The Schoolyard Foodie: Feeding our future one meal at a time

The Schoolyard Foodie: Feeding our future one meal at a time

Look. I’m an American too. I love apple pie, The Cosby Show reruns, and Born To Run-era Bruce Springsteen as much as the next person. But I despise some of the habits that we’ve developed here in America. Whether it’s excessive amounts of television, coffee, alcohol, or Walmart, addiction is part of our national inheritance.
Take that, Sysco.

Take that, Sysco.

Twelve step programs have evolved to address a wide range of addictions. I am proposing that we adopt a 12-step program to help public schools rid themselves of our systematic addiction to processed industrial food. (And I stuck with the “our” pronoun for a reason—that’s right, buddy—it’s your problem too).

Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over processed industrial food–that our lives had become unmanageable.

I’ll be the first to admit that I actually enjoy the short relief that a fried corn dog brings after a stressful morning without a snack (though I’m more ambivalent about the stomach cramps that follow). But until we accept that our schools are making our children fatter, sicker, and less food conscious, we cannot begin to work together to change what we our feeding our future.

I can’t tell you how common it is to find a school district that believes that simply because they are adhering to USDA standards—serving meals without transfats and following the food pyramid—they are serving ‘nutritious’ lunches.

Step 2: We came to believe that there is a power greater than Sysco that can feed our children for $2.67 a day.

We must demand that our school boards, city council, and unions advocate for policies that empower young people to choose a diet that is nutritious and environmentally sustainable. One such policy would be build scratch kitchens in every school, a place where locally grown food is cooked closer to the mouths that eat it, by people who know the community for which they are cooking. This means connecting to local farmers, local restaurants, and paying livable wages to those in charge of preparing and serving the food.

You may be familiar with what Alice Waters and Ann Cooper have achieved in the Berkeley Unified School District. They have seeded an example worthy of praise. If you were to visit the students during lunch at King Middle School in Berkeley, you would observe a state of the art industrial kitchen, an eating area that feels more like a church than a school lunch room, and most importantly, an adjacent cooking/gardening program that every student participates in during the regular school day. The students do not simply swipe a card and voila! food magically appears in front of them; it is part of their curriculum to spend time in the kitchen and garden.

Step 3: We made a decision as a community to turn our will to a diet that is not handcuffed by federal food subsidies.

Food subsidies are determined by the federal farm bill that is authorized each year by Congress. The USDA’s stated goal is “to meet the needs of farmers and ranchers, promote agricultural trade and production, work to assure food safety, protect natural resources, foster rural communities and end hunger in the United States and abroad.”

Kind of deep that there’s not one reference to health, nutrition, or education, hey?

In Foodfight, The Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill, Daniel Imhoff writes, “The farm bill’s distorted structure is far beyond a dietary crisis…Commodity farms lose money by growing corn, cotton, only to be compensated by those losses by federal subsidies.” Thus, commodity farms are encouraged to grow even bigger, local farms are unable to compete, and communities (read: schools) are bullied into relying on processed industrial food.

And as our farmers move further away from our kitchens, it requires more energy, more transportation, and more engineering for food to get to our plates.

That’s not the diet that I want for America’s future.

Check back on Wednesday, April 29th for the next steps of my 12-step recovery program. And in the meantime—be sure to educate yourselves on the proposed federal law, HR 875, which would make it illegal to grow organic food!