What’s the School Lunch Supposed to Do? A Different Model
Several readers have commented on American school lunches in recent weeks. Never having had direct experience of this iconic daily event, I must admit that it scares me a little. Shoving through a self service line, shoveling down your food (or shoveling it into the trash) and then back to class. Correct me if I am wrong but that’s the impression I have.
I know something of why the American school lunch got going and what happened to it but this is not the moment for repeating what you all know.
I’d just like to talk a bit about a different model, the one I grew up with. I don’t recommend it. I did not like it at the time. But I think it has some lessons for current attempts to reform school lunches.
I went to an English public (that is, private) school. These schools were predominantly for boarders. Day pupils. of which I was one, were a minority, though my school was somewhat unusual in having perhaps 70 day girls in a school of 300.
The day girls had their own dining room, a low-ceilinged semi-basement room in a building a hundred yards or so away from the main school buildings. We filed in and went to a series of long tables, neatly laid with knife and fork and spoon and fork for dessert. Grace was said by one of the teachers (it was an Anglican school).
Then we could sit. The head of the table (usually a teacher) served the meat course–thin slices of roast meat, mince, meat pie, hot pot, standard fare. We passed round the vegetables, almost always potatos in some form–boiled, mashed or roast–and a boiled vegetable in season which meant a lot of cabbage. We also poured water into the glasses. When everyone was served we were allowed to begin.
You had no choice. You could ask for a small and were sometimes allowed it (I had a good line in throwing up and so was allowed it more often than most girls) but in general the idea was that you needed your food. You had to take the vegetables and not in microscopic proportions. And you had to finish everything, like it or not, including the biggest obstacles, fat and gristle.
When everyone had finished, plates were passed to the girl assigned to take them back to the kitchen. The pudding (that is dessert) was brought out and again served from the head of the table. It might be apple pie or apple top hat or a treacle pudding or a chocolate pudding (not cornflour, suet). No smalls, no leftovers. Then plates were passed and the tables were cleared again.
We stood for grace. Then we all filed out and had the rest of the hour to relax before classes began again.
Oh and one other thing. Every girl had to sit next to the teacher on a regular rotating schedule. She was expected to make conversation to the teacher which meant having three polite questions ready to stimulate the interchange. Two were easy. What did you do last school holidays? What are you going to do next school holidays? It was the third that was the real devil. It helped if she had a dog you could ask after.
Here are some thoughts on this kind of school lunch.
1. It was home cooked in the school kitchens from seasonal local (at least the vegetables) fresh and probably organic ingredients though no one worried about that at the time. No cans in those kitchens, certainly no frozen things. It was pretty nutritious. No fried foods appeared, there were lots of vegetables and fruits in the desserts.
Which goes to show that home cooked, local, seasonal, does not equate with delicious (or with gourmet or even, given that at home we ate the same kinds of things infinitely better prepared by our mothers from our own gardens, particularly consciousness raising).
The poor quality wasn’t really anyone’s fault. The cooks were home cooks with a limited repertoire and no one had shown them how to scale up to seventy girls. And traditional English food does not wait well, particularly in unheated buildings.
2. It was designed to teach civilized eating. Table manners were corrected. Conversation was insisted on. This is a useful reminder that the family meal was not, for many children, the only or even the main place for instilling cultural values. And if we were privileged, this also applied to historically to less privileged children who went into service or apprenticeship at age 12 or so. (Boarding schools started younger at 4 or 5).
Is this alternative a good thing? I don’t have strong feeling one way or another.
But to look at the pros, clearly not all families excel at instilling cultural values and manners. And there is something to be said for having access to other families in the society to knit it together and to learn new ways.
3. It was, I believe, supposed to prepare you for a life of service at home (don or head matron) or overseas (wife of a colonial administrator, missionary). With rationing only a few years behind, eating everything was a civic duty. And being able to eat whatever was put in front of you was not, as now, a flamboyant display of extreme eating but a necessary skill for that day someone handed you a sheep’s eye.
And much as I hated this at the time, learning to converse while swallowing food I didn’t particularly like has been more useful than I would have thought. Confession, before going out I still think of three topics of conversation.
