The Labor of Lunch

Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools

Jennifer E. Gaddis

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780520971592
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica pubblica a livello agricolo

There's a problem with school lunch in America. Big Food companies have largely replaced the nation's school cooks by supplying cafeterias with cheap, precooked hamburger patties and chicken nuggets chock-full of industrial fillers. Yet it's no secret that meals cooked from scratch with nutritious, locally sourced ingredients are better for children, workers, and the environment. So why not empower "lunch ladies" to do more than just unbox and reheat factory-made food? And why not organize together to make healthy, ethically sourced, free school lunches a reality for all children? The Labor of Lunch aims to spark a progressive movement that will transform food in American schools, and with it the lives of thousands of low-paid cafeteria workers and the millions of children they feed. By providing a feminist history of the US National School Lunch Program, Jennifer E. Gaddis recasts the humble school lunch as an important and often overlooked form of public care. Through vivid narration and moral heft, The Labor of Lunch offers a stirring call to action and a blueprint for school lunch reforms capable of delivering a healthier, more equitable, caring, and sustainable future.

ONE

The Radical Roots of School Lunch

Free lunches for all. School gardens. Cooking classes. Canning and food preservation workshops. Health, nutrition, and biology classes that spark children’s curiosity and widen their ability to think across disciplines through the experiential study of food and agriculture. Children participating in the labor of lunch, learning from and building relationships with well-trained, adequately compensated adults in a community economy of care. Family and neighborhood engagement. This was all part of Emma Smedley’s vision for a nonprofit school lunch program that would operate not as “a mere appendage of the educational system” but rather as “one of the arteries through which the active blood of co-operation runs.”¹ While these lofty aspirations sound like the goals of today’s school lunch advocates, Smedley, one of the most influential leaders of the nonprofit school lunch movement, was writing about them back in 1920.

Smedley’s name has been lost to history, yet her vision is remarkably modern. She’d fit right in with Alice Waters, the famed chef, author, and sustainable-food activist who launched an online pledge for public education at the beginning of the 2018 school year. On the webpage announcing the pledge, Waters describes cafeterias as “the heart of our schools.”² It’s almost as if Waters is calling forth the ghost of Emma Smedley, heart metaphor and all, to urge the American public to recognize and elevate the status of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). The campaign asks individuals and organizations to promote the values of nourishment, stewardship, and community by pledging their support for free, sustainable lunches made with food purchased directly from farmers and ranchers who take care of the land and their workers.³

Transforming the NSLP in the way Waters proposes offers a path to begin living out a democratic ethos of care that extends beyond the walls of our public schools to the farms, ranches, and fisheries that turn “nature” into food. But if Smedley and her compatriots were unsuccessful a century ago, when opposition from ingrained political interests and Big Food companies was much less severe, what hope do present-day activists have in finally realizing the full power and potential of public school lunch programs?

I, for one, am optimistic. The time I’ve spent over the last seven years learning from leaders working to create a new economy of care within the NSLP has left me with a strong sense of just how widespread the desire for change actually is. This isn’t a “fringe” movement. Thousands of dedicated parents, school lunch workers, public health advocates, local food activists, and nonprofit organizations are already engaged in this work. Their school lunch reform agendas span a range of interrelated topics, including public health, racial justice, economic development, workers’ rights, and environmental sustainability. These issues are also bound up within what feminist scholars call “social reproduction,” defined by Giovanna Di Chiro as the “intersecting complex of political-economic, socio-cultural, and material-environmental processes required to maintain everyday life and to sustain human cultures and communities on a daily basis and intergenerationally.” ⁴ That includes care work, a form of reproductive labor that keeps people clothed, sheltered, and fed. Without it, daily life wouldn’t be possible.

