What’s WRONG with school lunch in the U.S.?

 

• This is me eating a typical American school lunch. - This hot dog looks sad. That was smuggled out of a high school in Milwaukee. - The school does not know that we're doing this. They don't know that I'm here. Why am I doing this? Because the U.S. has a real problem with school lunch. - Several students in Lee County reaching out to us with pictures of food they say is rotting or undercooked.
• School lunch is most of the time *ss. I'm not gonna lie. Hi, I'm Yara. And like a lot of people who went through the U.S. public school system, I don't have fond memories of school lunch. So when I see the kind of school lunches that some other countries are offering to all their public school students, I can't help but think: Why can't we do that here, in the U.S.
• ? And how is it that school lunch has gotten so bad in some places that students are protesting over it? - This campaign begins here, but will not end here. Food justice is central to quality learning. OK, let's start at the beginning. What does a typical American school lunch look like, and – most importantly – taste like? I went to Milwaukee to meet some high school students who are so sick of their school food, they've started a protest movement against it.
• - School officials say they are aware of posts made on social media showing unfavorable images of meals served in schools. The group is called YES – Youth Empowered in the Struggle. And they're fighting for better school lunches for all of the city's students. - Food ends up being lukewarm or, like, frozen in the middle.
• Lunches come out very unfresh and nasty. So first we headed to a secret location to try one of these "unfavorable" school lunches. So the school didn't respond to our requests. So we've had to resort to basically having a mystery student smuggle out a mystery meal to this mystery location, where I will mysteriously eat it.
• I mean, well... Is that them? And suddenly, it was go-time. Or, perhaps, lunchtime. - Looks like we have some very old-looking pieces of potato. All right. So the hot dog was a hot dog. The potato wedges were kind of bland. The fruit salad was fine, and the apple was actually pretty good. Nothing was awful, but the whole thing was just...
• - This is a really sad meal. And it literally is very similar to what I would have eaten as a kid. Is this a typical meal that you might find at your school lunch cafeteria? This is one of the best? Do the teachers even eat this stuff? They don’t eat the school lunch. They don't touch it. That is... I think that's a sign.
• Not gonna lie, if this was the best lunch they got, it made total sense why they were protesting. So later that evening, I met up with them at their campaign headquarters to learn about their plans to take on an entire school district. - If you had to describe school lunch in one word, how would you describe it? I would say weird.
• Rancid. Raw. Unappetizing. Unedible. I don't like the taste or the texture. Food is always cold. But the problems with school lunch here run a lot deeper than taste and quality. For one, Milwaukee has a growing Muslim population, and for Muslim students, the school food offered hasn't always been appropriate in the past.
• Some kids that I know, they're like immigrant families, low-income. They don't have any money. And they're forced to eat that. Some Muslim students that I know, they would eat the mock chicken leg 'cause they don't wanna starve later at home. This, by the way, is the mock chicken leg: a processed meat product.
• And you're telling me the mock chicken leg... - ...is pork. It's pork. And they're eating that against their, kind of, religious wishes? Cause they're just going to starve. - They don't have anything to eat at home. That's so screwed up. Milwaukee has the second-highest poverty level of the top 50 most-populated cities in the U.S.
• Poverty is so high, school lunch is free for all students in Milwaukee Pubilc Schools. So how did this get started? We sent out a survey asking students what their important issues was. And we seen that lunch was the one that was coming up after 2,000 surveys. So they gathered a list of six demands, which are: freshly cooked meals at school, more lunch options, larger portions, accommodating students’ dietary restrictions, hiring more lunch staff and raising their wages, and regular meetings with the school board, which they've actually achieved.
• In response to the protests, the schools sent a letter to the students. They blamed their failings on the impact of the pandemic and USDA restrictions. And when we asked them about some of the stories the students shared, they said the Milwaukee Public School district is “engaged in many efforts to improve meal options” and that they've rewritten menus to include “more appealing offerings” and daily “vegetarian options.
• ” But the students aren't buying it. They’ve just got to try harder, because it don't seem like they trying at all. It's something that's very easily solvable. It's just not getting solved. It's just negligence. So how do you solve the school lunch problem - not just in Milwaukee, but across the U.S.? Well, first we need to understand how the school lunch system works.
• Or, um, how it doesn't work. I'm in Madison, Wisconsin, to meet professor Jennifer Gaddis, one of the leading scholars on school lunch in the U.S. What are the biggest problems with school lunch in America? A huge problem that really began, like, in the early 1970s was this perception that school meals are like welfare food.
• There was this real influx of lower-income students of color into the program. There's just a lot of people who are from higher-income households that feel as if school meals aren't for them opting out of the program. It's an insidious cycle. It is. - Because as they opt out of the program, the program then has less money.
• In other words, the more students buy school lunches, even the discounted ones for lower-income students, the more money the school makes. So then you have, like, maybe more money to spend on higher-quality ingredients or to pay your workers better. So there used to be more federal funding for school lunch in the United States.
• In the 1980s, the Reagan administration kind of came in and really took a hatchet to a lot of social welfare programming. The school lunch budget was cut by over 25%. There was, like, an intense, like, fast food-ification of school meals, like, in the late 1970s that was really exacerbated during the Reagan administration.
• A lot of the, like, frozen food manufacturers and the airline industry in the late 1960s stepped in and said: "Oh, you need to feed, like, a ton of people in a really small space really quickly? We know how to do that." In 2010, Michelle Obama led a campaign to improve school lunches in America in the most significant way in 30 years.
• It resulted in the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. More whole wheat. Less fried food. Less trans fat. Salad bars. And so on. I appreciate now that the frozen pizza may be made with a higher percentage of whole grain. The chicken nugget may be baked instead of fried. There's something to me that's kind of strange about how a food can "tick the boxes.
