The Labor of Lunch aims to spark a progressive movement that will transform food in American schools, and with it the lives of thousands of low-paid cafeteria workers and the millions of children they feed. By providing a feminist history of the US National School Lunch Program, Jennifer E. Gaddis recasts the humble school lunch as an important and often overlooked form of public care. Through vivid narration and a dose of much needed imagination, The Labor of Lunch offers a stirring call to action and a blueprint for school lunch reforms capable of delivering a healthier, more equitable, caring, and sustainable future.

Check out the Labor of Lunch YouTube playlist!

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Find this interview in the Food Heroes podcast with Katie Jones.

Photo by Jake Gard / Unsplash

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Eleven billion dollars. That’s the total tally of the national school-food program in the United States and just a small fraction of what public institutions in this country spend every year in taxpayer dollars on food—including food for county jails, hospitals, city parks, and more. Public food procurement is clearly big business. But we also believe it can also be a force for good. On May 16, Cook County—home to Chicago and one of the largest counties in the country—joined a growing movement of public institutions when it adopted a procurement program that does just that: promotes public health, community well-being, animal welfare, social justice, and environmental protection.

It may seem like common sense that public institutions should promote the public good, but when it comes to food purchasing that’s not usually the case. All around the country, in local governments and public-school districts, officials pore over the minutiae of contracts for bread rolls and chicken patties, pizzas and salad greens. The dominant decision-making criteria? The cheapest bid.

In 2011, community leaders in Los Angeles started asking what it would take to transform that decision making so that city leadership could make food purchases based on shared principles, not just price tags. The result is the Good Food Purchasing Program, passed first in Los Angeles in 2012 and now in four cities nationwide. The Good Food Purchasing Program views purchases through five values: public health, local economic development, animal welfare, worker wellbeing, and the environment. The program can also be used, as it will in Cook County, to incentivize public institutions to support under-capitalized businesses—that is, those that have been historically shut out of tax incentives and access to technical and financial support. The idea is to help to correct long-standing inequities in the food system.

In the cities where it has passed, we’ve seen real impact. In Los Angeles alone, with support from the Center for Good Food Purchasing and other partners, program implementation catalyzed 220 new, good union jobs in the local food economy and a $70 million multiyear poultry contract with a producer committed to keeping antibiotics out of its feed. Following adoption of the program, the school district cut meat purchases by 28 percent, reducing water use by 1 billion gallons a year among other benefits. And the district’s largest food distributor rethought the source of its wheat, choosing to buy from California farmers for the first time and milling it in the heart of the city. Now more than 80 percent of all bread products served in LA schools come from California-grown, sustainably produced wheat.

Inspired by this impact, the Chicago Food Policy Action Council and a coalition of over 40 organizations have led the way in Cook County. As a first step, the groups helped press—and win—the adoption of the program in the City of Chicago in 2017 transforming the way food is purchased by its public schools as well as its parks department. Now, with leadership from Cook County Board Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, the county is following suit, making it the first in the nation to adopt the Good Food Purchasing Program. The Chicago Food Policy Action Council estimates that the county spends $20.6 million on food annually across its agencies.

In Cook County, enthusiasm for the program came in large part from those businesses, workers, consumers, and farmers that have long been marginalized in the food system. Under the program, the County will incentivize contracts with minority- and women-owned businesses, help to preserve urban farmland with community ownership, and transition publicly owned vacant lots to minority-owned social enterprises and public land trusts. Says the Chicago Food Policy Action Council’s Rodger Cooley, “The Good Food Purchasing Program has the power to transform the food system in every region where it is implemented as it will in Cook County where we are creating a model for food procurement that supports frontline communities most impacted by existing inequities.”

This all sounds good, you might be thinking, but these are tax dollars at work; shouldn’t public institutions entrusted to use money wisely make the most economical choice? Well, here’s the rub. Cheap food isn’t always so cheap. Consider the costs in the United States of the illnesses and deaths linked to unhealthy food (blights that fall mostly on low-income communities and communities of color, where millions live either without access to good food or in food environments with too much unhealthy food). Health-care costs from diagnosed Type 2 diabetes total a staggering $327 billion a year—a cost we all share.

