School Lunch Politics (37 page)

The extent to which school lunches became part of a national foodservice industry network could be seen in the heavy competition for the school markets and the wide reach of food industry interests. Styrofoam plates and cups, plastic forks, and the myriad of containers and wrappings necessary for large-scale food service meant lucrative markets for companies, such as Sysco Systems, that supplied restaurants and schools alike. Dupont, for example, sold polyester packing film wrap to school foodservice departments. Other companies supplied the component elements of school meals. Frozen sauces and chicken patties, for example, could be heated on-site. Rich Products, of Buffalo, New York, sold frozen pizza dough in pre-proportioned balls or par-baked crusts so schools could “develop their own brands.”
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School lunch menus reflected American consumer trends not only in fast-food tastes but in the rise of the ethnic food market as well. Beginning during the 1970s, food markets embraced increasing kinds of ethnic foods and a willingness to expand the definition of “American” cuisine. Schools across the country began to offer tortillas and even sushi on their lunch menus. Casa Christina Foods, which began to sell tortillas to schools during the late 1980s, saw a major increase in demand over the next decade. When they first introduced their product in North Carolina, company president Chester Brunty noted that the tortilla was “a novel food.” Within a short time, however, schools throughout the Southeast began to serve tortilla chips and burritos. Schools instituted “taco day” along with quesadillas and wraps. Happy to accommodate the school market, tortilla companies marketed their product as “low fat, flavored and organic.” Companies like Casa Christina or La Tapatia Tortilleria, in Fresno, California, eagerly attended school food shows and workshops, sponsored by the USDA or by other food corporations, and were happy to assist school food-service directors in devising new menu items using their products. La Tapatia president Helen Chavez-Hansen said she felt “in tune” because most of them were women who shared a deep concern with children's nutrition and health. “We really are all working moms” she pointed out. Casa Christina's president got to the bottom line, however. “The kids in these schools are going to grow up with the tortilla,” he observed. “They and their children will be good customers of our products. We're laying a foundation for our industry's future.”
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Privatization, fast-food, and national brands dramatically altered the atmosphere in school lunchrooms. School lunch professionals were divided, however, when it came to evaluating the impact of the new trends on children's nutrition. Some believed that privatization vastly improved lunch programs and made the free lunch program more viable. During the 1990s, for example, Rhode Island adopted a corporate model in order to maintain its free lunch program. In a major budget crisis the state slashed school lunch appropriations, throwing several hundred workers onto the unemployment lines and threatening to eliminate free lunches. School lunch administrators contracted with the Marriott Corporation to take over the system. The company introduced brand-named foods, offered children choices in the lunch line, and invited students and parents to meet with the company's food-service directors to test products and plan menus. State school officials claimed that student school lunch participation “soared” and nutrition levels improved. Paying children returned to the lunchroom, and even the state's poorest districts generated a profit in their lunchrooms. According to one report, the project was so successful that the janitors who had previously found tons of wasted food now noticed that the children “cleaned their plates.” Woonsocket principal John Caparco admitted that his fellow state school lunch administrators had been simply “out to lunch” when it came to making food appealing. In his district, over 77 percent of the children qualified for free and reduced price meals. Before privatization he had served 2,652 lunches a day, but after bringing in Marriott his numbers averaged 3,486. A student's comment proved most revealing. “The other stuff,” this child observed, “was, you know, welfare food, and it tasted like it.” The new menu, she said, is now “regular food.”
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For critics of “big government,” privatization of school lunchrooms signaled a triumph of local initiative over federal policy. In this view, individual school cafeterias or even district-wide food service was simply inefficient. Rhode Island Republicans, for example, favored “devolution” of nutrition programs and a federal block grant system that would send each district a set level of federal reimbursement. When critics argued that the block grants would not cover an unexpected—or even a predicted—increase in student enrollment, the state's legislators, Republican as well as Democratic, insisted that under the privatized scheme more children would buy their lunches, thus providing a sure subsidy for free meals. This was not a new idea. Indeed, states had long operated under the assumption that paying students would subsidize the poor. In truth, however, the contribution gleaned from student fees had never been sufficient to pay for free lunches for poor children. Rhode Island legislators believed that in privatization they found a way around the dilemma. In what one state representative called a “clever payment system,” schools paid an annual fee to the food-service company to run their programs. The fee was supposed to cover capital improvements, salaries, and food. School districts kept student fees plus the per-meal federal subsidies. If revenues fell short, the contractor assumed the loss. “This way the district can't lose money and the contractor has an incentive to keep costs down while serving more meals.”