3. It was also based, I now realise, on a philosophy that stretched back to Cato and the Stoics in the Roman Republic and before them to the Spartans. This said that in the end food did not matter that much–provided you had the fuel (the well-balanced fuel of course). There were so exciting things that (in this case) a girl could do in this world from marching and playing cricket to translating Dante and writing detective stories to running London hospitals and Cambridge colleges or setting up high schools for girls in rural Africa that fiddling about with gastronomy was on a par with embroidery. Didn’t you want a bigger challenge?
This is a perspective worth considering, I think. I don’t see it as just philistinism. If I were pushed to give my personal view, it’s that since we eat every day we might as well eat as well as we can–up to a point. A good of standard of ordinariness, as the English food writer Jane Grigson almost put it.
I’d be very curious what all of you think.
Rachel, the description of your school lunch is very evocative.
From 1965-1971, I went to a very similar public (i.e. private) school in England, but for boys. My memory is that the food was truly terrible, in fact so terrible that after two years, I started taking sandwiches to school. It was a solution to the food problem, but it did leave me more socially isolated as very few people took sandwiches, so I missed out on the social aspect of eating together, which you comment on.
It was not just the taste but the smell of the food that was so terrible. In particular, I remember a disgusting fish pie, with bones protruding from barely cooked mashed potato, whose smell made me instantly nauseous. And we were under strict instructions to eat everything. Being a boys school, I suspect there was much more institutionalised sadism than at a girls school, so the Masters and older boys took pleasure in forcing people to eat food that they clearly did not want to eat.
Another aspect I remember about these lunches is that every year around Xmas there would be a role reversal, and the prefects would serve the boys. Later, when I was studying sociology, I read (I think it was Erving Goffman’s “Total Institutions”) how this is a typical ritual designed to create order and control, by one day a year, for a limited time only, reversing the normal order of things. Providing this kind of social release on one clearly defined and regulated occasion only, helps cement the order for the rest of the year. Interesting, too, on reflection, that this ritual was centered around the serving and consuming of food.
My experiences with school lunches were different from both the American model and your own experience. I attended elementary, secondary, and one year of high school in the Catholic school system in Ottawa, Canada. There were no cafeterias in elementary schools so lunch was brought from home. What I recall most vividly was that it was less about the food and more about the beginnings of social identity. At the beginning of each school year, I was anxious to choose the right lunch box – the one adorned with Sesame Street characters so popular the previous year was ‘baby-ish’ by the next. Knowing that my mother would buy only one for the rest of the year meant I had to make the right decision.
Lunch was a comparative measure of status – I envied classmates who pulled out small boxes of chocolate milk while I had a plastic bottle of some artificial-fruit-flavored beverage. By the time I reached high school where cafeterias were more common (I attended 3 different schools – a challenge in the clique-based society of adolescence), food was even more of a status marker. Gone were the plastic lunch boxes; instead, I ‘brown-bagged’ my lunches. Watching my peers who purchased their lunches at the cafeteria, I felt the twinges of inferiority – my lowly egg-salad sandwich to their cheeseburgers. I could never ask for money to buy lunch so I eventually chose not to bring one at all.
In this context, your experience may be a healthier social alternative – regardless of the quality of the food, everyone ate the same thing, much as one would do at the family dinner table. That kind of commensality focuses on the group bond as opposed to the signaling of status that occurs when individuals with differing means are offered choices. However, ‘choice’ – even if it’s only about what a youngster eats for lunch – is a sacred cow in the US.
As for the lessons on civilized eating, that was something my parents took upon themselves, taking us out to restaurants after Sunday Mass as a way to teach us proper public comportment. From my brief experience with American school lunches during my final 3 years in high school, the focus seemed to be less on nutrition and lessons on civilized eating, and more about ensuring that order was maintained and that students headed out for the next class period on time. Perhaps things have changed; I really should ask my niece and nephew, who are my only age-appropriate resources on this matter, before I offer any more opinions or observations.
“Shoving through a self service line, shoveling down your food (or shoveling it into the trash) and then back to class. Correct me if I am wrong but that’s the impression I have.”
American school lunches vary. It depends on the school, the kind of cafeteria they have, on site kitchen, demographic make-up etc..
My brothers attended a private (i.e. public for the Brits) boarding school, many of the social/cultural expectations were similar to what you mention. The food wasn’t local, but it was cooked on site and quite good from what I’ve been told.
