What’s on The Lunch Tray?

Bettina Elias Siegel is a former lawyer, writer and host at the must-read American blog about kids and food (“in school and out”) called The Lunch Tray. She has been a fearless crusader for healthier school meals for several years, and was the brains behind the successful petition to the USDA to get rid of pink slime (fatty beef trimmings treated with ammonium hydroxide and added as filler to ground beef—yuck!) in the meat served in American schools.

I always enjoy her smart and nuanced writing and thinking about kids and food issues—especially her unapologetic defense of equity in the cafeteria—but I also appreciate that she sometimes blogs about what she’s feeding her family. School food is that kind of issue: the personal really is political.

So, of course, I was honoured and delighted when Bettina asked to interview me about What’s for Lunch? Here’s an excerpt from the Q &A after the jump. To read the whole thing, please visit The Lunch Tray. In fact, visit The Lunch Tray anyway.

School lunch rules

The big news in lunch this week was the USDA released its new standards for school meals. Pizza will still be considered a vegetable and the french fry lobby maintained its hold on the list of acceptable foods (and still isn’t happy that “the potato is being downplayed,” reports the New York Times), but according to observers like the Center for Science in the Public Interest, these new standards are the best ever, representing “one of the most important advancements in nutrition in decades.”

New nutrition standards: does that mean no more Frito pie?

The USA will now join countries around the world that offer healthy guidelines for school meals.

Salt will be limited, no trans fats allowed, kids will be offered a wider variety of fruits and veg, milk will be low fat and whole grains are prioritized. School lunch providers will get an additional six cents per school lunch in order to achieve these new standards. (USA Today offers a few more details here.)

It’s about time.

But the fight for healthy school lunches is not over. The new standards will be phased in over time, there will no doubt be food companies looking for ways to cut costs, and the amount provided per meal may simply not be enough in the first place. Vigilance is necessary.

Check out Bettina Elias Siegel‘s always excellent analysis at The Lunch Tray for more on the Good, Bad and Ugly of the new standards. I also thought Mrs. Q., of Fed Up with School Lunch fame, did a nice job expressing how parents can help improve school lunch in her babble.com column.

Incidentally, Mrs. Q. posted an interesting piece about lunch ladies. Seems the staff of Chicago school cafeterias were actually asked what they think about school lunch. More evidence of their makeover, methinks.

Pizza is a vegetable and other fables from the school food industry

Photograph by Yvonne Duivenvoorden, an early peek at my upcoming book, What's for Lunch?

Don’t miss the scathing must-read New York Times Sunday Review piece by Lucy Komisar about how the food industry is making American kids “fat and sick” while raking in profits. Here’s an excerpt:

“One-third of children from the ages of 6 to 19 are overweight or obese. These children could see their life expectancies shortened because of their vulnerability to diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Unfortunately, profit, not health, is the priority of the food service management companies, food processors and even elected officials. Until more parents demand reform of the school lunch system, children will continue to suffer.”

Celebrating school lunch?

Last week was National School Lunch Week in the U.S., and in order to “celebrate” it, the University of Southern California’s Masters of Arts in Teaching created this infographic on the reality and consequences of childhood obesity. Wow. When you put it that way…

Fed up with school lunch

Mrs. Q,the anonymous teacher who ate lunch in her school’s cafeteria every day for a year and blogged about it—generating thousands of hits a day—has come out of the closet.

Turns out, Mrs. Q is a Chicago school-based speech pathologist named Sarah Wu (rhymes with Q, of course). Her book Fed up with Lunch:  How One Anonymous Teacher Survived a Year of School Lunches,has just been launched.

I’ve been following Mrs. Q since she started, checking out her blog mostly to see the pictures of the largely unhealthy and invariably gross-looking food (squishy, doughy hot dog buns, dried-up tator tots, mushy frozen corn, overly packaged everything) that she—and the kids in her low-income school— had to eat. She was like a more low-key, less gonzo Morgan Spurlock (of Super Size Me fame).

And like Spurlock, eating the nasty food on offer in the cafeteria made her sick.

I found the images of her lunch—often slightly grainy and blurred— shocking and disturbing because while she had a choice in the matter, many of the kids eating the same food did not. But it was also fascinating to watch how she became more politicized about the horrors and complexity of school lunch as the year went by. It started out as an experiment, and became a campaign.

You can read an excerpt from the book here.

More good food heroes

A nutrition and public policy expert, Marion Nestle is one of the vibrant mothers of the American food movement. Her 2002 book, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health is a kind of bible for people interested in the subject. And her ever-growing list of other books (on subjects ranging from pet food to why calories count) continue to win awards and influence many.

She writes a regular column in the San Francisco Chronicle answering readers’ questions about food. I particularly liked a recent column where a reader wrote in to ask her how she can go farther than simply voting with her fork in order to affect change in food policy. It’s a question I think we all need to ask ourselves.

And Nestle argues—as I do in What’s for Lunch?—that school food is a great place to start:

“I particularly like school food as a starter issue for advocacy. Improving school food is nothing less than grassroots democracy in action.

Schools matter because kids are in them all day long and they set a lifetime example. If you have children in school, take a look at what they are eating. Could the food use an upgrade? Start organizing.

All schools are supposed to have wellness policies. Find out what they are and talk to the principal, teachers and parents about how to improve access to healthier food and more physical activity.

Another well-kept secret: The U.S. Department of Agriculture offers technical assistance to help schools meet nutritional standards. The USDA encourages advocacy. It says its work is easier when parents push the schools to do better.

