Free for All: Fixing School Food in America (California Studies in Food and Culture)

California Studies in Food and Culture #28

by Janet Poppendieck

How did our children end up eating nachos, pizza, and Tater Tots for lunch? Taking us on an eye-opening journey into the nation's school kitchens, this superbly researched book is the first to provide a comprehensive assessment of school food in the United States. Janet Poppendieck explores the deep politics of food provision from multiple perspectives--history, policy, nutrition, environmental sustainability, taste, and more. How did we get into the absurd situation in which nutritionally regulated meals compete with fast food items and snack foods loaded with sugar, salt, and fat? What is the nutritional profile of the federal meals? How well are they reaching students who need them? Opening a window onto our culture as a whole, Poppendieck reveals the forces--the financial troubles of schools, the commercialization of childhood, the reliance on market models--that are determining how lunch is served. She concludes with a sweeping vision for change: fresh, healthy food for all children as a regular part of their school day.

Genres: Food, Nonfiction, Education, School, Health, Sociology, Nutrition

368 pages, Paperback

First published December 5, 2009

About the author

Janet Poppendieck is Professor of Sociology at Hunter College, City University of New York. She is the author of Free for All: Fixing School Food in America; (University of California Press, 2010); Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement (Penguin, 1999); and Breadlines Knee Deep in Wheat: Food Assistance in the Great Depression (Rutgers University Press, 1985).

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't remember how I stumbled upon the blog, Fed Up with Lunch, but it's a fascinating look into what one school district calls food. For the last seventy school days or so, I've read about one school's lunch and looked at the pictures posted. It's a horror show - no really. The 'food' doesn't resemble anything I'd eat, think about eating, remember eating, or would serve to my worst enemy. I've been out of school for over twenty years and had no idea that the nations' children - through school lunch programs - were eating over processed commoditized crap. It's really disheartening, though not surprising when you consider how the American diet and palette have shifted with the introduction and mass commercialization of extremely processed 'foods' and high fructose corn syrup.



Anyway, Janet Poppendieck wrote a guest blog a few weeks ago, and I was prompted to buy her book, Free for All. It's a very comprehensive and interesting history of school lunch in America - focusing on how free and reduced lunch have intersected with nutritional guidelines as well as schools using food as a money making endeavor. While highly readable, I would encourage Ms. Poppendieck to consider a shorter paragraph style. Page long paragraphs made taking in the information more of a chore than it should be.



Fundamentally, the author advocates that all schools provide free breakfast and lunch for all students. It would, she says, eliminate the stigma of the free and reduced lunch program as well as make meals and 'nutrition' part of a child's regular school day and habits. After reading her book and considering her arguments, I fundamentally disagree. I'm horrified by the foods that are served in school (processed, 'fortified' grains, factory farmed meat, pasteurized, homogenized (and sometimes sweetened, shelf-stable) milk. Not only would I never eat these items, but I would never want these foods fed to my child. I'm truly sorry that poor children in our school districts are served this utter garbage, but expanding the garbage food to more children would not make the system better. I would never want my son to believe that 'fast food' items are normal for daily consumption (pizza, hamburgers, potatoes disguised as vegetables, fruit juice, processed fruit, etc). Furthermore, I don't want America's dominant belief in the lipid hypothesis spread any further than it is. Serving these kinds of foods in homes, restaurants, and schools has led to obesity, diabetes, and all sorts of modern illnesses. Spreading that further could only have devastating consequences.



Until these issues are fixed (and it's unlikely in a country where the government gets nutritional information (and excess commodities) from corporations), I cannot advocate school lunch be free for anyone. The cost is just too high.

[Book Worm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for school.