Or consider the price to taxpayers when private-sector employers fail to pay living wages. Around the country, food-sector workers are among the most underpaid and exploited and are twice as likely as workers in any other sector to rely on government assistance to put food on their table. With the Good Food Purchasing Program, good food means good jobs.

But let’s also be clear: While the program incurs a range of community benefits, it doesn’t always cost more. Analysis of the Good Food Purchasing Program has found that food costs don’t necessarily go up after implementation. In Oakland, for instance, the school district’s choice to buy better and, yes, more expensive meat—increasing the amount of 100 percent grass-fed beef and antibiotic-free chicken purchases, for instance—was coupled with a reduction in meat purchases. The result? The more expensive choice was actually cost neutral and the customers—those finicky kids—reported high rates of satisfaction.

Cook County’s groundbreaking decision to adopt the program is just the latest sign of the momentum nationwide for tapping the enormous buying power of public institutions for the public good. Another 13 cities across the country—including Austin and New York, Cincinnati and Washington, DC—are actively pursuing the program. If all pass it, the program will reshape a whopping $880 million worth of food purchases annually.

Cook County’s adoption of the Good Food Purchasing Program is a huge leap forward in the quest of good food for all. Who’s next?

Originally published in The Nation

Photo by Mike Blake / Reuters

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What’s for lunch? If it’s Thursday and you’re a part of Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), it’s a locally-sourced, #CaliforniaThursdays meal.

Focused on dishing out healthier meals, decreasing their carbon footprint, and increasing access to good food for all students, OUSD Nutrition Services is changing school meals for the better. Nutrition Services Director Jennifer LeBarre’s thoughtful and innovative leadership has made OUSD a rising star of the Good Food Purchasing Program–a program that helps institutions source food that supports five values: nutrition, local economies, animal welfare, valued workforce, and environmental sustainability.

Recently, Jennifer led Oakland Food Policy Council members on a tour of kitchens. We started with a brief history of the national school lunch program and a tour of Prescott Elementary’s kitchen—where a small but mighty crew prepare a whopping 20,000 meals a day for distribution to other schools in the district. Next stop was the site of The Center—a central kitchen, farm, and educational center. The Center, set to open in 2020, will be the site of innovative programming which will provide training and education to everyone from elementary-aged children to adults with special needs. This site will even have its own fruit & vegetable and meat processing rooms, which will decrease reliance on frozen, pre-packaged and processed items.

Our last stop was Madison Academy in East Oakland where the smell of chocolate chip cookies greeted us all the way out in the parking lot. I got to enjoy my first school lunch in many years (no need to get specific here), with a #CaliforniaThursday lunch: mixed vegetables, the sweetest apple I’ve had in a while, and no-antibiotics-ever BBQ chicken. It definitely surpassed my expectations.  

Providing over 40,000 healthy meals every day is a challenge when you have to balance budgetary constraints, differences in taste and perception, outdated infrastructure, and limited capacity. But OUSD, in partnership with the Oakland Food Policy Council and the Good Food Purchasing Program, is pushing boundaries, making changes, and engaging the community. Community engagement has been particularly strong thanks to the Oakland Food Policy Council, which has been leading the charge for good food for all in Oakland, from partnering with the school district for better school food, to organizing the community to fight back against Big Soda.

We celebrate the work of the Oakland Food Policy Council, food policy councils all over the world, and #goodfoodchampions like Jennifer LeBarre and the folks at OUSD and the Good Food Purchasing Program who have been pushing the conversation forward.

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Our food system needs radical transformation. It also needs healing from a long history of oppression and exploitation. This healing can only happen if we create spaces for honest conversation, trust, and relationship-building across the food chain. That’s what makes HEAL Food Alliance—a multi-sector, multi-racial coalition building collective power—so special.

Christina and Tanya—a.k.a. Real Food Media’s official (unofficial) Midwest Contingent—had the honor of participating in HEAL’s 2nd Annual Summit in Cleveland, Ohio, last month. As the hotel lobby began buzzing with energy and heartfelt hugs, it felt like a family reunion descended on Cleveland. We were just plain giddy to connect with so many of our partners including Good Food Purchasing Program coalitions from around the country, the Center for Good Food Purchasing, the Food Chain Workers Alliance, and fabulous Real Food Media advisors Neshani Jani, Dara Cooper, and Anim Steel. (Little did we know, Dara, co-founder of the Black Food & Justice Alliance, would soon be awarded the James Beard Leadership Award—congrats Dara!)

