Perhaps it’s time to give up on the hearts of Americans and focus on something more effective: the wallets. School children around the world are gobbling poisons masked as breakfast, lunch, and presumably dinner; meals that are chocked full of chemicals, fat and nutrient-free calories only to end up the most undernourished, obese and sickly people in the world. And we’re paying for it, multiple times over. We can feed children less expensively and more nutritionally using less tax-payer dollars than we are now.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) the idea of feeding needy children in schools stemmed from the book Poverty written by Robert Hunter in 1904. Although food programs were established state by state in the early 1900’s, it wasn’t until Franklin Roosevelt’s Congressional Address in 1943 that food subsidies and the school lunch program merged. President Roosevelt’s goal was to “see that the food for our civilians at home is divided as fairly as possible among all of the people in all sections of the country, and that it is obtainable at reasonable prices” (Roosevelt to Congress, 1943). Roosevelt’s goal was realized through increased food production in the U.S. using farm subsidies. This situation seemed to benefit everyone involved; the poor were fed and farmers were kept producing. The farm subsidies focused primarily on dense foods, or those which carried the most calories, as the starving children of the World War II era needed the densest of food to survive. Calorie dense foods included primarily fatty meat, and schools were given excess, subsidized meats that could not be sold on the open market. Corn subsidies were established during this time as well, only to swell in coming decades. What was once a system that saved children from the real threat of starvation, has become the primary source of preventable disease for the poor.
Our country has changed, but our food subsidies have not. Our children are starving, not for fatty, dense calories, but for nutrient-rich calories. Our farms, with their subsidized crops, are owned not by individuals, but by gigantic corporations who spend millions of dollars on lobbyists who keep these outdated subsidies in place. Our schools are still receiving excess foods from these subsidized crops: meat no one will buy, and corn that no one can eat unless it’s turned into high fructose corn syrup.
According to the Food Research and Action Committee (FRAC) the federal government spends only $2.40 per child for children who qualify for the free lunch program. Supporters of the current system rally around this number, because it truly is such a low cost. This number, however, is grossly inaccurate. Not included in this number are the costs for subsidizing the food generated or the medical costs that are generated from poor quality food being consumed on a daily basis. There is such a direct correlation between children who qualify for the free lunch program and children who qualify for free healthcare that we use the school lunch program to identify those who need healthcare. Both programs are paid using tax dollars. When we add the taxpayer funded subsidy program to taxpayer funded school lunch and health-care, we have to include all three when determining the cost of our current program.
The Washington Post reports that the U.S. hands over about $19 billion per year to the agricultural industry in the form of farm subsidies (2007). Roughly $300 million is spent on healthcare costs for children under the Children’s Health Insurance Plan (CHIP). The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reports that the majority of claims in the CHIP program are for “children with chronic conditions” (2010). Among new chronic conditions that poor children are developing is Type II Diabetes. Type II Diabetes was until recently unheard of in children; in fact it used to be referred to as Adult Onset Diabetes. Type II Diabetes is a direct result of poor eating; it is found primarily in obese children. What used to take decades to develop is debilitating our school aged children. The National Diabetes Education Program (NDEP) indicates that Type II Diabetes can lead to other chronic conditions including high blood pressure, lipid abnormalities and hypertension (2008). These treatments are costly, preventable and cost taxpayers millions of dollars a year.
Let’s save taxpayer money and increase the health of our nation’s children. Currently, schools can only afford to operate within budget if they integrate excess overly processed, fat-laden foods into their programs because these subsidized excesses are free and don’t require a cooking staff. Because it will take time to untangle the subsidy programs, the first step should be to work with local schools to find a low cost way to bring back healthy food. One of the most effective ways to integrate healthy foods into the lunch room is through a school garden.
The school garden is an attractive part of the solution, because it is low cost and can be integrated into the curriculum. Also, because the students grow the food themselves they are more likely to eat the resulting fruits and vegetables. Grants are available to help fund the start-up costs for a school garden. For example, the North Dakota Department of Agriculture gave an $1000 grant to the Circle of Nations School to begin on their school garden. The resulting produce not only fed the students, but the surplus was donated to the local food pantry. This $1000 of taxpayer money went directly to the task of feeding children and the poor healthy foods, with $0 of excess being skimmed into the pockets of big corporations. Let’s turn our acres of school land into learning laboratories that let kids grow their own healthy lunches.
A second part of the solution is to bring cooks back into our schools. Currently, the lunch staff at a typical public school are reheaters, not cooks. Food comes in boxes and is mass reheated. In order to integrate fresh produce into the school lunchroom we need to redefine the job description of school cafeteria workers and let them create nutritional meals. This can be done through providing the current school cafeteria staff with tools and training. Popular chef, Jaime Oliver, has accomplished such a task in Britain and is now bringing this program to America. One doesn’t need to wait for Jaime to appear on the doorstep to get started. Talk to your school district. See who will help with integrating healthful steps into the cafeteria. The cost for training cooks is negligible compared with the cost of continuing on our current track of obesity induced disease.
At the high school level, get the students involved. Let students who aspire to become chefs or simply create a healthful meal for their family meet those goals through learning about nutrition and making nutritious meals for their fellow students. Students with learn about biology, nutrition and the chemistry of cooking if they are introduced to it in a way that is both fun and embedded with the concrete results of creating food that their friends enjoy. The more kids are involved the more likely they will be to support their creation.
Eventually the food system will have to change at the national level. Although the above steps can be taken on a local level, school by school, it behooves us all to demand our federal representatives make overhauling our national food system a priority. The need for farm subsidies is past, the need for healthful foods for all children is present and the need for those children to live without preventable disease is our future. Our hearts and our wallets depend upon changing our national food system.
Works Cited
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. “Health Care Costs and Financing.” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. http://www.ahrq.gov/research/oct10/1010RA7.htm taken 19 Oct. 2010.
Bruske, Ed. “Americans Hate Feeding Poor Children at School.” Grist Magazine. 19 Oct. 2010. Web.
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “Policy Basics: Where Do our Federal Tax Dollars Go?” 14 April 2010. http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1258 taken 20 Oct. 2010.
Food Research and Action Center. “National School Lunch Program.” Child Nutrition Fact Sheet. 2009. http://frac.org/newsite/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/cnnslp.pdf taken 20 Oct. 2010.
Gunderson, Gordon W. “The National School Lunch Program Background and Development.” United States Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service. 27 May 2009. Web.
Morgan, Dan, et al. “Harvesting Cash: How to Spend an Extra $15 Billion.” The Washington Post. 4 Dec. 1997.
National Diabetes Education Program. “Overview of Diabetes in Children and Adolescents.” http://www.ndep.nih.gov/media/Youth_FactSheet.pdf taken 19 Oct. 2010.
Roosevelt, Franklin D. “Message to Congress on the Food Program.” The American Presidency Project. 1 Nov. 1943. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=16337 taken 20 Oct. 2010.
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