Fed Up With Lunch The School Lunch Project

The teacher who ate a school lunch for an entire year and chronicled her experience anoymously on a blog argues for school lunch reform and improvement in the nutritional content of the food served to growing children.

When school teacher Mrs. Q forgot her lunch one day, she had no idea she was about to embark on an odyssey to uncover the truth about public school lunches. Shocked by what her students were served, she resolved to eat school lunch for an entire year, chronicling her experience anonymously on a blog that received thousands of hits daily, and was lauded by such food activists as Mark Bittman, Jamie Oliver, and Marion Nestle. Here, Mrs. Q reveals her identity for the first time in an eye-opening account of school lunches in America. Along the way, she provides invaluable resources for parents and health advocates who wish to help reform school lunch, making this a must-read for anyone concerned about children's health issues.

There's a battle going on in school lunchrooms around the country...and it's a battle our children can't afford for us to lose. The average kid will eat 4,000 school lunches between kindergarten and twelfth grade. But what exactly are kids eating in school lunchrooms around the country? Many parents don't quite know what their children are eating-or where it came from. As award-winning filmmaker and nutritionist Amy Kalafa discovered in researching her documentary film Two Angry Moms: Fighting for the Health of America's Children, these days it's pretty rare to find a piece of fresh fruit in your average school lunchroom amid all the chips, french fries, Pop-Tarts, chicken nuggets, and soda that's being served. But what, if anything, can parents do about it? Written in response to the onslaught of requests she received from parents who saw her film and asked, "If I want to attempt to change the food culture in my kid's school, how on earth should I get started?!" this empowering book arms parents with the specific information and tools they need to get unhealthy-even dangerous-food out of their children's school cafeteria and to hold their schools and local and national governments accountable for ensuring that their growing children are served healthy meals at school. In Lunch Wars, Kalafa explains all the complicated issues surrounding school food; how to work with your school's "Wellness Policy"; the basics of self- operated vs. outsourced cafeterias; how to get funding for a school garden, and much more. Lunch Wars also features the inspiring stories of parents around the country who have fought for better school food and have won, as well as details Amy's quest to spark a revolution in her own school district. For the future health and well-being of our children, the time has come for a school food revolution.

In Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat, historian A. R. Ruis explores the origins of American school meal initiatives to explain why it was (and, to some extent, has continued to be) so difficult to establish meal programs that satisfy the often competing interests of children, parents, schools, health authorities, politicians, and the food industry. Through careful studies of several key contexts and detailed analysis of the policies and politics that governed the creation of school meal programs, Ruis demonstrates how the early history of school meal program development helps us understand contemporary debates over changes to school lunch policies.

A century ago, only local charities existed to feed children. Today 368 million children receive school lunches in 151 countries, in programs supported by state and national governments. In Feeding the Future, Jennifer Geist Rutledge investigates how and why states have assumed responsibility for feeding children, chronicling the origins and spread of school lunch programs around the world, starting with the adoption of these programs in the United States and some Western European nations, and then tracing their growth through the efforts of the World Food Program. The primary focus of Feeding the Future is on social policy formation: how and why did school lunch programs emerge? Given that all countries developed education systems, why do some countries have these programs and others do not? Rutledge draws on a wealth of information—including archival resources, interviews with national policymakers in several countries, United Nations data, and agricultural statistics—to underscore the ways in which a combination of ideological and material factors led to the creation of these enduringly popular policies. She shows that, in many ways, these programs emerged largely as an unintended effect of agricultural policy that rewarded farmers for producing surpluses. School lunches provided a ready outlet for this surplus. She also describes how, in each of the cases of school lunch creation, policy entrepreneurs, motivated by a commitment to alleviate childhood malnutrition, harnessed different ideas that were relevant to their state or organization in order to funnel these agricultural surpluses into school lunch programs. The public debate over how we feed our children is becoming more and more politically charged. Feeding the Future provides vital background to these debates, illuminating the history of food policies and the ways our food system is shaped by global social policy.

This book examines food in the United States in the age of the Internet. One major theme running through the book is business opportunities and failures, as well as the harms to consumers and traditional brick-and-mortar companies that occurred as entrepreneurs tried to take advantage of the Internet to create online companies related to food. The other major theme is the concept of trust online and different models used by different companies to make their web presence seem trustworthy. The book describes a number of major food companies, including AllRecipes, Betty Crocker, Cook's Illustrated, Epicurious, Groupon, OpenTable, and Yelp. The book draws on business history, food studies, and information studies for its approach.​

Formal approaches are those taken by government bodies through laws, court decisions and actions of government regulatory bodies. Informal approaches are those taken by individuals, non profit organizations, industries working at self-regulation, etc. Because the formal means are tied to a particular legal system, this kind of approach is nation-specific and the book focuses on the United States. But many of the things the authors have to say about US food policy and the interactions between formal and informal approaches would also be of interest to policymakers and food industry professionals in other countries. Coverage includes the regulation of food advertising on children's television and the internet, regulation of school lunch programs and the influence of Eleanor Roosevelt and Michelle Obama.

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.