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although it seems like school food has always been defined by meager expectations of processed, generic foodstuffs that do little to inspire or nutritionally satisfy children, today’s school kitchen offerings increasingly meet those stereotypes. Schools must rely on commodity foods, grants, and penny-pinching the totals of eligible “free and reduced” participants, scraping together meal plans based on complex and ineffective nutrition standards that somehow let districts count monochromatic meals as a balanced part of a student’s day. Meanwhile, schools compete with their own lunch programs by offering a la carte stations for ever popular pizza, pretzels, cookies, and more, trying to balance the costs of school lunch against the revenues they might gain by allowing students to make poor eating choices on their own dime. Beyond the monetary pinch, food supplies come in highly-processed, ready-to-serve form, promising schools nutritional worth down to the last scientific inch, taking the creativity and joy of cooking away from kitchen staff who now often have nothing more complicated to do than open, reheat, and serve. What can be done? Janet Poppendieck takes readers on a tour of school food in Free for All, a stirring exploration into the history, legislative snarls, monetary concerns, and social stigmas surrounding school food in America. Follow along while she digs deep into the heart of school lunch and breakfast programs, trying to sift out the winning strategies and outline a bold new vision for the future of food in schools.

This book is a deep dive, headfirst into a very complicated landscape of school food from its initial inception, to its steady decline into a complex and over-legislated program with too many rules and too little funding, to the grassroots efforts of modern food activists to reclaim school classrooms and school cafeterias as places where students can be taught to enjoy food and understand how their food choices impact themselves and the world around them. Free for All made me think a lot about my own school days- I was a bagged lunch kid K-12, eating school food barely at all, and I distinctly remember feeling like the whole process was too complicated, took too long, and then the food wasn’t even all that tasty. Reading this book, it’s fairly clear that those assumptions still ring true. It’s a huge problem when “logistics” becomes an honest barrier between school food programs and hungry schoolchildren. Schools don’t have uniform ways to calculate who qualifies for free and reduced lunches, don’t fairly handle all situations when funds run low and a kid can’t afford food for the day, don’t all have the resources, the community buy-in, the time or funding to turn toward local farm-to-school programs or even in-building scratch cooking. It’s maddening, and this whole book makes me want to jump right back into the school district, into the messy world of school food, with both fists swinging. Poppendieck proposes some excellent potential alternatives to the current system, examines the difficulties and benefits of switching to alternative methods, and I felt is able to offer some very good arguments for changing the current system despite the slow measure of progress thus far. Regardless of whether you have, had, or ever will have school aged children, this book is fascinating and truly infuriating. It’s enough to make food activists out of us all.

[minh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though I don’t think it was the right time for me to begin an odyssey like this, I’m grateful I did. This book was a solid 5 stars—though I’m over a decade too late, Poppendieck’s analysis feels unbelievably relevant, even in a Covid-era society. She is firm and assertive in her beliefs and never tries to convince the audience that she’s someone she’s not; she makes you ask larger questions about how school food policy at large. I’d definitely recommend this to anyone who’s ever consumed lunch at an American public high school. Bravo!

[Maria Di Ferdinando · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well researched and written, this books explained some facts about school lunches I did not know.

[Alana Soracco · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has been incredibly informative! Learned a lot on a topic that I knew nothing about until now.

[Lianna Gomori-Ruben · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It was chockfull of data and wisdom. I learned so much from reading it and it inspired me to dig much deeper into the function and potential of school food in America.

[Carmen Marshall · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read this for my food policy class. An extremely poorly written book, every page was just a run on sentence. Some bits were interesting but so irritating to read

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 - Universal and healthy breakfast and lunch for all schoolchildren now!!! "How will we pay for it?" Read the last chapter of the book if you actually want to know and are not just being contrarian!

[Susie · Rating 3 out of 5]

hmm... well there were errors that a good editor should have caught before publishing, and it was repetitive, but on the whole, worth the read. if nothing else I have a much better idea of the complexities of the national school lunch program.

[Debbie is on Storygraph · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew a lot about our food system, and a fair bit about our agricultural system. What I didn't know a lot about was how those two joined together into our school food program. Jamie Oliver was right: our school lunch program is broken - possibly irreparably so. However, he is also naive about just why it is broken and why it is not an easy fix.

Poppendieck explains how today's school lunches are the culmination of over a century of policy and legislation that were put into place for a variety of different reasons. There are competing goals in place: supporting the US agricultural system, providing a market for surplus food, ensuring adequate nutrition in school children, fighting hunger, etc.

