Food Fight

The unreal school lunch debate

Virginia Postrel from the June 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

I was struck by the series because its urban findings exactly matched what my brother had seen as a medical student doing free exams in rural South Carolina. He had patients, including grossly obese children, whose medical problems stemmed from eating hot dogs all day long. Today's poor Americans do not have the gaunt, hungry look of Haitians, Cubans, or Depression- era Appalachians. They are, if anything, quite fat.

And regulations and subsidies, the favorite recipe of people like Rep. Hall, are unlikely to solve that problem. In its current form, the school lunch program serves mainly to create jobs for licensed nutritionists and bureaucratic overseers. Having left behind collards and fish sticks, it now serves meals that mirror the poverty diet of fat- and- salt- drenched convenience food.

Loosening controls might, however, do some good. It would allow schools to experiment in ways that could actually teach kids how to make meals without benefit of professional help.

Making a hot lunch is complicated; even turning out the horrors of my elementary school's lunch room requires expertise. Making a cold lunch is simple. The ingredients are obvious, the equipment limited to ordinary cutlery. Feeding children from disorganized families a simple lunch--a model of meals that they could make themselves--would provide not only food but education. And, who knows, some radical innovators might even fire the kitchen staff and let the kids spread their own peanut butter.

But even imagining that possibility requires getting outside the Washington box. You first have to think of lunch as real.