The New York Times ran an article this weekend about San Francisco teenagers who are eligible for free school lunches but would rather go hungry than be seen eating the food the school district makes available to them.
It was only a few weeks ago that we heard about the tens of millions of pounds of recalled beef that had already been served as part of school lunches. Most of the kids I know won't go near the lunches served at their schools because they're nasty, not because they're free.
The school lunch program started in the 1930's as a way to use agricultural surpluses. In 1946 Congress passed the National School Lunch Act, making the program permanent and establishing minimal nutritional requirements.
Throughout its history, the program has struggled to balance its mission to provide low cost nutrition to low income children with the reality of having to use cheap, industrial ingredients.
There's been talk lately about upgrading the system. Here in Washington the Olympia school district has successfully implemented a a plan to use local and organic ingedients, and there's a bill currently working its way through the state legislature aimed at bringing local, organic produce into the school lunch program. But most local farms are too small to meet the school district's needs, and the system to date has been too streamlined to match individual farms with individual schools.
The school lunch program is broken because the whole mainstream food system in this country is broken. Fix the system of agricultural subsidies, and fix the practice of mass producing low quality staples and shipping them long distances, and the school lunch program will fix itself.
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