School Food Politics

This book has received the AESA (American Educational Studies Association) Critics Choice Award 2012. The essays in School Food Politics explore the intersections of food and politics on all six of the inhabited continents of the world. Including electoral fights over universally free school meals in Korea, nutritional reforms to school dinners in England and canteens in Australia, teachers' and doctors' work on school feeding in Argentina, and more, the volume provides key illustrations of the many contexts that have witnessed intense struggles defining which children will eat; why; what and how they are served; and who will pay for and prepare the food. Contributors include reformers writing from their own perspectives, from the farm-to-school program in Burlington, Vermont, to efforts to apply principles of critical pedagogy in cooking programs for urban teens, to animal rights curriculum. Later chapters shift their focus to possibilities and hope for a different future for school food, one that is friendlier to students, «lunch ladies, » society, other creatures, and the planet.

We all witness, in advertising and on supermarket shelves, the fierce competition for our food dollars. In this engrossing exposé, Marion Nestle goes behind the scenes to reveal how the competition really works and how it affects our health. The abundance of food in the United States--enough calories to meet the needs of every man, woman, and child twice over--has a downside. Our over-efficient food industry must do everything possible to persuade people to eat more--more food, more often, and in larger portions--no matter what it does to waistlines or well-being. Like manufacturing cigarettes or building weapons, making food is big business. Food companies in 2000 generated nearly $900 billion in sales. They have stakeholders to please, shareholders to satisfy, and government regulations to deal with. It is nevertheless shocking to learn precisely how food companies lobby officials, co-opt experts, and expand sales by marketing to children, members of minority groups, and people in developing countries. We learn that the food industry plays politics as well as or better than other industries, not least because so much of its activity takes place outside the public view. Editor of the 1988 Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health, Nestle is uniquely qualified to lead us through the maze of food industry interests and influences. She vividly illustrates food politics in action: watered-down government dietary advice, schools pushing soft drinks, diet supplements promoted as if they were First Amendment rights. When it comes to the mass production and consumption of food, strategic decisions are driven by economics--not science, not common sense, and certainly not health. No wonder most of us are thoroughly confused about what to eat to stay healthy. An accessible and balanced account, Food Politics will forever change the way we respond to food industry marketing practices. By explaining how much the food industry influences government nutrition policies and how cleverly it links its interests to those of nutrition experts, this path-breaking book helps us understand more clearly than ever before what we eat and why.

Whether kids love or hate the food served there, the American school lunchroom is the stage for one of the most popular yet flawed social welfare programs in our nation's history. School Lunch Politics covers this complex and fascinating part of American culture, from its origins in early twentieth-century nutrition science, through the establishment of the National School Lunch Program in 1946, to the transformation of school meals into a poverty program during the 1970s and 1980s. Susan Levine investigates the politics and culture of food; most specifically, who decides what American children should be eating, what policies develop from those decisions, and how these policies might be better implemented. Even now, the school lunch program remains problematic, a juggling act between modern beliefs about food, nutrition science, and public welfare. Levine points to the program menus' dependence on agricultural surplus commodities more than on children's nutritional needs, and she discusses the political policy barriers that have limited the number of children receiving meals and which children were served. But she also shows why the school lunch program has outlasted almost every other twentieth-century federal welfare initiative. In the midst of privatization, federal budget cuts, and suspect nutritional guidelines where even ketchup might be categorized as a vegetable, the program remains popular and feeds children who would otherwise go hungry. As politicians and the media talk about a national obesity epidemic, School Lunch Politics is a timely arrival to the food policy debates shaping American health, welfare, and equality. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

What's wrong with the US food system? Why is half the world starving while the other half battles obesity? Who decides our food issues, and why can't we do better with labeling, safety, or school food? These are complex questions that are hard to answer in an engaging way for a broad audience. But everybody eats, and food politics affects us all. Marion Nestle, whom Michael Pollan ranked as the #2 most powerful foodie in America (after Michelle Obama) in Forbes, has always used cartoons in her public presentations to communicate how politics—shaped by government, corporate marketing, economics, and geography—influences food choice. Cartoons do more than entertain; the best get right to the core of complicated concepts and powerfully convey what might otherwise take pages to explain. In Eat Drink Vote, Nestle teams up with The Cartoonist Group syndicate to present more than 250 of her favorite cartoons on issues ranging from dietary advice to genetic engineering to childhood obesity. Using the cartoons as illustration and commentary, she engagingly summarizes some of today's most pressing issues in food politics. While encouraging readers to vote with their forks for healthier diets, this book insists that it's also necessary to vote with votes to make it easier for everyone to make healthier dietary choices.

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.

In a lively and easy-to-navigate, question-and-answer format, Food Politics carefully examines and explains the most important issues on today's global food landscape.

How to successfully challenge and transform public school-food programs to emphasize care, justice, and sustainability, with insights from eight countries across the Global North and South. School food programs are about more than just feeding kids. They are a form of community care and a policy tool for advancing education, health, justice, food sovereignty, and sustainability. Transforming School Food Politics around the World illustrates how everyday people from a diverse range of global contexts have successfully challenged and changed programs that fall short of these ideals. Editors Jennifer Gaddis and Sarah A. Robert highlight the importance of global and local struggles to argue that the transformative potential of school food hinges on valuing the gendered labor that goes into caring for, feeding, and educating children. Through accessible and inspiring essays, Transforming School Food Politics around the World shows politics in action. Chapter contributors include youths, mothers, teachers, farmers, school nutrition workers, academics, lobbyists, policymakers, state employees, nonprofit staff, and social movement activists. Drawing from historical and contemporary research, personal experiences, and collaborations with community partners, they provide readers with innovative strategies that can be used in their own efforts to change school food policy and systems. Ultimately, this volume sets the stage to reimagine school food as part of the infrastructure of daily life, arguing that it can and should be at the vanguard of building a new economy rooted in care for people and the environment.

School Food, Equity and Social Justice provides contemporary, critical examinations of policies and practices relating to food in schools across 25 countries from an equity and social justice perspective. The book is divided into three sections: Food politics and policies; Sustainability and development; and, Teaching and learning about food. Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of academics with practitioner backgrounds, the chapters in this collection broaden discussions on school food to consider its educational and environmental implications, the ideals of food in schools, the emotional and ideological components of schooling food, and the relationships with home and everyday life. Our aim is to provide enhanced insight into matters of social justice in diverse contexts, and visions of how greater equality and equity may be achieved through school food policy and in school food programs. We expect this book to become essential reading for students, researchers and policy makers in health education, health promotion, educational practice and policy, public health, nutrition and social justice education.