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If there is no flour, there is no Torah…

by Leah Koenig · January 23rd, 2007
Family & Kids, Health, Obesity, School Food

These words, from Pirkei Avot - Wisdom of the Fathers - and remind me of an article about school lunches published last week by Grist. ”Renegade Lunch Lady,” Ann Cooper, is working to change the face of school lunch in American public schools, starting with the 9,000 students eating at the 16 schools in the Berkeley Unified School System. 
 

They also reminded me of a related and less-heartening article I read a few years back in Mother Jones, called Unhappy Meals, which painted a very bleak picture of the average school lunch.

Mother Jones reported, “At a time when weight-related illnesses in children are escalating, schools are serving kids the foods that lead to obesity, diabetes and heart disease.”  The article linked this trend with the National School Lunch Program, which was enacted in 1946 to provide meals to children regardless of income.  Although the program sounds well-intentioned, it was designed to subsidize agribusiness, especially the beef and dairy industries.  Public schools are often left with little choice about which foods they can offer the 27 million kids who eat government-funded lunches every day.

Partially as a result, an increasing number of children across the country - kids who are disproportionately low-income, African American, Hispanic American, and Native American - are developing unprecedented levels of food-related health problems that are linked to obesity.

Cooper’s story is an inspiring one, and she is certainly not the only “Renegade Lunch Lady” fighting the battle of the french fry.  But the tide has not yet turned on the national school lunch - and too many children continue to struggle to “learn Torah without flour.” 

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2 Responses to “If there is no flour, there is no Torah…”

  1. Anna Stevenson Says:
    January 23rd, 2007 at 3:54 pm

    Our CSA was discussing just last week how we might work with the PTA to get more good food into the school in our neighborhood. We thought of a couple options:

    1/ have the school buy a fruit share, and use the apples and pears that come in the fall for the recess snack (you’d have to see if it was possible to buy a share for just the fall– but I think, that it would be more like buying wholesale from the farmer, where the CSA was serving as the mechanism for making the connection in the first place)

    2/ a school in the bronx has bought 10 shares of a local CSA, and then resells the items individually at a farmer’s market type table at the school the next day. They’ve found this to be a really helpful way to educate people about CSA and give them a taste of the vegetables, before asking them to commit to a whole season.

    In both cases, though, it’s neat to think what you can do with institutional purchasing power….which is for that matter not rather unlike Jewish purchasing power, no? ;0)

  2. Ben Murane Says:
    January 25th, 2007 at 4:48 pm

    Her new book Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children spells out how parents and school employees can help instill healthy habits in children.
    And the numbers couldn’t help but explain the urgency more fully:

    * 100 - Percent of cafeteria food which was wrapped in plastic and reheated.
    * 78 - Percent of the schools in America do not actually meet the USDA’s nutritional guidelines.
    * $2.40 - Dollars per day to spend on each kid — 70 percent of which goes to payroll and overhead.
    * 72 - Cents from that initial $2.40 to spend on ingredients.
    * One in three - Numbers of white kids and fully half of African Americans and Hispanics born in 2000 who will develop diabetes in their lifetimes — most before finishing high school, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
    * 2000 - Year of the first generation of Americans not to live longer than their parents.
    * $70 billion - Expenses of health-care for diet-related illnesses per year in the U.S.

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