A Question of Values
Source: The Lunch Box Blog
Wednesday, October 28, 2009

The San Francisco Chronicle reported last week that San Francisco schools have had to pick up the entire bill for the school lunch program. Inspectors found “critical” program violations in the district and have cut off federal and state funding until the district shapes up.

Phyllis Bramson-Paul, the director of the state agency that distributes school meal funds, told The Chronicle that such an action is rare. “When we withhold funds, it’s because our findings are pretty egregious,” she said.

So what, exactly, did the district do to deserve its punishment? The violations had nothing to do with food quality. They didn’t have to do with food safety either. As far as inspectors were concerned, San Francisco schools were meeting most of the nutrition requirements for school meals. What they weren’t doing right was counting the number of reimbursable meals served to students. In simple terms, the district may have been using taxpayer money to feed children above the income cutoff.

This is a sad story, and it points to our skewed values about school meals. I have visited several cafeterias that operate in violation of nutrition standards, selling soda and other prohibited foods. In fact, the most recent School Nutrition Dietary Assessment Study found that only 20 percent of schools offered and served lunches that met the standards for fat, and only 30 percent offered and served lunches that met the standards for saturated fat. Inspectors didn’t seem to have a problem with that.

This comes down to a simple question. Do we care more about feeding children healthy meals, or do we care more about making sure we don’t feed students above a certain income level? Right now, it’s the latter. I call that finding pretty egregious.