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Under this system, the Woonsocket district claimed to run a “self-sufficient” program that actually earned $24,000 in profit during its first year. The money went to buy a new dishwasher and a truck. Providence claimed a profit of over $100,000. This was fine until costs began to rise and the private companies began to raise their fees. Although the Department of Agriculture contracts prohibited foodservice corporations from making a profit on school lunches, the companies were allowed to collect management fees.”
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In effect, as some critics pointed out, private food-service contracts provided public subsidies to for-profit corporations.

Some school lunch officials were less sanguine about the virtues of private contracts. USDA official Ellen Haas predicted that allowing private companies into the school lunchroom would lead to “short-term malnutrition and a lifetime of serious and costly health problems.” Democratic representative Dick Gephardt, equated the process with “a dagger pointed at the hearts of our children.”
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Indeed, while the private corporations claimed to meet or exceed nutritional requirements, the fact was that they often fudged the numbers. In the Rhode Island case, Marriott measured the nutrition content of its menus over a ten-week period. Like Pizza Hut, Marriott justified high fat offerings by serving lower fat dishes on other days or on the side.
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What they did not do, however, was keep any record of which offerings the children took. Thus a child might end up eating the high fat offering each day even though other foods were available.

The extent to which school lunches were embedded within the vast network of a private, commercial food industry was revealed when the Department of Agriculture set about to publicize new nutrition guidelines during the 1990s. The department formed “Team Nutrition” in which government personnel worked with private industry including the Walt Disney Company to shape public relations and develop motivational materials. Calling this a “groundbreaking partnership,” the department looked to Disney to “develop healthy eating messages to be used on television.” With the technical assistance and training from the Disney Company, the Department of Agriculture now depended on the private industry to help shape and modify children's food habits. The USDA also contracted with Scholastic to produce “age appropriate nutrition information” for children as well as for parents.
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The culture and the politics of food collided as schools attempted to make their lunchrooms financially viable, cover the costs of free meals, and at the same time provide children with nutritious food. Although no longer aimed at Americanizing an immigrant population, nutritionists' advice still was predicated on the assumption that children would bring good eating habits home to their mothers and families. Teachers, advertisers, and nutritionists alike still believed that education and reason would shape diets and influence people's eating habits. As Dr. Richard Carmona, U.S. Surgeon General, put it, the importance of “behavior modification” in food choices could not be stressed enough.
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The Surgeon General was specifically addressing the problem of obesity in children, but he could as well have been talking about eating habits in general. Figuring out a way to finance free lunches for poor children was as difficult as figuring out how to change people's eating habits. Just as children continued to make “bad” food choices, school districts, state legislatures, and Congress itself continued to make political choices when it came to financing children's meals. Neither school officials nor lunchroom supervisors liked to turn children away from the lunch line. But determining which children deserved—that is, “qualified” for—a free lunch proved to be no easier in the twenty-first century than it had been earlier. Although schools expended extraordinary resources verifying free lunch eligibility applications, some legislators still feared that parents (if not the children themselves) were “cheating” and trying to illegally claim a right to free food.
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The ASFSA, on the other hand, believed that the school lunch poverty levels were too low and that the “near poor,” that is, children who technically qualified for reduced-price meals, could not in reality afford the price of lunch. Even the conservative Hoover Institute recognized the difficulties in trying to determine which children truly needed free meals. “Tighter incomeverification procedures,” a Hoover sponsored study concluded, would mean lower participation rates. No one wanted this outcome. In the end, most schools simply lacked the resources to track and document the often changing incomes of hundreds of families.
