A plan to fix school lunch?

“No nation is any healthier than its children or more prosperous than its farmers,” President Harry Truman pronounced as he signed legislation establishing the National School Lunch Program. If that was the goal, the program has been a failure. Small farmers are struggling and one-third of American children are overweight and obese. How did this happen? In her new book “Free for All: Fixing School Food in America,” Hunter College Professor Jan Poppendieck charts the surprisingly lively history of school lunch. And like much complex legislation, it reflects a series of accidents. Case in point: The federal government only began to subsidize school lunches as a way to manage huge farm surpluses. Its previous effort – to stabilize prices by slaughtering millions of immature pigs — had resulted in escaped piglets squealing down the streets of Chicago and Omaha, a Tiger Woods-worthy public relations disaster. This history is a must-read. But it’s Poppendieck’s policy prescriptions (try saying that 10 times fast) that are most provocative. The author believes the program cannot be fixed with more tweaks, tinkering or even more money. “It is time to move to universal free school meals,” she writes.

“This would benefit poor children who would no longer have to eat a meal seasoned by shame, and it would benefit middle-income children for whom healthy school meals could become the norm. It would benefit our overstressed, time-staved working families by taking one more task, and one more parent-battleground, off the table. It would benefit food service staff, who could turn their attention from accounting to cooking. And in the long run, it would benefit us through savings in health care costs and better educational outcomes.”

How much would this cost? Using Congressional Budget Office figures, Poppendieck does some back of the envelope calculations and determines that universal lunch would total an extra $12 billion annually. If that sounds like a lot, it is. (President Obama has asked for $10 billion for all child nutrition programs over the next decade in his current budget.) But, notes Poppendieck, it is also the amount that the president’s budget specified for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan each month in 2009.

“I understand that we cannot simply, miraculously, redirect the expenditure from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to school food. My intent is to give some sense of the size of the funding increment that would be needed … and to point out that there do seem to be ways of ‘finding’ money if we really want to.”

The argument for universal school lunch is a convincing one. Finding the money? According to my sources on the Hill, it’s a political non-starter. Twelve billion a year ends up as closer to $150 billion over 10 years. Obama’s jobs bill might total $100 billion. The Republican prescription drug benefit, which was supposed to lock in the senior vote for GOP in perpetuity, was $300 billion. And remember, kids don’t vote. Still, Poppendieck’s ideas and idealism should inform and stimulate debate as Congress moves forward to reauthorize school lunch program and Michelle Obama launches her all-star childhood obesity initiative. (The announcement is Feb. 9. Stay tuned here and on All We Can Eat, the WaPo Food blog.)