The junior high I went to had the standard school lunches, we could also order a la carte, chicken salad sandwiches, fruit, salad, etc..
My children’s school gives a monthly menu. Some of the items for this month are Chinese chicken salad, tuna salad, turkey and cheese on a French roll, taco salad, chicken patty on a bun, chili cheese wrap, crunchy shrimp, spaghetti with optional meatballs, cheese quesadilla, burritos, etc..
Every day fresh fruit and some kind of salad or “garden bar” is offered. It’s a lot of prepackaged stuff, opening big packages, reheating, putting them in chafing dishes., etc.. They usually pack a bottle of water and chat with their friends while eating.
There’s a nutritional analysis at the bottom of the menu. Lunch average (for the entire meal)
687 calories
Iron 3.92 Mg
Calcium 532.10 Mg
Protein 26.62 Mg
Total fat 24.45 %
Saturated fat 8.12%
I don’t feel strongly about what my kids are currently offered at school. They are both healthy, athletic and fit. I have the option of packing them lunch. They eat breakfast at home, dinner time always includes conversation about what we did that day, etc..
having always wondered what went on in a boarding school, i found this post very informative.
your reflections on boarding school food share a basic similarity with my husband’s reminiscences of bootcamp food – the fact that you HAD to go to the dining room, whether you were hungry or not, and you HAD to take a tray of food, whether you liked it or not (all boys do compulsory military duty in greece). there was also a question about quality – home made food, yes, trained cooks, no.
it so happens that only this morning, i posted a story about bootcamp food. it will provide you with more insight into the the Greek army food of the past
There’s a lot of stuff going on in any format of ‘school lunch’, isn’t there!
Referring back to your post, Rachel . . .
1. Home-cooked vs. institutionally-cooked and/or high use of industrialized products . . .
Home Cooked/Fresh Local Foods: I’ve known home cooks who made things that even the dog wouldn’t eat.
Local foods are great when they are great, and when they are affordable. For many budgets, including school systems, they are not all that affordable – particularly when on-site labor is faceted into the equation.
Our school systems have already cut Arts programs and teacher-to-student ratios, along with the playground time allotted in elementary schools (reasons being given that ‘Arts are not a primary necessity for a good education’; ‘we simply can’t afford more teachers given budget cuts and rising expenses’; and ‘playground time is not as important as getting our SOL scores high and we need more time to teach’) so unless the school district is a particularly wealthy one, the issue of ‘good, lovely, admirable, delightful school lunches’ is going to be the last thing on the agenda.
Ask the voters in the town if they want to pay extra taxes for that. And the answer is obvious: they don’t want to.
A few years ago here we had a tax added to restaurant meals. It was designed to help with the expenses of maintaining all the government services including education. Indirectly part of this money would go to the local school system as well as (indirectly) to the university (as it is part of the state system).
It did pass, the tax . . . but it was amusing to see the college students all over the streets in the days before the vote on it, with petitions to sign against the tax, angrily telling anyone who would listen that they – the university students who by simply coming here from other places with their $$ (well, really their parents money which is loaded onto their university credit card for meals and such) should *not* have to pay for this – by paying an extra ten percent on their meals out (ha ha pizza and beer).
Institutionally-cooked: What’s funny is that a lot of chain restaurants are basically using institutional-feeding methods but they sell it/market it as upscale ‘restaurant food’ which, in the imaginations of many diners, being made by a ‘real’ chef.
There are big plastic packets of things being opened with scissors, and big frozen boxes of things being perfectly heated – in many a mid-to-upscale chain restaurant . . . and the customers are paying a pretty penny for it. There is no chef required. Simply good management skills and basic cooking knowledge of this type of foodstuffs.
The difference is in the quality of the initial product. Schools get federal $$ for their lunch programs which means they have to answer to a set of incredibly rigid, convoluted, ridiculous guidelines that fill a book larger than one volume of the Cambridge World History of Food. It seems like some combination of a fool and a shoemaker, both with happy faces painted onto their Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy sewed-cotton heads, developed these guidelines.
There is some sense to be found in these guidelines (particularly because they try to assure that ‘balanced, healthy meals’ are being provided but rapidly any sense that is there rapidly gets mired in language and rules that resemble quicksand. But these rules must be followed, and documentation done daily to prove compliance – or the government $ is threatened.
