“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.)
Feb. 4: I’ll be joining my The Washington Post’s Joe Yonan, the City Paper’s Tim Carman and Monica Bhide to read our pieces from the new 
I am a food writer at The Washington Post where I cover food politics, trends and sustainability issues. My reporting and writing examines how politics, culture and business affect what ends up on our plates – and how that is dramatically changing. On this site, you will find links to my work and my blog, which explores the pleasures and challenges of good food.
The future of food writing
So as you might expect, there were some frayed nerves and unchecked emotions on display at the first annual Roger Smith Food Writers Conference in New York. Veteran Wall Street Journal restaurant critic Ray Sokolov derided David Chang’s account of Hudson Valley foie gras in the Momofuku cookbook as a work of an inexpert and gullible work of reporting. (This despite the fact that co-author Peter Meehan is an excellent, former New York Times journalist.) Jane Daniels Lear, a former senior editor at Gourmet, could not imagine why her 68-year-old alma mater should have vanished – the readers were so loyal! – and picked a fight with Jordana Rothman of Time Out, a magazine whose ad pages jumped 9.2 percent last month.
Of course, if any of us were smart enough to know what is to become of us, we probably wouldn’t be journalists. (We’d be rich business magnates instead.) But there was one food luminary with a vision. Molly O’Neill. And I just hope she’s right.
O’Neill is a former New York Times columnist and the author of cookbooks, a memoir and an excellent food writing anthology. This fall, she will publish what may be her greatest work: A “door-stop” size tome of American regional recipes and oral histories, titled “One Big Table.”
Food writing is not a new invention, O’Neill argued. Food and the bounty of the American continent was a main topic of many reports of the new world. The descriptions of cooking and of elaborate meals gave insights into regional development, culture and class.
Over the last several decades, however, Americans’ attitudes about food and cooking changes, and writing changed to reflect that. People were less interested in expressing themselves through their cooking traditions than showing off what they had experienced.(There was, according to research O’Neill did for an article in the New Yorker, an inverse relationship between the amount of money that someone spent on a stove and the number of times they used it.) “Cooking for me had always been a way of affirming one’s life. The voyeuristic had replaced the real,” she said.
The popularity of televised cooking competitions (and their grotesque, sado-masochistic cousin shows such as Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen) would seem to confirm a dark future for food writing. But O’Neill is optimistic: “Yes, there’s a dark side. There’s a sense you have to say, ‘fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, here’s my bowl of noodles. But it’s the last gasp of macho cuisine…There are other voices out there that are fresh and clear.”
One-note people will have their 15 minutes of fame. (Julie Powell and whoever wrote that Cake Wrecks book jump to mind.) But if you take food seriously and are diligent about reporting, there is always room for enterprise. One thing is sure, O’Neill said: “There’s no future in hand-wringing. Except repetitive stress syndrome.”
Hear hear.