HANNON WRITES:

Have you watched ABC’s “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution”? I watched two episodes tonight. Aside from the nutritional insights that many Americans need to have brought to their attention it is also a compelling, and chilling, snapshot of a “government program.” The setting is Huntington, West Virginia.

The food for the school district (some 25 schools total) is regulated by USDA guidelines and administered by a woman whose title I did not catch; she probably works for the state. She was coy and arrogant, acting as if the last thing that could possibly interest her is the well-being of the children whose diets she is charged with managing.
The defensiveness of the five chefs at the featured school— all women of course, in their 50s– is understandable, but the resistance extends to people he meets at all levels. The food is disgusting, the kids (and the administrators and parents) love it and he’s got no chance. A lot more substantive than Hell’s Kitchen, I’d say.

A TV program I watched a while back looked at school food across the USA and highlighted a school, in Wisconsin I believe, that cooked wholesome food from scratch. It turns out they also achieved a lower cost per student than other area schools serving the usual processed food heavy on starch, salt and sugar.

I don’t know what it is about this extension of Beatlemania but if it gets more Americans to focus on issues of primary importance, like what millions of kids eat every day, I’m all for it.

 Laura writes:

I have not seen the show.

I am skeptical of efforts to improve food offered in public schools. Schools have contracts with major suppliers. This is big business, in the same way textbook sales are, and there is minimal local control. Despite widespread health campaigns, many schools have not abolished soda vending machines and high school students spend their money on soda and pizza. The highly-publicized efforts of people such as chef Alice Waters to improve school food are quixotic and ulikely to ever be realized unless our schools are privatized.

The health of children is a compelling argument for the privatization of education. At a small private school near my home, parents and a few hired workers in the cafeteria make lunch every day. It is healthy and homey. The students have no choice but that or a bag lunch. There are no snacks to buy or vending machines. They eat things like homemade applesauce with raspberries from the school grounds and bean burritos with salad.These are not expensive lunches. You will never see such tings in our expensive, government-run schools.

Hannon replies:

 I cannot really disagree with anything you’ve said here, but I can add a few more details from watching the show that had convinced me something good was being disseminated.

An example he used to graphically show the idiocy of the guidelines was a day when the administrator was evaluating a new lunch menu of freshly made chicken, a green and rice. She declared this was insufficient, for the guidelines called for “two starches” and she suggested– or rather dictated– that bread or rolls be added to that menu. Mr. Oliver made the point that this was not merely unnecessary but that it was wrong.

A premise that the show touched on repeatedly is that the heart of the problem, as you indicate, is the federal government’s involvement in this endeavor. It is indeed big business and is yet another example (a very good one I think) of collusion between government and the corporate world. To my mind, Mr. Oliver did everything short of gazing into the camera and saying “The federal government is killing your children with its food mandates.” He did not soften the message by suggesting that the fed needs to better order its priorities or guidelines but rather left the viewer to decide the origin of the essential problem, which the show makes abundantly clear I think.Coming on the heels of Obamacare this is a positive development, even if it is a drop in the ocean at this point.

This man has energy and the show is well-produced. He is helping show America that the responsibility is ultimately ours and that by not allowing the federal control of school menus parents can exert their own influence and control, maybe to the exclusion of the fed in the future. It should be a wake-up call to those who believe that government can lead the people. 

Laura writes:

Interesting.

Karen I. writes:

When my young daughter was late to school one day a few weeks due to an appointment, I had to sit with her while she ate her school lunch. I was appalled by the whole thing. The little ones had exactly 20 minutes to get their lunch, shovel in whatever they could and throw out the rest before marching back to class in a row. By the time the ones at the back of the line got their food, they had about 10 minutes to eat. The food was terrible, something called a “pizza quesadilla” (bright orange cheese melted into some kind of rock-hard tortilla) along with a digusting three bean salad, and a less than fresh pear. Her front teeth, like those of her peers, are missing and she could not bite into the whole pear. The quesadilla was inedible as was the three bean salad. The only milk available was artificial vanilla flavored and she gagged on it. I felt like a terrible mother as I escorted her back to class knowing full well she had not eaten enough. I had a second lunch ready when she got home and I have packed her lunch almost every day since. 

The saddest thing about this is that in our district, about 40% of children qualify for free or reduced price lunch. I have a relative who was working as a substitute paraprofessional and she told me about how she was trying to get the kids to eat one day and wondered out loud why other adults were not doing the same. The other paraprofessionals looked at her and said “Who cares if they throw it out? It’s free for half of them anyway.” How sad to think this is the main meal of the day for some children. My relative quit the job shortly after in disgust.

Laura writes:

It is no accident that both the food and the architecture of schools are prison-like. These are institutions of confinement and social control.

Jake Jacobsen writes:

From the perspective of a chef who has worked in every nook and cranny of the food business there is an aspect of this that is being overlooked in this conversation. Taste and flavor, I’m not taking a position about who is right vis-a-vis Jamie or the school lunch lady but, I’ve tried and failed to eat more than one meal prepared by a well meaning nutritionist or nutrition activist that tasted like boiled donkey.

Don’t get me wrong, from what I’ve seen school food sucks and could most likely be vastly improved, but these conversations are held as though the only two choices are nutritional and non-nutritional. How about very nutritional food that tastes like crap? Or very nutritional food that has the texture and appearance of cardboard?

Also, I can tell you that one of the reasons schools most likely use prepared food stuffs is because the big boogie man these days is labor. Most hotels today have less than half the kitchen staff they would have had even ten years ago and like it or not the only way half as many people can put out the same amount of food is by using prepared goods. I never worked at a school but I did work in the kitchen of a Colorado jail and that was the deal there, they were cutting staff like mad.

So yes, let’s feed our kids well but there is absolutely no reason it can’t taste good as well, right?

Laura writes:

Saying we should have delicious, aesthetically-pleasing food in schools is like saying we should have beautiful school buildings or classes that teach great literature. It isn’t going to happen. High standards, even in food, depend on some vision of the good. They have no place in a large government-run institution run on pseudo-scientific principles and radical egalitarianism.

Please follow and like us: