The ABCs of School Lunch

Dr. Janet Poppendieck (KNFP 5), Professor of Sociology at Hunter College, City University of New York
School lunch is suddenly a hot topic. Rising rates of childhood obesity and Type Two Diabetes have focused attention on our national diet as never before, and naturally, people are discussing the eight billion dollar federal program that delivered more than 5.4 billion lunches last year. All across the nation, parents and their allies are organizing to demand healthier, fresher and more appealing school food. Farm to Cafeteria programs that promote the use of locally grown produce are underway in at least 430 communities in 22 states. Efforts to return to fresh “scratch” cooking, programs to engage children in producing and preparing food, attempts to integrate school food with the curriculum, crusades to increase the availability of vegetarian alternatives and campaigns to reduce fat and salt in school meals are ubiquitous. Would be reformers, however, are up against some formidable obstacles that reflect federal policy as much or more than local practice. Real change of the sort we need will require significant reform at the national level. Child Nutrition Reauthorization takes place every five years. The National School Lunch and Breakfast programs will be reviewed, amended, adjusted, and presumably renewed by Congress in 2009. Now is the time to begin organizing for serious reform; now is the time to begin a public discussion that can lead to a thorough overhaul of the federal school food programs. Here are some things that would be reformers should know: the ABCs of school lunch.

A IS FOR A LA CARTE

School lunch is not what it used to be. Walk into the lunch room of any of nine out of ten American secondary schools or two thirds of elementary schools, and you will find the school cafeteria selling other foods in competition with the federally subsidized and nutritionally regulated school lunch. In some schools this may be just a few items, but in many, you will find the school food service doing a brisk business in burgers, pizza, fries, nachos, cookies, pastries, sports drinks, and chips of all descriptions. This is an arrangement that comes fairly close to defeating the purpose of the National School Lunch Program. In the first place, it makes a mockery of the carefully wrought federal nutrition standards. School food service menu planners strive to create lunches that will provide adequate amounts of vitamins and other nutrients without exceeding federal guidelines for fat. But why should a student try an unfamiliar vegetable or acquire a taste for low fat milk if her favorite foods are available on site?

In the second place, a la carte service stigmatizes the federal lunch. Stigma is already a problem for children who receive free or reduced price meals, about three fifths of the reimbursable meals served last year. As children grow older, many choose to forego the meal rather than be seen by their peers getting a meal without paying for it, and schools have undertaken a variety of devices to protect students’ privacy. Separate a la carte lines, however, undermine the privacy practices and in extreme cases, effectively segregate the cafeteria. Once you set up a separate place that sells kids’ favorite foods, the students with money will gravitate to the a la carte line, where they can choose their meals and snacks unconstrained by federal nutrition standards, and fairly soon, the rumor will spread that only “poor kids” eat the “school lunch.” Then, in a classic display of the self-fulfilling prophecy, affluent students, especially at the high school level, will avoid the regular line for fear that someone might think they are getting a free meal.

B IS FOR BOTTOM LINE

If a la carte sales undermine the nutritional integrity of school food and promote segregation, why do they exist? Why are food service directors competing with themselves in the school cafeteria? The short answer is money: the tyranny of the bottom line. In most schools, the prices students pay for the official meal, which are typically set by the school board, not the food service department, do not cover the full cost of producing a meal, even when supplemented by a modest federal subsidy in cash and commodities–just under $.40 last year. Neither do the federal reimbursements of just under $2.50 for a free lunch. A la carte sales subsidize the reimbursable meals, helping to keep the program in the black and the food service director in her job.
School districts used to put local money into school food, but faced with mounting costs for everything from fuel to pensions, many school boards now demand that school cafeterias “break even,”and “operate like a business.” Not only must food service departments generate enough revenues to cover the costs of food, labor, and food service management, but they are increasingly asked to cover a share of the school’s utilities, to pay for renovations and to equip cafeteria facilities in new schools, and to pay an overhead or indirect rate for the management of their payroll and other central school functions.
In this climate, it is no surprise that school cafeterias are being urged to regard school children as “customers”. The higher the participation in the official meal program, the lower the unit cost, and the greater the next year’s allocation of donated agricultural commodities. In some schools, the “marketing” of school lunch has extended to “branding” the food service: re-christening the cafeteria with a catchy name and creating color schemes and logos that appear on everything from cafeteria workers’ uniforms to paper cups and napkins. Thinking of children as customers may improve the way cafeteria staff treat children, but its impact on the menu is less salutary. The offerings in many school cafeterias increasingly mimic the items in the a la carte line: fast food clones, though they may be prepared with less fat. The most popular entree in the school lunch program has been pizza since the School Nutrition Association began surveying its members, and the most popular vegetable? Potatoes.

Increasing revenues is only half of the break even strategy. The other side of the ledger is, reducing expenditures, and this, too has hastened the rush toward fast food in the cafeteria. Schools have done this largely by cutting labor costs. Curtailing benefits was often the first line of defense, generally accomplished by reducing hours to less than the threshold for benefit eligibility. Many schools cut out labor intensive “scratch” food preparation, not only to reduce the amount of labor involved in the preparation of each meal, but also to permit the use of less skilled and thus cheaper labor. Some schools went to completely pre-fabricated meals–cooked, packaged, and frozen in factories, sometimes hundreds of miles from the schools, and delivered frozen to be defrosted and reheated on site. Even when the total meal was not prepared and packaged elsewhere, defrost and reheat entrees have become the mainstay. School menu planners also found that they could reduce risk –the risk of food borne illness and the risk of an expensive lawsuit–by transferring liability up the chain through the use of precooked and frozen items. We are unlikely to see a return to”scratch” food preparation nor a significant increase in fresh fruits and vegetables unless reimbursement rates are increased and liability laws are revised.

C IS FOR COMPLIANCE

No amount of hype about branding the cafeteria and kids as customers can change the underlying reality; school food is not really a business, and this is nowhere more evident than in the host of federal state and local regulations with which cafeterias must comply. There are many–health and safety regulations, employment practices regulations, environmental regulations–that they share with their commercial counterparts, but the two sets that constrain them most are unique to school food: the nutrition requirements and the rules for managing the three tier eligibility and reimbursement system.

School meals are required to meet two sets of nutrition requirements. The first, established during World War Two, reflected wartime concerns about getting enough food; the War Food Administration required school lunches that received donated commodities to provide one third of the Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs) for protein, calories, and a short list of vitamins and minerals. The standard of one third of RDAs was transferred into the permanent program when the National School Lunch Act was passed in 1946. By the 1980s, however, health concerns had shifted from a focus on deficiency diseases to the perils of overconsumption; critics charged that school menus were high in fat and saturated fat and pointed out that the Department of Agriculture was not following its own dietary guidelines. Legislation passed in the mid 1990s required school meals to conform to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, specifically to reduce fat to no more than 30% of total calories and saturated fat to 10% or below.

It turns out that reducing fat to 30% or less of calories while maintaining the minimum number of calories needed to supply one third of the RDAs is no easy job. In short, if you reduce the fat, it is hard to meet the calorie minimums, at least within the financial constraints typically faced by school menus. An additional serving of vegetables, the element in which American diets are most glaringly deficient, would usually fill the calorie gap, but it is beyond the financial reach of most schools. The quickest, least expensive fix, and the one that seems to be routinely recommended by state reviewers when they encounter the calorie deficit, is to add sugar! Sweetened, flavored milks have become a staple of the cafeteria, and desserts are making a comeback.. State reviewers assess the menus in each district at least once every five years, but they see their mission has helping school to comply, not as challenging the contradictions built into the rules. A culture of compliance interferes with common sense.

The nutrition standards, while demanding, are a piece of cake compared to the task of managing the free/reduced price/ full price structure. Applications must be distributed and retrieved; getting them back is often a struggle. Last year the New York City Department of Education held a raffle which could be entered only by submission of a completed school meal application form; the grand prize, donated by the New York Jets, was an all expense paid trip for two to the pro bowl in Hawaii. Once the applications are complete, schools are required to verify the information provided on a random sample equivalent to 3% of the applications submitted, a task for which they assert that they are singularly ill equipped. And once eligibility is established, each meal must be assigned to the proper reimbursement category. The labor costs of carrying out this federal mandate are substantial, but the penalties for mistakes are also significant. The state agencies that supervise school food programs conduct detailed audits at least once every five years, and can withhold reimbursements for claims that can not be substantiated. As a result, many school food service operations have invested in elaborate software that allows cashiers to identify each child’s category with a combination of swipe card and picture i.d.. The swipe card tells the cashier which category of lunch should be claimed, and the picture, which appears on the computer screen, allows the cashier to make sure that the card is being used by the right child.

THE 3 RS OF SCHOOL FOOD REFORM

What can be done to untangle the ABCs of school food and free the school food service to do its job? The efforts of local activists need to be supported and supplemented by changes at the federal level.

1 .REGULATE A LA CARTE and other competitive foods. The existing regulations are so minimal as to be laughable and in some cases counterproductive. They prevent schools from selling seltzer, but not chips, cookies or chocolate bars. To its credit, USDA tried to regulate foods sold in vending machines and elsewhere on campus, but lost in court in a suit brought by soda distributors. Now a bill introduced by Tom Harkin would give USDA the authority and the obligation to promulgate new standards. The soda and snack food industries are rumored to be open to federal rules because a single set of federal standards is easier to manage than 50 sets legislated by the states.

2 .RAISE THE REIMBURSEMENT RATES. Increase the federal subsidy across the board–enough to make “full price” meals an attractive alternative to more students and to permit more fresh preparation, more whole foods, more local procurement. In fact, an increase could be tied to these environmentally, socially and nutritionally desirable practices. Adjusting the free and reduced price meal reimbursement rates to mirror local costs could also help, though it might be cumbersome.

3. Remove Stigma: Free the School Lunch Program. Eliminating the Reduced Price category and making those children eligible for free meals has been urged by the School Nutrition Association, and Congress authorized a pilot program to test this approach in the last Child Nutrition Reauthorization,(2004) but has failed to fund it. It certainly merits a try. The reform that would really make a difference, however, would be to feed all of the children a nourishing lunch for free. Close the cafeterias, eliminate the a la carte, remove the vending machines, and make lunch a regular part of the school day, currently the practice in both Sweden and Norway. Without a la carte competition, menu planners would be free to incorporate healthier options, and with more affluent children participating in the meal, more parents with more clout will care about the food, and meal quality will improve. With lunch a regular part of the school day, integration with the curriculum would be far easier, so serious nutrition education would be reinforced, not contradicted, during the lunch period. Obviously this would increase the federal cost, but it would also eliminate scads of essentially unproductive labor involved in managing the current absurd system. There is indeed no such thing as a free lunch; the fundamental issue is who pays, and how, and that is a social choice that we need to reconsider. What could be more important than the way we feed our children?