How the reproductive labor necessary for social reproduction should be organized (who should do it and how much it’s worth) and the desirability of “cheap food” economies have long been debated. For well over a century, the premise that social reproduction should be cheap, if not free, has driven down standards of care and limited the power and possibility of public school lunch programs. It’s meant that the workers (mostly women) who care for children are paid poverty wages in districts that aren’t unionized. And it has allowed school lunch to remain semiprivatized, while the “educational” side of public schools is paid for collectively. Math, English, and a host of other academic subjects are offered to children free of charge, but when they walk through the cafeteria doors, any façade of egalitarianism fades. No one expects a math teacher to collect children’s fees at the classroom door. Cafeteria workers, on the other hand, must sort children according to their eligibility for free, reduced-price, or paid lunches and charge them accordingly.

In many ways, the history of school lunch in America reflects the gender, racial, urban, and class politics of the twentieth century. Any strategy for reforming school lunch will necessarily be limited if we do not take the time to first understand the intersectionality of social problems that allowed the NSLP’s cheap-food economy to arise in the first place. Learning about the history of school lunch activism—and what the labor of lunch looked like at various points in school lunch history—can help today’s generation of school lunch activists identify the root causes of injustice within the NSLP and organize for a better future.

THE PROGRESSIVE ORIGINS OF THE NSLP

While not always recognized as such, the NSLP is the product of generations of women’s activism. It didn’t spontaneously arise in 1946, with the passage of the National School Lunch Act, as a beneficent social service for American schoolchildren. It has a history—and a feminist one at that. For over a hundred years, reformers—most of them women—have fought to decommercialize childhood and establish new forms of public caregiving as an alternative to the for-profit vendors and private households that would otherwise supply the labor of lunch.⁵ In many ways, the school lunch debates of the Progressive Era were an ideological battleground over the appropriate role of government in family life and, relatedly, the position of women in society vis-à-vis their responsibility for performing unpaid care work in the home.

Early school lunch reformers like Emma Smedley did not always self-identify as feminists or conceptualize themselves as belonging to a larger “nonprofit school lunch movement,” as I refer to it, but that’s what their efforts amounted to. They worked for the greater good in a spirit of shared enterprise to reimagine the labor of lunch—and care more broadly—not as a private, gendered responsibility, but as a public necessity. The movement began in the 1890s, when reformers created charitable lunch programs for the extremely poor. The “penny lunch” programs that followed served even more children, and by the end of World War I, nonprofit lunch programs were flourishing across the nation. This expansion of public care was a concrete result of Progressive Era activism that historians call “maternalist,” because it was led by women and focused on traditionally female spheres of influence: home and family.⁶ Shrouded in the respectability of maternalism, these same reformers led bold campaigns for a more caring state, calling on governments at all levels to protect workers, families, and the environment from the destructive forces of unregulated capitalism.⁷

Feeding children was but one piece of a much larger economy of care that they aimed to renegotiate by altering and innovating the material infrastructure involved in satisfying real and concrete caring tasks. Public kitchens and laundries, cooperative housekeeping, kindergartens, and public school lunch programs were, for these reformers, tactics for addressing the economic and spatial issues that made homes, neighborhoods, and cities oppressive for women and unhealthy for everyone. Urban historian Dolores Hayden situates this activism within a longer lineage of material feminist activism stretching from the end of the Civil War to the onset of the Great Depression.⁸ Key to the material feminists’ theory of social change was the belief that housewives should be recognized as workers within the capitalist system—just like the many working-class women who toiled in sweatshops, canneries, and slaughterhouses—even though their labor happens to be unpaid and in the home. The women who put in long hours caring for their families—tending to the needs of children and husbands, regenerating their bodies, minds, and souls for a new day at school or work—should be the ones to decide how concrete activities of care are organized. In making such a claim, material feminists brought the language and goals of labor organizing and trade unionism to individual women’s homes.

