Everyone remembers school lunch. The mystery meat, greasy pizza and god knows what else – school lunches were surely a subject of at least one conversation during your grade school experience.
Strangely, however, it seems this conversation often ends once we graduate. Rarely is school lunch discussed in college or the public policy arena, and when it is, it’s usually the stuff of concerned parents and PTA meetings. The idea of reforming school lunch as a national policy objective is nowhere near as sexy as rebuilding the catastrophically deregulated banking system or developing a “green energy.” But as school lunches help to provide the fuel necessary to educate a generation, it cannot be dismissed as the mere whining of teenagers.
School lunch is typically highly processed, mass-produced and energy intensive. It essentially does the same thing as fast-food chains – serve a lot of people quickly and cheaply. All the while, a lesson is being taught to a growing nation of children: Eat quickly, get back to work soon, eat whatever we serve you and know nothing about where it came from or what it really costs. Food is purchased from a wonderfully mechanized agribusiness operation, harvested, processed, and shipped by machines, and finally cooked and served in a centralized, mechanical fashion.
But lost is an increasingly critical appreciation for ecological and nutritional understanding. Worse yet, many schools couldn’t serve sustainably produced food even if they wanted to.
“The facilities in many schools are not currently set up to prepare and serve fresh food,” said Lisa Bennett, communications director of the Center for Ecoliteracy. This kind of disconnect between trying to teach students to eat healthy and respect the environment presents a serious challenge when asking them to consume a school lunch that does quite the opposite.
It’s time to think about how schools can practice in the lunchroom what they preach in the classroom, to envision a school lunch program that is both healthy and ecologically sustainable. Through the School Garden Project of Lane County, students don’t just eat food at school, they grow it. The project currently focuses on garden education (and harvesting) sessions, but Executive Director Jared Pruch hopes to change that in the future.
“I would love to see large and functional gardens at schools that we’d be able to use for lunches,” Pruch said. SGP attempts to deal with the problem of “mystery meat” from an environmentalist, more health-conscious perspective. “Studies have found students are about six times more likely to eat food they grow themselves … and parents really appreciate us being able to get kids to eat things like kale,” Pruch said.
The Willamette Farm and Food Coalition has also taken on the cause of improving school lunches locally by helping to provide districts with produce from Oregon farms. Through its Farm to School program, it works to overcome barriers local school districts face in procurement and distribution. WFFC also works with other groups to advocate in Salem for school facilities better suited to prepare sustainable and locally-sourced food.
“We are focused on purchasing locally-sourced food for schools in our area,” Farm to School Program Coordinator Megan Kemple said. “We connect local farms with schools who can use their products.” In one example, Winter Green Farm in Noti, Ore., was able to find a market for its surplus food while also helping to improve the sustainability of school lunch offerings by connecting with the Bethel School District in the West Eugene area.
This sort of reform comes not a moment too soon. The agribusiness operation that feeds our kids will someday come to a halt whether we like it or not. It is not sustainable and though it has produced more food than ever before generated, it has done so on the financing of non-renewable fossil fuel energy, by depleting aquifers, degrading topsoil and dumping thousands of gallons of cheap fertilizers and pesticides into rivers.
Mass-production agriculture, efficient as it may be, will and should come to an eventual end, to be replaced by agriculture that lasts indefinitely. As many critics would legitimately point out, the lower yield of “sustainable, organic” agriculture portends starvation for the billions of people living on Earth. But we should not forget that billions of people are starving right now, even with a food industry that produces more than enough food for them. We must be able to both sustain the Earth and feed mankind.
Reforming the school lunch program should hardly be thought of as trivial. As the environmental and public health consequences of our food system become more and more apparent, it is an ecological, nutritional and yes, educational imperative. And yes, it will likely come with an increased cost. But agribusiness itself will continue to get more expensive if it does not change, as the costs of energy are rising, and soils through degradation need more energy inputs to get the same yields they did years ago.
If we think about the long-term, it’s likely that further investing in better school lunches has the potential to even reduce associated costs. In the meantime, we might have to pay more only to feel better and live happier lives.
[email protected]