Professional bloggers operate under pressure to produce a high volume of provocative posts. And there’s also the rule (often honored in the breach) that brevity is best—no one wants to slog through a tome on a computer screen.
Thus we sometimes propound our opinions without taking time to tease out (or think through) nuances. Luckily, we have readers—some of whom have their own blogs—to challenge us. And then we get to think through our opinions in nuanced fashion.
Thus today’s post.
In a Choice Nuggets post yesterday, I gave my quick reaction to a Washington Post piece by Jane Black on school lunches. The article focused on a private company called Revolution Foods that provides healthy, well-sourced lunches to schools for $2.90 to $3.00 per meal—close to the federal reimbursement rate of $2.68. The company provides lunches to 250 schools in California, Colorado, and Washington, D.C., Black reports.
Here’s what i said:
From my perspective, any method for getting decent food into schools deserves praise. But I can’t support a full-on privatization model-if we want a decent society, I think we need to figure out how to make and serve good food in our public schools.
And that was that—onto the next “choice nugget.” But what did I mean? Was I denouncing all private-enterprise methods for getting good food into schools? Rejecting private enterprise altogether? And if I “praised” Revolution Foods for its work, why didn’t I want to see its model replicated wholesale?
Into this forest of ambiguities stepped Zachary Cohen, an occasional blogger and prolific Twitterer.
In a Wednesday blog post, Cohen posed the question: “What the Heck is Wrong with the Local Food Movement.” His answer: me. Based on the above paragraph and a Twitter exchange between us (which he quotes), Cohen concludes that I reject private enterprise—an attitude of which he seeks to purge the sustainable food movement.
Rather than take Cohen on point by point, I’d like to clarify what I meant about the privatization of lunches.
First of all, I’ve got no beef with Revolution Foods or the schools that use its services. School lunches are a full-blown disaster; school cafeterias often have inadequate and/or decaying kitchen equipment—sometimes none at all—and few cafeteria workers are trained cooks. Cafeteria directors are allotted $2.68 per lunch per day—and two-thirds of that goes to labor and other overhead. Thus each lunch represents 90 cents worth of ingredients.
If I ran a school canteen, I’d be sorely tempted to wash my hands of the challenge of feeding kids healthy meals for less than the price of a Big Mac. If a private firm offered well-made lunches with quality ingredients for $2.90 or $3.00 a pop, I might jump.
But I would do so knowing that I was ceding something.
First of all, let’s concede that the school-lunch program has long-since been de facto privatized. Since the 1980s, schools have been responsible for maintaining their own kitchen equipment. To raise funds for that, they’ve invited in a plethora junk-food and soda machines—surrendering snack time to private companies like Coke and Frito Lay.
And then, as kitchen equipment slowly decayed and schools could no longer afford to hire skilled cooks, kitchens increasingly became reheating centers. And what they reheated was pre-made fare churned out by transnational food giants—companies that are expert at profitably transforming cheap commodity ingredients into “food.” Thus we get programs like this one , offered by Tyson Foods (until very recently, the globe’s largest purveyor of industrial meat) to cafeteria directors:
Tyson K12 allows school foodservice directors the opportunity to turn commodities into products that excite kids about lunch in the cafeteria. With indirect sales discounts from Tyson Food Service and the online inventory management system at k12foodservice.com-a K12 Services, Inc. Web site-directors can now make a huge impact on the bottom line of their school foodservice program.
When commodity chicken or beef is diverted to Tyson Food Service, it is stored and converted to products of choice, such as popular Whole Grain Breaded Chunks; new premium Charbroiled Beef Burgers; fully cooked Shaved Steak® beef; or Skillet-Style Ground Beef made with pure ground beef.
Commodity meat transformed by a gigantic industrial-meat processor into “Whole Grain Breaded Chunks”—that’s pretty much the status quo. When I argue against the privatization of school lunches, I’m thinking about a 20-year privatization experiment that has failed abjectly. Efforts like Revolution Foods don’t so much as challenge the status quo as turn it into (well-made, corn-syrup free) lemonade.