And government officials do actually check the documentation on an ongoing basis.
So you’ve got a strained budget, ludicrous rules to follow, and products specified for use that severely delineate what the menu offerings can be. Scary, really. I don’t know how school lunch program managers manage to keep their equilibrium, really. Even thinking about it from a distance I’m starting to feel much more wacko than usual.
On that note, I’ll stop here for a bit. :)
I “shoveled” those American school lunches only rarely — it cost 25 cents in those days for lunch and my folks didn’t have the money for four kids, five days a week, believe it or not. (University professors made very little money!) When I first started school, on Wednesdays, I did get to eat the chili that was brought from someone’s kitchen (no kitchen in that school) in a big zinc (I think) bucket with a flapping lid. We lined up and the cook or whoever ladled the stuff into our bowls. I still LOVE anything with chiles, though I know now that that chili probably would taste plenty bland to me now!
Most of the time, my mother made our lunches — she’d be on Swiss cheese kicks, peanut butter kicks, bologna kicks (bologna being a bastardized version of mortadella) and we’d eat the same thing day after day. School lunch looked pretty tasty in comparison.
Then there were no choices in food (same as in the dining hall at university). I realize that “morning milk,” which cost 2 cents, and school lunch used food produced in part under agricultural subsidies.
I like the British system Rachel describes. One of the problems with today’s world is that kids rule the parents and not the other way around. (I have one son, so I have experience with raising kids and I don’t pretend not to have to fallen into that trap!)
But the fussiness over food and the demand for so much choice astonishes me. Quite frankly, the dining halls on campus here blow my mind — everything anybody could want all right there. It caters to the prevalent sense of individualism and self-centeredness of today. The British public school sounds like it didn’t cater to individualism at all! But it formed upstanding individuals.
As we head into this economic downturn, it will be interesting to see what happens. Frugality and gratefulness for food in any form might be refreshing, actually.
Okay, back for more. :)
2. Instilling cultural values and civilized eating: Great idea where it can be done. If it can be done at an early age, terrific. I have to say that I know people with Ph.D’s though, who have gone through various sorts of schools with various types of feeding forms (ha ha) offered, and what is offered does not always ‘take’. There are people who can carry themselves at table who had to actually learn on their own when they entered the world (and who somehow managed) and there are people who have been ‘brought up right’ who do not manage to be good conversationalists and though they may know their forks they still might dribble gravy. Is there, in this looking-back-at-things, an idealism going on that overrides reality? (A question, not a snark.)
3. Somehow I think the 1960’s did a number of the concept of ‘civic duty’ for many people. The motto of ‘Question Authority’ can tend to erode the concept of ‘civic duty’ because what is civic duty if not defined by authority . . . (?)
4. (Which you wrote as 3 again, but I know that is because you were focusing on those darn three topics of conversation, Rachel!) Interesting. The earlier feminists, I believe (of whom my mother was one) decried the time spent in the kitchen. My mother told me it was a waste of time to learn to cook or to learn to type – for if one learned these things one would get stuck doing them. More current feminist thought seems to be decrying the thoughts of the earlier feminists in their turning away from the kitchen.
A few more notes – sorry. It is your fault for making me think too much.
* The way we feed our children at school is an outcropping of our cultural child-rearing concepts. I’m not so sure that the kids rule, myself. They seem to be doing fairly poorly in this case, unless they have a family who will do the extra for them and send them a decent lunch. The kids who get free lunches (15% of the population here I think? Rather lower than many places) or subsidized lunches (another 15% of the population or so) eat what is given to them – or they don’t – they muddle it around and toss it in the trash to prove what they think of it. Are they hungry? Maybe. Angry? Probably. What do they eat? Probably there are big bottles of generic-brand soda at home to allay the hunger pangs.
* Interesting thing: When the high-school kids have exams at the end of the year they are not allowed to take the exam until they eat the snack (orange juice and a cereal bar) that is given to them at the door to the exams. I’m not sure whether this is a school board rule or a state law, but it is enforced to the point where if the kid is not hungry or if orange juice makes their tummy hurt (my daughter, who eats well at home and who brings a lunch from home also) they are told to go over to the side and choke it down somehow before they can begin the exam.
