Are you looking for bright spots amidst the tragedies of the last month? Well, in addition to some heartening election stories, here’s one: Public school educators in Andover, Massachusetts went out on strike on Friday. Teachers are standing in solidarity with instructional assistants (you may know this underclass of vital frontline educators as “paras”) in their demands for equitable pay and working conditions, including a real voice in school- and district-level decision-making. If you’re not sure why that last item is crucial for healthy school communities, check out my Jacobin reporting on paras, featuring Holly Currier, an Andover instructional assistant and Massachusetts Teachers Association member who has proven herself a force to be reckoned with.
Here’s another bright spot you may have missed back in August: Massachusetts’ 2024 budget made us the eighth state to permanently fund healthy school meals for all students. Going forward, youngsters across the commonwealth can count on getting the daily nutrition they need without any stressful means-testing. This is thanks to years of organizing and advocacy by food justice warriors like Rebecca Wood, whose inspiring story I featured in this Jacobin/Economic Hardship Reporting Project story about the "right-to-lunch," and what it means for all of us.
This beautiful victory didn’t happen in a vacuum. Here’s a little more context: During the pandemic, the US government temporarily funded universally free school meals for an annual cost of about $11 billion (by contrast, we expect to spend over $60 billion annually on maintaining our supply of nuclear weapons.) Food justice activists, including young students (check out this video I co-produced for More Perfect Union featuring adorable and amazing school food advocates across the US) have been fighting to win universal school meals (USM) at the state level, since Congress has thus far refused the much simpler option of enacting USM federally, through the USDA (and in fact, the GOP has made preventing universal school meals one of its top priorities–evidence, I think, that they correctly understand the collectivist power of robust public goods).
The topic of how kids are fed, and who feeds them (whether with packed lunches or from a cafeteria kitchen) is something we don’t talk about much in our culture, even though the very reproduction of society depends on it. The same is true of other forms of reproductive labor, such as driving students to school, or attending to their individual needs throughout the school day (thinking back to those instructional assistants in Andover, who make IEP compliance possible). This is work that’s disproportionately done by marginalized ethnic and racial groups–highly feminized, grossly undervalued occupations that resemble the unpaid labor of parenting. Without this work, the rest of our economy would grind to a halt.
Here’s an excerpt from one of my school food stories to give you a sense of the history and broader importance of the right-to-lunch struggle: why investing in school meals doesn’t just help kids, families, and nutrition workers–it actually nourishes democracy. (I promise I’m not just trying to toot my own horn here. This subject is so underreported that I’m actually one of only a handful of people who have been covering it in-depth).
A World of Possibility
The fight for school meals traces its roots all the way back to maternalist Progressive Era efforts to shield children and workers from the ravages of unregulated capitalism. In her book The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools, Jennifer Gaddis describes how early school-lunch crusaders envisioned meal programs that would be integral to schools’ educational missions, immersing students in hands-on learning about nutrition, gardening, food preparation, and home economics. Staffed by duly compensated professionals, these programs would collectivize and elevate care work, making it possible for mothers of all economic classes to efficiently nourish their young.
When Congress passed the 1946 National School Lunch Act, it instead solidified nutrition departments as financially starved appendages to general education programs. Because of the infrastructural inequity (e.g. the lack of cafeterias in urban schools serving marginalized kids) and underfunding that plagued the National School Lunch Program in its earliest decades, many of the United States’ poorest students either didn’t benefit from it, or faced indignities like being made to scrub dishes in exchange for food.
In the 1960s and ’70s, a diverse coalition of food justice advocates demanded better, eventually seeing gains like the School Breakfast Program (arguably the federal government’s attempt to short-circuit the growing political power of the Black Panther Party). These “right-to-lunch” activists called for universal school meals because they recognized that means-testing would discourage participation by privileged families repelled by the whiff of welfare, making it impossible for programs to reach robust levels of popularity and public investment. Just as importantly, they understood that economic segregation in the lunchroom would, in Gaddis’s words, “weaken the democratic ethos of public schools.” Some even dared to ask why school cafeterias should stop at feeding children, when families and entire populations are afflicted by preventable hunger.
Despite the advice of Nixon-commissioned experts, Congress refused to sign off on lunch universalism. The decades that followed saw a cheapening of both school food and school cafeteria jobs, leading us to the funding and staffing crises that beset district nutrition departments today. But during the pandemic, the dream of the “right-to-lunch” movement was temporarily made real, with federal waivers allowing schools to feed all of their students, and in some cases, whole communities. Elizabeth Marchetta, executive director of Baltimore’s K-12 nutrition services, says her program used a combination of federal funding and private aid to turn schools into pandemic “food distribution hubs,” making meals available to both kids and adults.
Because USDA-backed school nutrition programs are the largest “restaurant” chain around, they have extraordinary potential not only as emergency-response infrastructure, but also to alter the landscapes of food procurement and preparation in ways that protect farmers, food chain workers, and the ecological systems on which all earthly life depends. We just need to think more expansively.
Above all, school meals have the power to bring children and the constituencies who care about them to a common table where we’re united across our differences. “Eating together is so important community-wise, you know? You build relationships,” says Rebecca Wood, who is currently fighting to push a universal school meals bill through the Massachusetts State House — an effort that parallels other campaigns across the United States.
Wood says now that her daughter Charlie and her schoolmates all have access, “they’re not even called ‘free meals’ anymore. It’s just lunch. We’re just having lunch.”
Solidarity forever.
awesome news and reporting...bright spots of progress definitely appreciated right about now!