Poppendieck - Free for all : fixing school food in America

Free for All

CALIFORNIA STUDIES IN FOOD AND CULTURE

Darra Goldstein, Editor

FIXING SCHOOL FOOD IN AMERICA

Janet Poppendieck

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University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

2010 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Poppendieck, Janet, 1945.

Free for all : fixing school food in America / Janet Poppendieck.

p. cm. (California studies in food and culture; 28)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-24370-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. National school lunch program. 2. School breakfast programsUnited States. 3. School childrenFoodUnited States. 4. ChildrenNutritionUnited States. I. Title. II. Title: Fixing school food in America.

LB3479.U6P55 2010

371.7160973dc22 2009015369

Manufactured in the United States of America

19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.

For my daughter, Amanda

I am grateful to the many people who have helped me along the journey represented by this book. First, I want to thank the food service director and staff at the school I call Any Town High School, who must remain anonymous. Your generosity and candor were essential to helping me understand the realities of school food. And so were the time and insights of all of the people that I interviewedfood service staff, legislators, advocates, innovators, parents, teachers, administrators, students, and the staff and leadership of the School Nutrition Association. Very busy people with many demanding responsibilities took time to teach me about school food. I interviewed many more people than I quoted, so not all of you will find your names in these pages, but rest assured that you all contributed to my understanding.

Between me and the people I interviewed, there were often intermediaries, people who helped me find the folks who could tell me the real story. In this role, I particularly want to thank Mark Winne, Bernie Beaudreau, Bill Flynn, Dorigen Keeney, Frank Fear, Jonathan Osorio, Joyce Lowry, Toni Liquori, Matt Sharp, Ken Hecht, Martha Lee, Sandy Sheedy, and, in Sweden, Annika Wesslen.

Librarians at Hunter College and the University of California, Santa Cruz were unfailingly helpful, and the staff of the wonderful Child Nutrition Archives at the National Food Service Management Institute steered me toward many useful sources in my brief time there. I am also grateful to the staff at USDA who answered my many questions by phone and e-mail, and particularly to John Endahl for finding and sending studies of schools that had withdrawn from the National School Lunch Program. I thank the staff at the Womens Center for Education and Career Advancement in New York City for using the sophisticated computer models of the Self Sufficiency Standard to model school food affordability for me.

Colleagues and students have provided support for this endeavor since its inception. Im grateful to both the members of the Agfood Seminar and to my temporary colleagues in the Community Studies Department, both at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for stimulating and thought-provoking discussions and for encouraging this project during the sabbatical semester I spent there. UC Santa Cruz was where I first asked students to write their school food memories for me, and I am grateful to those who did so, and to Mary Beth Pudup for permitting me to distribute a brief questionnaire in her large class. I continued to collect such memories when I returned to Hunter College, and I am also indebted to Mary Summers at the University of Pennsylvania, Kathleen Gorman at the University of Rhode Island, and Lisa Heldke at Gustavus Adolphus College for arranging for me to collect such memoirs from their students. I want to thank all the students for their candor and humor.

At my home base in New York, Im grateful to the City University of New York Foodways Seminar organized by Jonathan Deutsch, Annie Hauck Lawson, and Babette Audant for an attentive hearing early in the process. Colleagues at Hunter also listened attentively at a departmental brown bag, asked good questions, and then took the initiative to pass along useful items of interest. Thanks to Nancy Foner, Margaret Chin, Jack Levinson, and Ruth Sidel for such thoughtfulness, to all of my colleagues for a helpful level of interest in this project, to Rick Zdan for stepping up to the plate at a crucial moment, and to my department chair, Robert Perinbanaygam, for a course release when I needed it most. More recently, Nick Freudenburg and colleagues in the Hunter College School of Public Health provided useful feedback and an opportunity to gain insights from colleagues in London through a joint CUNYLondon Metropolitan University project on responses to childhood obesity. I am also grateful to the Hunter College Institutional Review Board and the Office of Research Administration under the leadership of Bob Buckley for able administration of grant funds and the protocols for the protection of human subjects.

The W. K. Kellogg Foundation, through the good offices of Gail Imig and Rick Foster, provided generous support for the travel necessitated by this research and for release from teaching at crucial points. I am grateful both for the funds and for the expression of faith in the project that they represented. I am also grateful to the Kellogg Foundation for including me in several of their annual Food and Society convocations, which gave me an opportunity to learn more about innovations in school food and much more about the food system context. And I am grateful to the Kellogg Fellows Leadership Alliance for its ongoing interest in this project.

Those funds from the Kellogg Foundation also made possible some student research assistance, and additional research assistance was provided as part of a course requirement in the nutrition program at Teachers College, Columbia. In alphabetical order, I am grateful to JC Dwyer, Natali Gonzalez, Thomael Joannidis, Cara Nemchek, and Ina Tsagaraskis. I am also grateful to Hunter College graduate students S. M. Burke, Biana Perelshteyn, and Sylwia Struk, who wrote papers on aspects of school food that added to my understanding.

The tapes of my interviews were transcribed with exceptional care, patience, and speed by Christian Peet and Lynn du Hoffmann, both of whom also contributed useful ideas and welcome encouragement.