I mean, consider what Revolution Foods is up against. Ask any restaurateur or caterer what it takes to put lunch on the table, at a profit, for $3.00 a head. You have to be extremely price-conscious, at every step in the process from ingredient to plate. It’s difficult to see how some key element—quality, working conditions, flavor—doesn’t suffer on such a cut-to-the-bone model. “Good, cheap, fast—choose two,” as the old engineering saying goes.
According to Black, Revolution Foods operates centralized kitchens, from which it distributes thousands of lunches daily, to be heated at the schools. I have no reason to doubt the quality of what Revolution produces, but that already seems like a major quality concession here. The commissary-to-consumption scheme is essentially the airplane model of food service. Another notorious example is Starbucks and its gross little breakfast sandwiches. Revolution may know how to make it work, but is this really the model of lunch we want to teach children?
At a time when relatively few kids have parents who regularly cook at home, isn’t showing the a a bustling open kitchen full of people cooking an important educational tool?
Moreover, as Black reports, even with its low prices and despite its best efforts, Revolution Foods remains out of the price range of most public schools. They simply can’t afford to the premium, and there’s always Tyson Foods, beckoning with its cheap “chunks.”
While exploring short-term solutions like Revolution Foods, school-lunch advocates also need to look at long-term solutions that give lunch the place it deserves in schools. And that means increasing the miserly outlay for lunches, and reinvesting in actual kitchens.
And while keeping the outlay anywhere close to $2.68 per day is a recipe for disaster, a decent school lunch program need not be a spendthrift’s nightmare. Indeed, Revolution Foods shows a path forward. Admirably, Revolution focuses on high-quality ingredients: no trans fats or high-fructose corn syrup, milk free of synthetic growth hormones, etc. According to Black, Revolution Foods preserves quality by buying in bulk and wrangling deals with local suppliers.
What if every school district’s cafeteria director were charged with doing the same? An entire school district would have considerable buying power, and no doubt be able to shave a few percentage points off of wholesale prices. They could negotiate straight with farmer’s coops for a year’s supply of apples or grass-fed beef, or whatever regionally appropriate staples.
We need plenty of private enterprise in the food system. We don’t need the government running restaurants, or monopolizing liquor/wine sales, or growing veggies. A healthy food system is composed of a variety of small, interlinked businesses that are grounded in communities. But school lunches are a classic example of market failure. Remember, the government got into the game in the first place for lack of healthy bodies to fight wars. Companies like Revolution Foods have their place—but in a privatized system that values cheapness over other factors, they’ll always be a niche in a world dominated by Tyson and its ilk. Let’s invest in the health of our kids, and not outsource their lunches to the lowest bidder.
A parable on the National School Lunch Program
White House loads policy initiatives into a few hours of fun at Healthy Kids Fair
Two takes on school lunches, plus other tasty morsels from around the web
Comments
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zacharyadamcohen Posted 1:18 pm
01 Oct 2009
Thanks for the great article. And I appreciate the response. I hope you know that I do no believe you are what's wrong with the local sustainable food movement. We both want the same things, lots of small local businesses getting local sustainably-raised foods into the mouths and bellies of Americans. I love the idea of leveraging the buying power of entire school districts to find affordable local sources. Reports from around the country are encouraging, providing more examples that it simply can be done!
Z
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dan ellenwood Posted 3:07 pm
01 Oct 2009
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JMG Posted 9:27 pm
01 Oct 2009
http://www.willamettelive.com/story/Organic_Fingers_offers_organic_lunch_options_to_schools_and_daycares113.html
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couchrock Posted 11:40 am
02 Oct 2009
Of course, it's well-recognized that kids often need someone to make wise decisions on their behalf. What would be really interesting is to compare the ways that public and private schools respond to parental demands for good nutrition (taking into account income, demographic, and other variables).
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StephenR Posted 4:17 pm
06 Oct 2009
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myra smith Posted 11:59 am
02 Oct 2009
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marklbishop Posted 1:33 pm
02 Oct 2009
Now, I have to say that I generally agree with your response, but you leave out one major point. To move towards schools making their own food, there would be a need for tens of billions in facility improvements to build and repair school kitchens because, as you said, "kitchen equipment slowly decayed". At best, private food providers are still necessary to fill this void because of the historic trends towards privatization in schools. And increasing the reimbursement rates through CNR, while hugely important, won't fix our kitchens. That money will go toward operations, not capital expenses. So there needs to be more money - on top of the money needed from a CNR increase.
