Lincoln vs Lincoln: What Would Abraham Say About

Blanche’s Pennies for School Food?

“I believe it will be held a crime in the twentieth century to lure young bodies and minds to school under the pretense of education, only to poison them slowly with bad food.”

– Ellen H. Richards

The history of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) spans the better part of the last 65 years, certainly not “ancient” in relation to our nation’s centuries since independence or the 145 years since Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, but many none the less.

The NSLP had as its early beginnings an idea fomented by Ellen Richards as a way to feed hungry children and help them learn.  This model then was pushed forward by many states and cities including New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. The idea, going back over 100 years, was that hungry children can’t think and malnourished children can’t learn.

In her 2000 treatise on the history of School Lunch in America, Antonia Demas wrote the following:

In 1904, in a book entitled Poverty, Robert Hunter made the claim that in New York City alone between 60,000 and 70,000 children arrive at school each day hungry.

It is utter folly, from the point of view of learning, to have a compulsory school law which compels children, in that weak physical and mental state which results from poverty, to drag themselves to school and to sit at their desks, day in and day out, for several years, learning little or nothing. . . learning is difficult because hungry stomachs and languid bodies and thin blood are not able to feed the brain.  The lack of learning among so many poor children is certainly due, to an important extent, to this cause (Hunter: 216-17).

Fast forward 100 years and we see an unprecedented National discussion of school lunch.  From Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, to Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution to Mrs Q’s Fed Up, Ed Bruske’s Tales From a DC Kitchen, Farm to School, Healthy Schools Campaign, Slow Food’s Time for Lunch, Marion Nestle,  Kate Adamick, The Orfalea Foundation’s S’cool Food and F3’s Lunch Box; everyone seems to be talking about school lunch.  And not just talking, but agreeing that most school food is not as healthy as it could/should be and that we need, more stringent guidelines and more money to fix it.

In fact the USDA (who oversees the NSLP) “hired” the Institutes of Medicine (IOM) to evaluate the program and their report stated that we need better food and its going to cost more money.  Great – so we all agree, right?

Well wrong, everyone is in agreement, except perhaps Blanche Lincoln and her committee’s Healthy Kids Act, which Tom Philpott from Grist called dismal.

The bottom line, The Healthy Kids Act suggests that the reimbursement rate that the USDA gives to schools for children who qualify for free lunch be increased by 6 – yes 6 cents.

And what do we think that Mr. Lincoln, who graces those 6 pennies, would say about our government caring so little about the health of America’s children that we would propose to keep them healthy by allocating 6 pennies to their lives?

Let’s count: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 pennies; hmmm and what can we buy for that in the store?  Let’s ask Blanche when next she goes shopping to let us know what those 6 pennies will buy.

In the past I have attacked Obama’s budget that would have allocated approximately 10 – 12 cents per child for lunch and now I find myself defending it.  It never occurred to me that we might end up with less.

As a lunch lady who spends all of her days trying to put the best possible food on kids’ plates, it is unconscionable to me that as a Nation we would accept 6 pennies for the health of our children.

If you feel as I do that this is just totally unacceptable, then stand up and be counted.  Join us by writing your elected officials and letting them know that our children and their future are worth far more than six paltry Lincoln Pennies.