This year’s theme was Good Food Rising! and it was in full effect. This was authentic movement-building: issues framed by community leaders; stories of both trauma and triumph; and delicious, real food. (A big shout out to Rid-All Green Partnership, a 26-acre farm and education center in Cleveland’s Lee-Miles neighborhood, for providing us with such lovingly prepared food and an inspiring—if a bit chilly!—farm tour.) 

Perhaps most powerful? Naming names. As many participants noted, there are few “food” spaces where words like capitalism and white supremacy are used without apology. Where land reform is a banner struggle. And where the prison-industrial complex is called out for its role in perpetuating a violent food system and foreclosing community-based alternatives. And as both a grounding and a reminder of our collective history, there was the 80-foot-long food justice timeline created by Minneapolis organizers and shipped to the Summit for participants to interact with.

Needless to say, we came away with a lot to think about—and work on—to better support this growing movement of movements. 

Follow HEAL Food Alliance on Facebook and Twitter check out more photos from the Summit. HEAL is now on Instagram too!

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The Good Food Purchasing Program from Real Food Media on Vimeo.

Every year, public institutions across the United States—from school districts to city governments—spend $150 billion dollars on food with virtually no oversight over, or awareness of, under what conditions these foods were produced. Without accountability tools in place, companies that routinely cut corners along the supply chain continue to receive substantial public contracts at the expense of community health, worker wellbeing, animal welfare, and the environment.

The lack of transparency in the public procurement process and food supply chains denies communities the right to ensure shared community values can help shape how their own taxpayer dollars are spent, which is particularly important for low-income students for whom the majority of their meals come from school. Until institutions and the communities they serve are armed with better information about their supply chains, business as usual will continue.

First adopted by the City of Los Angeles and the LA Unified School District in 2012, the Good Food Purchasing Program provides a metric-based, flexible framework and set of tools that creates greater transparency and accountability in public food procurement and encourages large public institutions to direct their buying power toward five core values—local economies, environmental sustainability, valued workforce, nutritional health, and animal welfare.

Following adoption in Los Angeles, the Center for Good Food Purchasing was created to help respond to interest around the country, providing cities support for evaluation and implementation. In the last two years, the Center has partnered with three other national organizations—Food Chain Workers Alliance, the HEAL Food Alliance, and us at Real Food Media—to respond to interest in the Program from across the country. Thanks to all of us working together, and with partners on the ground, the Program has passed in public institutions Chicago, Oakland, and San Francisco. Today, the Program influences over $300 million in taxpayer dollars to improve the food system and increase access to healthier school meals for millions of students.

At Real Food Media, we work with partners across the country and local coalitions to build public support for Program adoption. We work closely with local coalitions at various stages of campaign development to tailor resources that address local political context and communications priorities. We also help tell the story of the local, and national, impact of the Program.

Learn more about how to bring the Good Food Purchasing Program to your city at GoodFoodCities.org and follow the Program on Facebook and Twitter!

“Interest in the Good Food Purchasing Program has spread like wildfire, sparking efforts in Oakland, San Francisco, Austin, Chicago, the Twin Cities, New York, Cincinnati, and beyond. The scale of this expansion is nothing short of inspiring: the collective nationwide reach of these initiatives is soon expected to pass over 2 million meals every day.”

—Ricardo Salvador, Union of Concerned Scientists

Header photo by USDA

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An audacious idea was hatched: A global boycott of the biggest pusher of infant formula, the Big Food giant Nestlé. The resulting campaign included the founding of INFACT (now known as Corporate Accountability International and home to Real Food Media) and, while the campaign didn’t end Nestlé’s marketing of infant formula, it dramatically restricted how, what, and where the company could market.

This multi-decade campaign of courageous leaders around the world working to promote health in the face of multinational food industry marketing was front-of-mind reading The New York Times deeply reported piece about Nestlé in Brazil. In the piece, you learn about how the global giant is still impacting the health and well being of people around the world, not only through its ongoing marketing of infant formula, but also KitKats, pudding, sugar-sweetened yoghurt. The Times pieces is powerful evidence that preventable diet-related illnesses are on the rise and the processed foods industry, including giants like Nestlé, are driving this public health scourge.