They organized together to build a more just, caring, and healthy society. Their stories offer not only a history of the present—teaching us how the “status quo” came into being—but also a warning to never lose sight of the feminist potential of school lunch. Take Ellen Swallow Richards, the first woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example. Her many claims to fame include founding the field of home economics in the early 1900s and earning a place in 1951 as a “Wonder Woman of History” in the DC Comics franchise. She was the brains behind America’s first nonprofit school lunch program. In 1894, the Boston School Committee hired Richards and her nutritionist-friend Mary Hinman Abel to supply school lunches for several of the city’s neediest schools. They oversaw production at the New England Kitchen, which they’d founded in 1890 as a public laboratory kitchen and takeaway shop designed to use the latest technology and scientific knowledge to provide healthy, safe, affordable meals for the masses. They met those goals. Thrifty purchasing, streamlined menu planning, energy-efficient cooking, and centralized production kept costs low. But simply making food affordable and available doesn’t mean everyone will actually want to eat it. By all accounts, the New England Kitchen’s bland, institutional meals were a tough sell.

Even “Wonder Women” stumble. The patronizing, ethnocentric undertone of “bringing good food to others” that haunts the contemporary food movement has roots extending at least as far as Richards and Abel’s community kitchen.⁹ The working-class immigrants they had originally hoped to feed didn’t have much appetite for the “Yankee” foods served at the New England Kitchen.¹⁰ So Richards and Abel jumped at the opportunity to serve a new, younger, and perhaps more impressionable group of eaters in the local schools. If they could get immigrant children to like these foods, new attitudes toward their “scientific” way of eating might just trickle up to their parents. And if not, at least they would be protecting kids from profit-seeking street vendors who sold goods laden with copious amounts of salt, fat, sugar, and germs.

In an early precursor to the type of school wellness policies now mandated by the federal government, Richards and other members of the Boston School Committee crafted a policy in 1894 stipulating that “only such food as was approved by them should be sold in the city school houses.”¹¹ Scientifically nutritious, sanitary, affordable foods that could be eaten quickly and digested easily—the New England Kitchen’s specialty—were precisely what the committee was looking for. Best of all, the city wouldn’t need to build kitchens in the schools since all the food could be prepared offsite in the New England Kitchen and transported to the schools. And since the whole operation was run as a not-for-profit, the kids could get higher quality food at a cheaper price.

This phenomenon of educated women inserting themselves in city politics to fight for new forms of public provisioning had a name: “municipal housekeeping.” Drawing on maternalist political discourse, so-called municipal housekeepers argued that the ability for mothers to protect their homes and care well for their families required them to exercise their moral authority in the public sphere.¹² Universal education, pure food, clean water, fresh air, and sanitary streets were necessary for their ability to survive well, and they should not be viewed as somehow disconnected from the home or the “women’s sphere,” the thinking went.¹³ What’s more, they turned women’s status as caretakers for children, husbands, and the elderly into a badge of honor that rendered them uniquely suited for “keeping house” at the city scale.

For women—even the relatively privileged white women from the upper and middle classes—such a political undertaking would be doomed at the onset unless they built collective power. They didn’t yet have the right to vote, yet there they were, making demands on the city and state officials in charge of public works.¹⁴ Luckily, they knew better than to go it alone. Tens of thousands of women joined clubs, aid societies, and parent-teacher associations. Together they experimented with new forms of care infrastructure that would make homes, neighborhoods, and cities healthier and more enjoyable for everyone. The public parks, public libraries, community kitchens, public baths, public laundries, nonprofit public school lunch programs, cooperative purchasing clubs, kindergartens, and settlement houses that opened their doors in American cities were the result of their efforts.

At the same time, Progressive Era activists pursued legal protections for women and child workers who toiled on farms and in factories. Their efforts to secure children’s access to free public education worked: from 1890 to 1920, while the number of school-aged children in the United States increased by 49 percent, school enrollments increased by 70 percent.¹⁵ Compulsory education promised not only to protect children from the grit and vice of city life but also to mold them into adults capable of participating in a socie...