could feed 840 million people who followed a plant based diet (Pimentel & Pimentel, 2003)

>E Coli in Corn Fed Livestock (James Russell, Cornell University)

United States: 9 Billion livestock raised for animal protein consumption per year outweighs the human population by 5 times (Pimentel & Pimentel, 2003)

Food Packaging
Approximately 4% of US petroleum used for plastic packaging (Pimentel, 2006)
Plastics last between 200-500 years in a landfill (Earthshell, 1999)

53 Million Students Eat in Schools Daily
School Feeding Program Program or School Dining Program?

The school lunch program has historically been called the school “feeding” program. An inescapable comparison is to animal feed lots where the cattle are placed in a small space and fed corn to quickly fatten them up before they are slaughtered. A comparison to schools is that the kids are quickly sent to the cafeteria, a crowded, noisy space with little time to eat. While the kids are not slaughtered, many of them are fattened up slowly over the course of their schooling which may last for 12 years.

While currently called the school meal program, many kids eat all their meals at school which includes breakfast, lunch, snack, and sometimes dinner. This could be a wonderful opportunity to promote health, but students must be educated as well as school staff. If students were given a relaxed time to eat (preferably in the classroom) visitors could socialize with them. I believe it would be wonderful for students to dine with senior citizens so that 2 of our most vulnerable populations (seniors and kids) would be able to bond and the seniors could share their wealth of knowledge in their stories about the past. It would be beneficial to re-brand the former “feeding” program to the school “dining” program.

School Food Service

The people who run the meal program (usually women) are rarely appreciated for the work they do and are often made to take the blame, made fun of as the lunch ladies, and not respected by providing them with education that begins with nutrition and culinary training. I have worked with many school meal employees and have found them to want to be treated as professionals who care deeply about the kids. They take pride when they are educated, are capable and we should view them as part of the teaching team. I view including food service staff as essential educational partners and have attached an article I wrote for their NY annual meeting where they presented to their colleagues and were trained to teach the kids.

When I was a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University, I worked with a graduate student, Dana Kindermann, MD, MPH, who evaluated Food is Elementary in Baltimore City Schools and found that it was highly effective in the potential to prevent diabetes. She conducted a study in 2008 although many of the numbers have changed since diabetes is affecting more and younger students as the name was changed from adult-onset diabetes to type 2 diabetes. The number of kids with diabetes continues to grow at an alarming rate. Education about the role of nutrition to prevent diabetes is critical to reverse this trend. [5]

Cost Analysis Study
Food is Elementary (FIE) & Diabetes
Dana Kindermann, MPH

The analysis found that FIE could prevent one case of diabetes among the 130 schools participating (about 13,000 students), the program could be considered cost-saving
The estimated average per person cost of FIE for one year is about $229
The average cost of diabetes treatment for one year in $6,650
About 1/3 of young people are expected to develop diabetes in their lifetime
If the program could prevent 1 case among the 4,333 students expected to develop diabetes (1/3 of 13,000), it would be cost-effective to implement the program

Conclusion

We need to focus on prevention programs that are based on access to scientific evidence about food, nutrition, ecology, and climate change to ensure there are robust programs in place to educate the public with joy rather than primarily rely on the often-changing information from the food and agriculture industries. Although it is difficult to tease out many of the variable’s an honest look is critical in assessing what works combined with reflective thought guided by ethical considerations.

Based on my 50 years of working with diverse populations on food literacy lessons that are multidimensional and fun, they will result in positive behavior change in many students and their families and encourage appreciation of nature and the physical environment. But ongoing education based on facts is essential for this to occur. Nutrition is a relatively new science with vitamins not being discovered until the early 1900’s (1913 – 1948) The explosion of new “food” products that did not exist (most of them processed) took off at this time, so nutrition concepts must be carefully looked at to determine their true value to health.

The time has come to re-vamp the school meal program and re-think how and why this is vital to our future and to our planet. We need a new paradigm in the way we educate, care for ourselves and others and apply the best from the past with contemporary knowledge for our future. Many of the solutions are available -we just need to expand them with creative vigor as if our lives depended on it. They do!

Is There Such a Thing as a Free Lunch?

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world” – Nelson Mandela

Please Note:

School Lunch History Part 1 and Part 2 can be found on the Food is Good to Think blog.

In 2011 I trained food service personnel in Trumansburg, NY to teach the Food is Elementary curriculum. They taught the students, cooked the food with the students, and presented to their colleagues at the annual conference what this experience was like for them.

The article about school food service, Cooks in the Kitchen, 2011- 12, is attached.

[1] https://yubanet.com/opinions/william-lambers-weve-known-since-the-1940s-that-kids-dont-do-well-in-school-when-theyre-hungry/

[2] https://strongnation.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/1541/aab5fcd2-74e4-4b76-b260-010a5d9afcc9.pdf?1674578754&inline;%20filename=%2277%20Percent%20of%20American%20Youth%20Can%E2%80%99t%20Qualify%20for%20Military%20Service.pdf%22

[3] https://www.pizzahut.com/assets/w/marketingpages/schoollunch/School_Lunch_Program_8MB_r2.pdf

[4] https://news.stanford.edu/2022/02/01/new-model-explores-link-animal-agriculture-climate-change/

[5] Kindermann, Dana, Evaluating the Impact of a Nutrition Education Program in Baltimore City Schools, MPH Capstone Project, 4/30/08

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Celebrating the History of the School Lunch Program

Part 3

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