Many groups are devoted to school food issues. Some have published guides to getting started or developing strong wellness policies. They range in focus from hands-on local to national policy.

(Read more.)

Saddle up to the salad bar

There are a lot of stories, video and podcasts out there that chronicle the worst of school lunches in America.

It’s a greasy, gory ride through tales of Frito pie, pizza and deep fried chicken nuggets. Of course, there are going to be widespread changes as the new Child Nutrition Act gets put into place, but it turns out, one of the biggest school districts in the country made the change several years ago.

According to The New York Times City Critic Ariel Kaminer in this video and article in the paper, New York City’s public schools started serving healthier meals six years ago. No fried food, no artificial ingredients, no trans fats—and all for about $1 a meal.

And the best news? Kids like the food. Especially the salad bar.

Now if they could just get rid of those nasty disposable Styrofoam trays…

Will the revolution be tweeted?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about social media and how/if  it works as a tool of activism. Like many others, I read Malcolm Gladwell’s controversial piece in the New Yorker debunking its power and efficacy.

And, of course, I’ve been watching Egyptians and the rest of the Arab world use Twitter and Facebook, Gmail, etc. to organize and (in the case of Egypt) overthrow their repressive regime. Seems social media can’t be counted out quite yet.

But when it comes to advocating on food issues, Ken Cook on the US Environmental Working Group Agriculture blog makes a really important (if slightly harsh) point about its limitations and the importance of doing all the other work of political organizing: pounding the pavement, talking to people, pressuring politicians to listen, etc.

Those of us in the advocacy world can meet, tweet or blog ad nauseam with one another, dreaming up policy ideas in support of local or organic food, more fruit and veggies in schools, wildlife habitat or clean water, but what we need to do is to build the lobbying and grassroots muscle to turn ideas into funded realities. That means taking on the subsidy lobby; for instance, taking a bite out of the $5.2 billion per year in direct payment crop subsidies going out to the wealthiest landlords and farmers in a period of record earnings for those crops.

Nothing wrong with blogging, but to paraphrase Truman Capote, that’s not advocacy. That’s typing.

What do you think?

[illustration by Andrea Curtis]

2011: the year in preview

There’s something about all the “Best Of…” lists that come out this time of year that I find a bit depressing. In the dead of Canadian winter, with so little sun to warm my bones, I guess I’d just rather look ahead. So here’s that fool’s errand—a  round-up of predictions for 2011 in the world of food and kids—from my home to the wider world.

My 11-year-old son’s New Year’s Resolution is to make his lunch “more”—which, considering he never makes his lunch, probably means once a week. The mornings are a frantic time in our house and we haven’t made the space for him in our routine but all that changes now that he’s taken the initiative. I hope he’ll allow me to chronicle some of his efforts here on What’s for Lunch?

The Food Channel predicts that one of the big food trends of 2011 is thousands of chefs will be joining school cafeteria crews. “This will be the year we finally get really serious about feeding our children healthier, better quality foods. We’re no longer just talking about childhood obesity, we’re doing something about it.”

According to agriculturalist/horticulturalist George Ball writing in The Wall Street Journal, 2011 will be the year of the vegetable.  Ball says kids will eat them if their parents tell them they must. (I ought to try that one….)

Epicurious suggests that Meatless Mondays will go mainstream, with numerous American school districts already embracing vegetarian offerings.

Marion Nestle writes that school food will continue to make front page news in the US as the new Child Nutrition Act is implemented—and negotiated on the ground.

This is the year Ontario schools will ban junk food from their premises. I predict lots of hand-wringing from good-food backlash types about children’s god-given right to soda, etc.

Funding for school dinners in England has been on shaky ground since the change of government last year. There are signs that this will continue despite all the excellent work the School Food Trust and others have done showing the enormous benefits of healthy food in school canteens.

In Afghanistan, where thousands of children rely on school meals (often emergency biscuits or corn-soy porridge) supplied by the World Food Program, the organization says the outlook on food security is increasingly bleak. A funding shortfall may mean the WFP has to cut its assistance down to only emergency projects. With wheat prices continuing to rise and the humanitarian situation deteriorating, need is only going to increase.

Lunch love

Last week,  the American Congress finally passed the new child nutrition act known as the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. School lunch activists are greeting it with cautious optimism—it doesn’t go nearly as far as most would like—and compromises were made along the way, but there was the chance it wouldn’t get passed at all. So the fact that it lives to increase the money going toward lunches by 6 cents per meal (activists were pushing for $1 at the beginning of their campaign), establishes better nutrition standards, funds farm to school programs, and cuts down on red tape so low-income kids can get subsidized or free lunches more easily, are all victories.

But it’s worth a reminder of how far from the ideal most US school lunches are, and (despite these gains) will likely continue to be.

Lunch Love Community Documentary Project shows the ideal (or at least somewhere pretty close). In a series of short videos (or webisodes as they call them) the filmmakers chronicle the story of the Berkeley School Lunch Initiative, a community-based reform movement that’s transformed school lunch in the Berkeley school district. Or, as the filmmakers explain, the videos reveal “how passionate and dedicated people coming together can change the way their children eat, how they think, and how they learn in school.”

The webisodes run the gamut from school gardens and cooking programs to the role of parents and the people who make the food. The filmmakers intend to collect it all into a full-length documentary to be released next year.

Berkeley has long been in the forefront of school lunch reform but gathering the story together in such a visual way with so many entry points reveals even more clearly how extraordinary it is. It’s inspiration for all of us.