And one other point, there are dozens of small companies doing creative work trying to get better food into schools. Good for them. Keep innovating. But let's also not forget that some of the big guys are doing some creative work too. In Chicago, the food is provided by Chartwell's, and they have created a system where they now serve 5 days a week, regionally grown, flash frozen, produce in their schools. They've also removed trans fats, only serve 1% milk, only use low fat cheeses, are increasing salad bars... Yes, the food still needs to get a lot better, yes we need more money in the food programs, but there are many creative programs even with large companies that are driving positive change.
Ideally, I'd love to see scratch cooking in all schools. But until that happens, we need to leverage all the resources at our disposal to improve the food for our kids.
http://www.healthyschoolscampaign.org
http://www.cookingupchange.org
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marklbishop Posted 8:28 am
05 Oct 2009
http://healthyschoolscampaign.org/?313
Thanks.
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marklbishop Posted 1:40 pm
02 Oct 2009
Now, I have to say that I generally agree with your response, but you leave out one major point. To move towards schools making their own food, there would be a need for tens of billions in facility improvements to build and repair school kitchens, because as you say, "kitchen equipment slowly decayed". At best, private food providers are still necessary to fill this void because of the historic trends towards privatization in schools. And increasing the reimbursement rates through CNR, while hugely important, won't fix our kitchens. That money will go toward operations, not capital expenses. So there needs to be more money on top of the money needed from CNR.
And one other point, there are dozens of small companies doing creative work trying to get better food into schools. Good for them. Keep innovating. But let's also not forget that some big guys doing some creative work too. In Chicago, the food is provided by Chartwell's, and they have created a distribution system where they now serve, 5 days a week, regionally grown, flash frozen, produce in their schools. They've also eliminated trans fats, only serve low fat milk and cheese, are increasing salad bars... Yes, the food still needs to get much better, yes we need more money in the food programs, but there are many creative programs, even from large companies, that are driving positive change.
Ideally, I'd love to see scratch cooking in all schools. But until that happens, we need to leverage all the resources at our disposal to improve the food for our kids.
http://www.healthyschoolscampaign.org
http://www.cookingupchange.org
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zbikenut Posted 5:34 am
06 Oct 2009
Competition is the key, without it in a very short time either private or public system will get fat.
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Catmoves Posted 4:26 pm
08 Oct 2009
Now where did you find this out? Mysteries, mysteries, mysteries. Or perhaps that is just another opinion?
My personal belief is that schools should get their act together as a single unit. They need to fire some of the dead weight administrators and become a body responsible to parents and non-parents alike.
Where is it written that education availability is a special area that can be abused by students and parents alike?
When did we decide that childless homes should pick up the bill for our breeders kids? When did Administration grow so large that their salaries, in toto, would outstrip what we pay teachers in these schools?
Americans (and others) today want the best as long as someone else pays for it. Maybe it is time to "change" the way it is operated today. After all, "if it is IS broke, fix it".
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marklbishop Posted 8:51 pm
08 Oct 2009
As for your statement - "When did Administration grow so large that their salaries, in toto, would outstrip what we pay teachers in these schools?" Please source this. This is news to me.
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kingaa Posted 2:18 pm
13 Oct 2009
I agree with Mr. Philpott that providing healthy school lunches is important, and I think that the national government needs to dedicate more money to funding them. However I think the demands that Mr. Philpott suggests are simply too extreme. The federal government has many important programs to fund, including but not limited to other important causes such as health care, environmental protection, national defense, as well as other aspects of education such as teacher pay.
In light of the above I do not think Mr. Philpott can shoot down the efforts of Revolution Foods or the privatization of school lunches because the services they provide do not live up to his standards. His standards, in my opinion, are not and will never be obtainable. They are idealistic and not plausible. Sacrifices must be made, and if the sacrifices in quality can be made more minimal with the services of companies like Revolution Foods, then I believe communities should be urged to embrace these new options whole heartedly. Any progression is better than none.
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