Disparities in School Lunch

If you’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird [2], you might remember the scene in which Scout beats up Walter Cunningham in the schoolyard. It’s the first day of school and Scout’s teacher, Miss Caroline, is not from Maycomb. She doesn’t understand just how hard the Great Depression has hit the farmers of southern Alabama. So she innocently offers Walter a quarter to buy lunch in town. He refuses. As Scout explains he’s a Cunningham, and Cunninghams never take anything they can’t pay back. Every student at my school is eligible for free lunch this year, so they understand Walter’s situation. But what they don’t understand is “why other students get to go off campus for lunch and we don’t?”

Little do my students realize being able to eat lunch on campus was once a sign of progress. In 1946, the first version of the National School Lunch Act [3] was created as a way to make use of the surplus foods farmers produced but were unable to sell. This benefitted many hungry children and, of course, the educators trying to teach them. Every teacher knows that a hungry student has a shorter attention span, feels alternately sleepy and agitated and may even be developmentally delayed if malnourished. Had Walter started school just a few years later, he might have been able to benefit from the National School Lunch Act with little shame.

My students would maybe appreciate their on-campus lunch better if they understood the history. They might be shocked to learn that it wasn’t always possible to eat breakfast, lunch and even an after-school snack on campus. But more importantly, students would embrace their meals if those meals seemed more like food. No ill intent is meant for the hard-working employees of school cafeterias who have no control over the menu. But students are hard pressed to believe that school lunch is any healthier than the fast food options they prefer [4]. This year I’ve seen more and more students skip lunch altogether. Even worse, they stock up on junk food from the corner store before coming to school. At least there they have choice over what junk they put in their body. 

The seniors at our school have become so fed up with lunchtime that they have begun selling homemade food. Some days there’s posole. Other days papusas. We’ve seen tostadas and agua frescas, fresh fruit with chile. They know that in nearby Berkeley [5], a district with many low-income students as well, schools have a much better school lunch program [6] piloted by the mother of California cuisine Alice Waters [6] herself. A few years ago I took a group of students on a field trip to the Edible Schoolyard [7] garden at Martin Luther King Middle School. My students wandered the grounds of the lush and beautiful garden, saw the outdoor wood-fired pizza oven and toured the immaculate kitchen stations used for food preparation and instruction. “Why can’t we have this,” they asked.

Early federal aid for school lunches states that “the children who could not pay for their meals would not be segregated or discriminated against and would not be identified to their peers.” But there’s a difference between what kids eat at affluent schools and what they eat at Title I [8] schools like the one where I teach. At nearby Piedmont High School, the only secondary building in the affluent city of Piedmont, students have the option of eating at the Piper Café [9]. One of the daily options is a spinach salad with dried cranberries, red onion, feta and balsamic vinaigrette. At our school, students can have an iceberg lettuce salad with ranch dressing. Food discrimination is alive and well.

Why can’t every child have healthy and delicious options at school? This is the question President and Mrs. Obama have been asking too, which led to the signing of the new National Hunger-Free Kids Act [10] last month. Hopefully this legislation will begin to change the sad reality of school lunch in poor schools.

If your school already has a healthy school lunch program, what did it take to make it happen? Hungry students and their teachers want to know.

Thomas is an English teacher in California.