* A few years ago there was a school system in a economically advantaged area of California that started to refuse to give students lunch if they had not paid their lunch bill. The parents had been contacted, asked to pay for the lunches, and even though their income level was in general in the six-figure area, they simply didn’t pay the bills. And I guess they didn’t pack lunch for the kids either. Talk about socialization issues . . . gak.
* Last thing: here is a great children’s book – Yoko – reviewed on the If Only I Had Superpowers blog. Great book to do a read-aloud in the kindergarten classroom with a sampling of different foods.
You asked What’s the School Lunch Supposed to Do? I don’t know, Rachel. I guess it depends on how much we as a society expect our institutions to represent the best of us, and whether we are willing to pay for it. If we can pay for it. If we care. As for me, I send my kids lunch and always include extra so they can share.
Challenging question you posed. :)
Every year at my children’s former private school there was mom who wanted to change the school lunch system.
It was like bad foodie tick for six years.
One French mom owned a “Frenchish” restaurant downtown. Her angle was that since it was a French-American private school, the kids should eat French food and be exposed to French food culture. Basically, she wanted sell lunches. I pointed out that her lunches were not particularly French, some not at all and that I wasn’t buying her culture angle.
Last year, there was the nattering mom, again French, who was appalled by “what these people feed their children”. She had a lot of free time and needed a cause. Nevermind that she served kraft parmesan cheese at home, she was still indignant about “that American crap”.
I don’t know how many different caterers and catering trucks this school has gone through. The yard supervisors told me that a lot of the kids who pack lunch barely have enough food. Which was shocking to them, because it’s a private school and everybody has enough money to buy whatever. And they were the biggest whiners, complainers about what somebody else didn’t do for them.
I know there are low-income neighborhoods where school lunches represent sustenance, not just convenience. But where are the “foodie” activists in these areas? I’ve never seen them here in L.A.. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were around here and there. But I’ve never seen them in these socio-economic contexts.
As Karen rightfully says “there is a lot going on here”.
It’s clear it is not just the dimension of the food itself which is important and properly so……in an ideal world a school should provide tasty, nutritious interesting, varied food that could also have some link to education…..food from different parts of the world…..kids more involved in the preparation and cooking of food (probably impossible given the nature of school bureaucracies commented above)…..but there are important social and psychological dimensions of the school lunch too.
The school lunch is a significant social arena in the school, and provides opportunities for socialising and learning, as Rachel points out in her post. This could also be developed with a bit of imagination and determination….art exhibitions in the dining room, the occasional music concert at lunchtime…….is all this impossible?
Additionally, I think food has a deep psychological dimension in its connection with nourishment and being taken care of. So how school lunches are organised and what happens at school lunches shows a lot about the way different schools and the culture in general expresses its care of children in this way. I already pointed out how at my school the school lunch became an extension of the institutional sadism that permeated the whole school. School lunch was another opportunity to reinforce this culture.
Finally, on a different but related point, a number of years ago I attended a Christian retreat center near Andover in England for a few days. The center was a practising monastery and the overall environment was beautiful and very well taken care of. The chapel was exquisite, and the services had an authentic spiritual feeling to them. But the food…………..was terrible…….spam and white sliced bread. There seemed to be a disconnect (not uncommon in Christianity) between the needs of the soul and the needs of the body, and a failure to see that taking care of the provision of food was also part of the nourishment of the soul.
Very interesting post and responses. I went to a school similar to Rachel’s, where manners were also very important (‘Mable, Mable, strong and able, get your elbows off the table!!’) – and so forth.
By contrast, here in Burundi, just about the only school lunches in public (gov’t financed) schools are those organized by donors and this is turning out to be a very important component for both increasing school attendance as well as performance: for most of these poor kids, it is the only meal they will get in a day (and so parents may send the kids to school primarily to be fed!). Very simple: usually rice or cassava meal porridge with beans and perhaps lenga-lenga, which is the local most popular green. All cooked in palm oil.
