The Slow Food USA Blog

No More School Lunch Baloney

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by Claire Stanford

My school lunch awakening began the summer after I graduated from college, in 2006, when I volunteered as a counselor at a free day camp in New Haven, Connecticut. The point of the camp was many-fold: to teach kids about the environment, to keep kids off the street and out of trouble all day, and to exhaust them enough during the day that they’d stay out of trouble when we let them out, too. And, importantly, to give them free breakfast, lunch, and snack every day, provided by the New Haven public school system.

For many kids, school lunch (and the less well-known school breakfast) serve the invaluable function of providing two guaranteed meals a day, something I didn’t realize until that summer. Kids were allowed to bring their own lunch; out of the forty-or-so kids, I could probably count the number who actually did bring brown-bags on one hand. 

Every day at noon, the kids would sit in a big circle on the floor, and we would pass out lunch, the most typical one being a baloney and cheese sandwich (one slice of baloney and one slice of processed American cheese on white sandwich bread), a bag of carrots, and a small carton of chocolate milk. In the middle of the circle were three bins labeled trash, recycling, and food waste. The plastic wrappers for the sandwiches and the carrots went in the trash bin, the milk cartons in the recycling, and anything the kids didn’t eat into the food waste. At the end of every lunch, after everything had been cleaned up, one counselor would weigh the bin of food waste. We recorded these weights on a chart posted on the blackboard; the goal was to get below one pound of food waste. If the goal was reached, the head of the camp promised, she would shave off her eyebrows.

The first day we weighed the bin we had thirteen pounds of food waste. Baloney slices clung to the sides; chocolate milk swished around over floating bits of carrot stubs; islands of saturated white bread bobbing around. The next day the weight dropped dramatically, to more like eight pounds, where it hovered for a full two weeks, sometimes going as low as six pounds, sometimes climbing back up to nine or ten. The point of the exercise was to teach the kids to take the right amount of food; not to take two sandwiches if they were only going to eat one – a more common occurrence than you’d think when you’re dealing with hungry eight year olds. But the other point was to make sure they actually ate their food, that they didn’t pick and choose – eating the baloney but not the cheese, the whole sandwich but not the carrots.

And still, for weeks, we weighed the bin every day, and every day they hadn’t gotten below the three-pound mark. Not because they were taking too much, not because of childhood pickiness, but simply because they just couldn’t bring themselves to eat all their food, even with the promise of the ultimate reward: an adult shaving off her eyebrows.

Every day, I passed out sandwiches and milk, with the exhortation to the kids, “Remember the prize for eating everything.” And every day some kid would inevitably be unable to finish his or her baloney. “Are you full?” I’d ask. “No,” came the usual – occasionally whiney – response. “I don’t want it! It’s gross.” And every day I’d sigh as we weighed the bin, and dumped it out, and rinsed it (no glamorous task).

Three weeks before camp let out, and a full three weeks after the challenge was first issued, the bin of food waste finally came in under one pound. The kids were jubilant, victorious, riotous. What had seemed like such a simple task had become a Herculean feat for them, and they had achieved it. I was proud of them, but also a little sad – since when was finishing your food a cause for such celebration? Shouldn’t it be a basic assumption – a civil right – that food be tasty enough that kids want to eat it? And shouldn’t we be able to provide children with food that is both tasty and nutritious?

The baloney sandwiches had become a symbol both of how much these kids needed free lunch and also how poorly it was actually serving them. Currently, the USDA reimburses schools only $2.57 for each free lunch (and less than that for reduced-price and paid lunches). Some days, I spend more than that on a latte. And then, if you factor in labor, equipment, and overhead costs, schools are left with only $1 per child per meal to spend on food. One dollar?

Raising the reimbursement by one dollar per child per meal would have myriad implications. Healthier meals mean lower obesity rates, lower diabetes rates, better national health and lower health care costs. Healthier meals mean kids who are more alert and engaged in learning. Healthier meals mean kids who grow up to be adults who know what a healthy meal is – and that chicken nuggets don’t quite cut it.

That extra dollar means not only healthier but also tastier meals, which also means no more baloney sandwiches and chocolate milk sloshing around in the summer camp food waste bin. Kids actually eating their lunch? That shouldn’t be such a novel idea that eyebrows have to be sacrificed for it.

When the Child Nutrition Act comes up for reauthorization this fall, Congress has a chance to add that much-needed dollar per child per meal. Urge them to do it: sign the Time for Lunch petition and join the campaign to give kids real food at school.

Claire Stanford is an MFA student at the University of Minnesota and a blogger at Food Junta.