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At the turn of the twenty-first century, parents, educators, and health professionals began a new campaign to ban vending machines, candy, and soda from schools. Termed the “Junk Food Wars,” by the American School Food Service Association, children's nutrition once again took center stage in the media as well as in the halls of Congress.
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This time around, a new culprit threatened children's nutritional choices. The very measures that schools had introduced during the 1980s to solve the lunchroom financial crisis—fast food and vending machines—now loomed as major obstacles to nutrition education and good eating habits. Much of the impetus for local bans came from a report submitted to the House Appropriations Committee in January 2001 entitled, “Foods Sold in Competition with USDA School Meal Programs.” This report revealed the extent to which the nation's public schools had become dependent on vending machines and private food-service companies to keep their meal programs going. The Oakland school system, for example, brought in an estimated $600,000 each year from vending machine sales and an additional amount from the sale of soda and candy bars in school cafeterias. A vending industry trade report estimated that school sales provided $750 million for school districts around the country.
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While the report praised the lunch program for providing children with more nutrition than they might otherwise receive, it also documented the health risks associated with the so-called competitive foods, that is, candy, sodas, and snacks. Children participating in the program, the report emphasized, are “more likely than non-participants to consume vegetables, milk and milk products, and meat and other protein-rich foods.” Children who participated in the School Breakfast Program had higher intakes of “food energy,” including calcium, phosphorous, and vitamin C.
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At the same time, however, the report warned that competitive foods, which are high in fat, added sugars, and calories, presented diet risks and “may affect the viability of school meal programs.” The National School Lunch Program, the report stressed, was established “as a program for all children.”
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Despite the fact that schools depended on private industry to supply everything from educational posters and athletic equipment to pre-package meals, some parents began a campaign to remove vending machines selling sugar-based snacks from school halls. In February 2003, all sales of soda and candy in Oakland schools was prohibited. The Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education followed, with a ban on the sale of carbonated drinks during school hours beginning in January 2004. The Los Angeles ban was applauded by a new generation of nutrition refomers who had marched to the district's headquarters “wearing neon green shirts with signs mocking soda advertisements.” School districts around the country followed suit. According to one report, twenty states introduced bills to limit the sale of junk food in schools. As if reinventing the wheel, Jennifer LeBarry, Oakland administrative supervisor, for food services, warned that “just yanking soda isn't enough. You've got to have nutrition education so students and their parents know why drinking a soda with every meal is the wrong choice.” Indeed, in its own defense, National Soft Drink Association spokesman Sean McBride blamed the children for their own poor health, saying it was “really about the couch and not the can.”
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Because only children with money could buy food from the vending machines, the “junk food war” revealed the persistent class divide in school lunchrooms. Although the school lunch program, in theory, was aimed at all children, the “Foods Sold in Competition” report rightly warned that “children may perceive that school meals are primarily for poor children rather than nutrition programs for all children.”
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It was a bit late in the game to begin re-claiming the school lunchroom from the “stigma” of poverty. While some school districts resisted vending machines and fast food, they could only do so if they could come up with local resources to supplement the state and federal education appropriations. The most well-publicized example of school lunch nutritional reform was the famed chef Alice Waters's natural foods project in the Berkeley, California, schools. During the summer of 2004 Waters initiated a nutrition curriculum designed to teach children the virtues of fresh vegetables and whole grains. Waters had earlier started school garden projects, which she now used to prepare school meals. “We have to go into the public-school system and educate children when they're very young,” Waters said, echoing long-held goals of home economics and nutritionists.
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The problem was, however, that her project was subsidized by a generous grant of $3.8 million from her own foundation. When school officials and others questioned whether her plan was viable in the long run, she responded, “We have to change the paradigm on how we spend money in this country.”
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While Waters's model inspired other foundations and wealthy individuals to fund school lunch projects in other parts of the country, the fact was that these efforts depended on special contributions.
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Neither Waters nor other private donors addressed the public policy issues that produced school lunch difficulties in the first place.