"To those unfamiliar with the absurdist theater of school lunch, it is puzzling, even maddening, that feeding kids nutritious food should be so hard. You buy good food. You cook it. You serve it to hungry kids.
Yet the National School Lunch Program, an $11.7 billion behemoth that feeds more than 31 million children each day, is a mess, and has been for years. Conflicts of interest were built into the program. It was pushed through Congress after World War II with the support of military leaders who wanted to ensure that there would be enough healthy young men to fight the next war, and of farmers who were looking for a place to unload their surplus corn, milk and meat. The result was that schools became the dumping ground for the cheap calories our modern agricultural system was designed to overproduce...
Since the 1990s, the USDA has made many improvements—it now requires that canned vegetables have less salt and insists that ground beef be 95 percent lean. But school lunch is still a disgrace, and the timidity of Congress is largely to blame. In 2011, the USDA proposed limiting the amount of potatoes and other starchy vegetables permitted in school lunches so that cafeterias could make room for healthier options. But the Senate, led by members from two top potato producers, Maine and Colorado, killed the idea in a unanimous vote...
by the early 1960s, schools weren’t receiving enough to feed all their students, and many pulled out of the program. As a result, middle-class students, whose parents could cover the difference between the government subsidy and the actual cost of a meal, ended up benefiting the most from school lunch, while the truly needy went hungry... Once school lunch was perceived as welfare, it became a target...
It’s weirdly beautiful watching one of McCoy’s kitchens at work. At many U.S. schools, the food arrives ready to be reheated. Mixing a jar of commercial sauce into boil-in-the-bag pasta is considered “cooking.” But at Cabell Midland High School, the 18 cooks—all women, all dressed in medical scrubs, all engaged in constant small talk with one another—start arriving at 6 a.m.; it’s the only way to make sure that lunch is ready for the first wave of students who eat at 10:49. Over the course of one morning, I watched two cooks quarter red potatoes and toss them in olive oil with a shake of garlic powder and paprika, then move on to rubbing chicken breasts with a 17-spice seasoning. I saw cooks top rounds of pizza dough with homemade tomato sauce and cheese and mix olive oil and vinegar for salad dressing. (Commercial dressings, packed with sodium and calories, undermine the health benefits of most salads.) One cook’s full-time job consisted of making homemade desserts and fresh bread—fluffy, delicious parkerhouse rolls whose yeasty scent wafted down the school’s hallways...
It’s weirdly beautiful watching one of McCoy’s kitchens at work. At many U.S. schools, the food arrives ready to be reheated. Mixing a jar of commercial sauce into boil-in-the-bag pasta is considered “cooking.” But at Cabell Midland High School, the 18 cooks—all women, all dressed in medical scrubs, all engaged in constant small talk with one another—start arriving at 6 a.m.; it’s the only way to make sure that lunch is ready for the first wave of students who eat at 10:49. Over the course of one morning, I watched two cooks quarter red potatoes and toss them in olive oil with a shake of garlic powder and paprika, then move on to rubbing chicken breasts with a 17-spice seasoning. I saw cooks top rounds of pizza dough with homemade tomato sauce and cheese and mix olive oil and vinegar for salad dressing. (Commercial dressings, packed with sodium and calories, undermine the health benefits of most salads.) One cook’s full-time job consisted of making homemade desserts and fresh bread—fluffy, delicious parkerhouse rolls whose yeasty scent wafted down the school’s hallways."
This was informative #understatements
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