We at Real Food Media believe as a global community, we must stand up to Big Food and its attempts to influence our elected officials and demand real regulation and new policies for public health. The good news is we know there are policies that work—the ones we seek to amplify, through our videos, collaborations and media engagement—like restricting marketing to children (particularly in schools and hospitals), promoting healthy food procurement through initiatives like the Good Food Purchasing Program, and passing taxes like the sugary beverage taxes. (Ideas I shared in a Letter to the Editor, published here).

If you haven’t yet, we encourage you to read The New York Times piece and turn the heartbreak you may feel when you finish into positive action—what we try to do every day.

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When you picture school lunch what comes to mind? Gooey pizza and floppy French fries, or fresh organic produce and chicken raised without routine antibiotics? My guess is the former. But thanks to advocates around the country, someday it may just be the latter.

Every year the National School Lunch Program spends almost $13 billion to feed over 30 million children. For years, school leaders and community activists have been working to improve the food purchased with those public dollars. Now advocates have a new tool to help achieve just such a lofty goal: It’s called the Good Food Purchasing Policy and after its successful passage in 2012 by the Los Angeles Unified School District and the city of LA, school districts and cities across the country are exploring its possibilities for shaping how public food, like school lunch, is procured.

The policy is similar to LEED certification, only for food instead of buildings. It’s a tool for school districts and the city government’s to make purchasing decisions based on a set of core values. Imagine that!

Under the policy, suppliers must meet basic criteria across five values: supporting local economies, promoting health, providing a safe and healthy workplace and fair wages, protecting animal welfare, and promoting environmental sustainability. Like LEED, the policy inspires suppliers to reach higher than the basic minimum, to “score” better and better across these criteria.

“The Good Food Purchasing Program provides institutions with the framework and tools to achieve an alternative vision for the food system,” says Alexa Delwiche, the head of the Center for Good Food Purchasing, a nonprofit launched by the masterminds of the policy to help cities and school districts pass it and evaluate its implementation.

After the City of Los Angeles and LA Unified School District passed the policy, procurement decisions for more than 750,000 meals a day were made with a whole new lens: not just which suppliers are cheapest, but which suppliers best reflect those five values. It’s making a big difference.

Consider the case of Tyson. Two years before the policy was passed, in 2010, the multinational chicken giant was awarded the $60 million, five-year poultry contract with LA Unified. By 2015, when the Tyson contract was up for renewal, the school district had a different set of questions for the company, such as its record on animal welfare, environmental protection, and treatment of workers. Concerns about Tyson’s poor track record on multiple fronts led school board members to question whether Tyson could meet the standards of the Good Food Purchasing Program. Ultimately, Tyson withdrew from the contract process, and the school board awarded Gold Star Foods, which had much better labor and production practices, a contract instead.

It’s not just the source of chicken that’s changed. PolicyLink found that before the policy was in place, only about 10 percent of produce served in LA schools was sourced within 200 miles of the district. Today, that’s grown to 50 to 72 percent, depending on the season, bringing roughly $12 million into the local economy.

Inspired by its neighbor to the south, San Francisco Unified School District became the first institution outside of Los Angeles to formally adopt the policy in 2016. Across the bay, the Oakland school board is poised to pass the policy this year, too. Together, these three cities alone make about $200 million worth of food purchases annually.

Community leaders across the nation are seeing the power and unifying spirit of this policy that brings these five crosscutting values together. Cities across the country – from Chicago to New York City to Minneapolis and Cincinnati are all exploring it.

“The Good Food Purchasing Program has energized food justice activists in Cincinnati,” says Brennan Grayson, director of the Cincinnati Interfaith Workers Center. “It brings a bold vision to food justice activism – one that brings people from all parts of the food chain together. And togetherness is what people need to make changes in the food system.”

Policy change at the national level can move at a glacial pace, if at all. So it’s exciting to see communities take action locally: to put our public dollars toward food that’s best for our bodies, for workers, and for the planet.

Originally published in Earth Island Journal

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