It was especially eye-opening to learn just why children are served monochromatic fast-food, and why that would be difficult to change. The answer isn't simply "just give them better food." It's tied into a large suite of requirements schools are required to meet regarding nutritionally content, servings, what counts as reimbursable, who qualifies for free or reduced lunch - all with the eye of the bottom line. Tie that in with stigma (children can be relentlessly cruel) and administrative red tape, and the end result is a program that is deeply flawed.

Fascinating and disheartening at the same time. The title "Free for All" points to what Poppendieck concludes is the solution to ensuring that hungry children can eat without jumping through hurdles - both socially and logistically. I'm less convinced that is a workable solution for a number of reasons - first being the appropriations necessary to fund this and the reluctance (failure?) of Congress in this financial climate to spend any money not towards defense.

It also doesn't solve the problem of the quality of the food being served in schools. Poppendieck acknowledges this and points to several programs around the country that are working on sourcing locally, cooking from scratch, etc. But there is heavy reluctance in the vast majority of schools to adopt such measures, and in many schools an impossibility due to infrastructure.

Still, a very compelling and much needed book. It certainly got me thinking.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was very excited to finally get a chance to read this book. There isn't any earthshattering new information in here for me. I was pretty surprised that one of initial reasons for the National School Lunch Program was as a response to the US military's concern that soldiers were malnourished in WWII. The reason I was surprised was because just last year, the military was concerned that recruits are too fat, out of shape, and unable to meet health requirements. If the military's needs were able to get the NSLP, then hopefully they can change it too.

Poppendieck's solution for fixing school lunch is a bit weak in my opinion. She spends most of the book educating the reader about its history and current challenges. Her solution is universal free lunch, hence the title Free For All. But she only spends 40 pages making suggestions, and nothing is specific.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good book, but crazy dense and not a quick read. I learned a lot about the history of school food and the competing concerns in delivering it. I was happy to see that she covered all the reasons I wouldn't eat in the cafeterias a student, and still won't as an adult who works in the public school system. I know my district likes to say that it makes good, yummy food, but it simply isn't true. I love her examples of systems that work and her suggestions for change based on her research and experience. I saw some other reviewers were upset because her recommendations appear political, but I really think that is more of a commentary on our current political climate than the book. She is careful to say that these are things she thinks will work, but that she doesn't have all the answers. It does clearly become a question of which values you support, though.

[Dina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alright, so I skimmed through a lot of this and bailed out early. Truth is, if you're pretty well versed on the state of food these days, the agricultural laws and outcomes of those laws that got us in the mess we're in, there's not a ton of new info to get out of this book. Most notably, the history and laws pertaining to school food specifically were a departure from the more generalized food-centric books I tend to read, as well as the mess that is keeping school lunches in line with the tangled mess of nutritional guidelines, exempt student lunches and picky eaters that populate school cafeterias. Bottom line: If you read the relevant news articles as they pop up on similar issues, Poppendieck won't deliver you any epiphanies, but she'll certainly flesh out your understanding of the complicated world of school cafeterias.

[Chris Aylott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughtful exploration of the immensely complicated school lunch system. Sociologist Poppendieck shows how the program tries to meet the often conflicting interests of farm subsidy programs, educators, anti-hunger activists, and -- oh yeah -- kids. The system doesn't work particularly well, but it's impressive that the system works at all.

Poppendieck makes a solid case for giving breakfast and lunch to all kids regardless of income. Yes, it'll cost more, but more kids will get fed (especially the ones who need it most) and a vast quantity of paperwork will disappear in the process. It would be nice to see all the changes she envisions come into place, but pushing for more and healthier food in schools seems like a good goal to work for.

[Lo La · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. There's so much good info about why school lunches are the way they are. Its well written. I liked her vision of what the National School School Lunch Program should be and why and she makes a compelling argument for it. She even estimates how much her proposed program might cost and puts that cost into perspective, which not every writer would have bothered to do. I only wish she would've proposed some solutions for where that budget could come from. I know that's not what the book is about; but Where's that money gonna come from? is the first question proponents of her plan would throw at it. Regardless, you should read it. Don't engage in a discussion of school lunch if you don't know the material in this book.

[Gwyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

There have been a lot of very good food issue-related books published lately, many following in the footsteps of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. Free for All is not one of them. This is not to say it is a bad book, but it is written by a university professor accustomed to writing scholarly articles, rather than a journalist accustomed to writing words for the masses, and this is abundantly clear in Poppendieck's prose. If you are strongly interested in the issues she discusses, this is an excellent book, but it's definitely not something to pick up for a little weekend reading.

[Alison · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is extremely informative, and at times extremely depressing! Only because I would like to know HOW we fix our children's school lunches... and it doesn't give a clear answer, but if there was a clear answer I think we'd give that a try, right? Anyway, nutrition is a huge issue in the US, especially with children and childhood obesity, diabetes etc., and Poppendieck explains how the breakfast and lunch programs came to fruition, how they work now, or rather how they don't work, and her recommendation for solutions. I highly recommend this book for teachers, parents, activists, and anyone who cares about how our children eat.

[Adam Rabiner · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book if you are interested in school food. However, it is not a casual read. The writer is a professor of sociology at Hunter College whose academic focus is on hunger. The book is very comprehensive and covers the history, politics, and technical nature of the school food system (procurement, nutrition requirements, economics, etc.). It's accessible to the general reader or casual concerned parent but perhaps it is a bit overkill and it's really those who are school food reform advocates or in some other fashion part of the sustainable food movement who will have the patience and stamina to get through the book.

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well researched history of the evolution of food service in American schools, from its origins on a local level, the involvement of the government as a way to bolster farms and avoid surpluses, and the growing pains of a system caught between a social welfare concept for children and a business that must treat them as consumers. For all those wondering how our cafeterias became so broken, why we can't just have healthier foods in our schools, or those who are skeptical that what we have can even be salvaged, this book is for you.

[JC · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting read and look at school lunch. I had a couple of interesting discussions with my wife as I read this book (she grew up in Russia so didn't understand how we feed so much crap to our kids). I can't believe that I would eat pizza basically everyday in high school, but I did. I barely touch pizza now. Also interesting to hear what different things are being tried. I think that free lunch for all kids would be ideal, but I get the hard part of this. Anyways, interesting look at school lunch - I'll be sending lunch with my kids to school.

[Jodie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yes, this is an academic title and as such not as thrilling or as easy to read as a novel. I still gave it four stars because it helped me to see beyond my own school to what school lunch is other places and what it could be. IT has made me a believer that the National school lunch program needs to change from the ground up.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been working on this one for a while, but it gives such an great history of school lunches, and shows what it has become today. I'm hoping Poppendieck will provide some suggestions on policy changes at all levels of government and school administration, but I think she may avoid that and only try to explain how it is, rather than what it should be.

[Bookworm · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting look at food in American schools. This looks at school lunches in various aspects, including sociological, educational, physical and mental. It was interesting to see the effects of what the lack of food has on academic performance, personality and overall well being on a student.

It was a little tedious though, and arguably comes across as more of a textbook than anything else.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you're not familiar with school food, this is a good and thorough overview of the entire system complete with historical and political detail, student memories, and interviews from school food workers. Poppendieck is passionate about food and social justice. Her writing is clear and well organized, but at times, a bit repetitious and long-winded.

[Laura Skladzinski · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book until the last chapter, when Poppendieck got very political with her recommendations (though to be fair, she pointed out that she didn't have all the answers and wasn't as well versed in tax reform, for example, as she was school food issues). This book was extremely thorough - to the point of being at times too dense - and really made me think.

[Kathryn Colasanti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poppendieck is a great person to journey with through the world of school food. She's honest with her readers about her own reactions and conflictions and knowledgeable enough to clearly present the topic's many dimensions.

[Barbara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Exhaustive study of school lunches.... useful if you're writing a series on the subject, but heavy stuff for personal reading.

[D Coulombe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really great primer on the political and economic forces that have shaped school food into the systems we have today.

[Emily]

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