Yes this did bring back memories. Here in Jamaica I went to boarding school (private) based on the British model. Breakfast at 7am, Lunch at 12 noon , Tea at 4pm (the only time you were let into the tuck room to get your treats from home from individual wooden locked tuck boxes) and Supper at 6pm. The bell rang and we trooped into the dining room which was divided into seniors and juniors. There was a teacher present to supervise the juniors and one in the senior dining. Meals were plated in the kitchen and served by the kitchen staff. The meals were not awful, though we complained constantly but they were balanced meals.
Our water was piped from huge tanks that had fish and tadpoles swimming in them… I don’t recall ever having sodas at boarding school unless it was at an end of term midnight feast…so yes we drank the water. There was the odd outbreak of gastro (two in my six years at boarding school).
Most of the schools today in Jamaica are now government schools. At the primary level there is a school feeding programme for those who need it…and as far as I know this offers (or used to) both breakfast and lunch. I’m not sure this extends to the high schools , though at my eldest sons high school the Home School Association has a breakfast programme for the kids who require that service but this is primarily donor funded. There is also a private canteen for those who can afford to purchase their meals.
At the Caribbean institute of Media and Communication (CARIMAC) at the University of the West Indies, there is also a breakfast programme for the students who need it, as it was recognized that some of the students were not able to afford meals .
My youngest son (11) is at a private day school, and the parents are sent a menu with the prices to assist us help the kids make the right choices.
I went to a state school, where there are no lunches provided. The whole school lunch thing as seen in the UK or USA has always seemed a bit odd from my perspective. There was a shop on the school ran by local mothers where you could buy sandwiches, rolls, cakes, and icecreams, in the winter you could get pies and pasties.
Quite often my provided lunch made by my mother/father ended up in the bin as I didn’t like what was on offer. So a home packed lunch is no guarantee of nutrition.
Ji-Young,
Your invention of the term ‘bad foodie tick’ should be noted in the annals of history, I believe. It is much better than my previous favorite word in this category invented by someone, ‘nutritionista’.
‘Bad foodie tick’.
Love it! :)
We are so very very personal in our thoughts about school lunches. As a kid whose father and then husband moved for work, I have firsthand experience with six or seven school lunch systems, both as the eatee and as the adult who dispatched the eatee to school — public or private in the USA. This makes me want to think about WHY any particular school uses any particular system. One must know the ostensible purpose of the system before any cogent analysis can be made of how the system is performing. What is most important aspect of a given system? nutrition? manners? convenience for parents? uniformity of experience?
My first experience was a two room school house with four grades in each room and total attendance was around forty — five or six to each grade. There was no kitchen and furtive examination of what other kids brought in their lunch pails was part of the the basis for social status. Sometimes items were traded and some kids ALWAYS had things that were in demand and some kids NEVER had anything with trade value. Then there are the schools that have kitchens where food of varying quality is prepared and now some schools just have heat&serve rooms.
Most systems with which I have been familiar were some combination of these and often kids/parents chose different modes on different days with some always/never bringing lunch because of economics (if the lunches are or are not subsidized on a means testing basis) Some schools even have a minimum charge levied on all students monthly ostensibly to ensure that all students eat a minimum amount but more likely to ensure the economic viability of the food service department.
My favorite personal story comes from a time when my family was living in southern CA and spending summers on a small private lake in WA north of Seattle. The Canadian and US dollars were about at parity and nobody ever paid attention to which country had minted the coins used in shops on either side of the border. Early September of my daughters third grade she came home one day ravenous. I asked if she had forgotten to get her 35 cents from the change pot (where adults dumped their pocket coins every night) on the way out that morning and her baffled reply was, “Well, they said that my dime was not real and they wouldn’t give me any food.” She held out the quarter&dime and sure enough, the dime was a Canadian one that had slipped into the coin pot at the end of summer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/opinion/20waters.html
Opinion piece from The New York Times by Alice Waters and Katrina Heron.
I don’t even know where to begin…
After about a month of school lunches the novelty has worn off for my kids.
Again, I’m not opposed to processed ingredients. I think many of them are just fine in terms of taste and nutrition and they certainly make life easier. It’s a matter of which kinds of processed foods I use in cooking and the percentage of overall diet.
Anyway, both my kids noticed that school lunch food made them want to overeat more and made them feel very full but for a shorter amount of time than the lunches I make for them. They’ve made similar comments while on vacation and having to eat out for a week or more.
They’re back to home made hot lunches packed in thermoses.