• " Like I can give you a rock, but sprinkle vitamin K, vitamin A, vitamin C on it, and then give it to you in a package, and this meets all the standards. This is also known as... So scientific nutrition is basically just this idea that if a food has the right kind of, like, components, that it is actually healthy for you without really taking into account, like, the taste or texture or appearance.
• So you can have this label that you put on all your products, and then it means that basically any school that were to serve that, they know for sure that they are meeting federal guidelines. This is so convenient and easy that some schools just buy these prepackaged certified meals and wash their hands of the whole situation.
• - The power of the corporate food industry is a real problem. When the National School Lunch Program was started in the 1940s, it was explicitly stated that schools could not outsource their lunches to a private company. But as the program expanded to include more students, schools realized that they weren't set up to feed everyone.
• So in 1970, after some lobbying, the law changed. Schools could now turn to private, for-profit companies to feed their students. - I get, like, a little nervous sometimes being like, Because I think that there's variation in them. There are actually some newer private management companies really doing school food differently, having different goals in mind.
• But if we're directing most of that food money to big food companies, isn't that kind of a problem in terms of how we're using public dollars? But there is one idea that could make a huge difference. - Scratch cooking. - Yes. It's this radical, revolutionary idea that meals being served in schools are cooked fresh using real ingredients.
• I know. Crazy. And the benefits go far beyond the food on the lunch tray. So we actually headed to Minneapolis and met up with this guy: Bertrand Weber. He went from being a food director at a five-star hotel to transforming the Minneapolis public school lunch program. - Good morning, sir. From something that looked like this, into something that looks like this.
• - Everything we served in school was oversized, processed food. So I said, "No, no, no." Why do we have to serve chicken nuggets? Why can't we serve real chicken? Fresh fruits and vegetables on a salad bar? So when Bertrand took over in 2012, he set out to serve freshly cooked meals made from scratch with actual produce from local farmers.
• The only problem was the school district’s central kitchen, which distributed meals all over the city, barely had any cooking equipment. Nothing was cooked here. Everything came frozen, pre-made, processed and repackaged to send to the schools. But today, the facility is something else entirely. The biggest change is that we're actually making food.
• Scratch cooking. - Cooking, yeah. This has had a huge impact on student participation. In a high school that has 1,000 students, we went from serving 300 meals to 600 meals. Wow. You doubled. And over the last 10 years, more and more schools in the district have been equipped with functional kitchens. They'll receive basic ingredients from here and then cook them into full-on, scratch-cooked meals.
• So now we're actually gonna head to a high school and check out some scratch-cooked meals and see what it tastes like. On today's menu, they were serving chicken parmesan with roasted veggies, sauteed kale and pizza. Oh, and an open salad bar. I'm just- I haven't been inside of a school cafeteria in... - It's not the same.
• It's not the same from 25 years ago. - It's not what we grew up with. Everything I'm referring back to is my childhood experience of, like, heat lamps above, like, french fries. This is so humane. This is, like, the way it should be. I'm going to help serve the kids lunch with my new friend. What's your name? - Marlene.
• I'm in charge of the chicken parmesan. - And I'm in charge of the spaghetti. - OK. Oh, we got to prepare fast? OK. Oh, and I see them. Oh my God - they're coming. Chicken. Oh my God. Oh, yeah. Now I'm going fast. Here you go. - Thank you. - Yeah, of course. This looks so great. I am excited to eat this. Are you excited to eat this? - Kind of.
• How are you? - Hi! I love this. It's just amazing that the staff is also eating this. Well, I'm excited. Can we eat now? Is this, can we eat? Ooh, I wanna get a really saucy one. All right, there we go. God, I can't believe I'm eating this at a school. Then vegetable and salad bars, free for all. I’m just gonna go full Thanksgiving-style.
• Don't judge me. This is the final product. So I am now trying your food. Here goes. I'm going to judge you now. This is very nice! This is real chicken. It's not like processed into a... into some mystery nugget. - It is a commercial product, but it's made from whole chicken. There is no filler. A-plus on the chicken.
• Love the zucchini. The comparison between this and what I ate when I was, like, 15? Night and day. It's like something you would eat, like, at a dinner table with your family. - I know the kale is definitely local. Summer squash are more than likely local. The cucumbers are local. The teachers were coming here.
• That was probably one of the biggest shocks to me. - I'm glad you're enjoying this, but it's by far not our best menu item. OK, so I obviously loved it, but what did the students think? What did you have to eat today for lunch? A hard chicken patty and flavorless spaghetti. OK. What did you think? It was actually pretty good.
• The chicken was kind of good. Not gonna lie. Chicken parmesan, that was good. The noodles was actually good, but the meat kind of hard, ain't gonna lie to you. Do you guys ever take the cooked vegetables? I know they had some zucchini and some onions. You had two plates. How did you get two plates? Her. What do you think overall of the school lunch here? Most of the time it's good.
• It's like, uh, hit or miss. A lot better than before. I think this year they actually improved. It be dry sometimes. Less dry. OK, that's very fair. I don't like dry food. I generally tell my friends I like wet food. It's fairly good. Most of the time, it's fair and good. It's all right. Our school district doesn't offer pork in the menu because we have a lot of Somalian and other Muslim religious followers.
• So I like [that] they're appreciative of the people around them. - Why is there some bad lunch? Because they give in to it, because they just want to make money. We're staying our ground. So we have the salad bar. If we don't do this, they would never be exposed to it. So how is all this possible? Well, it's a mix of politics – winning the school board over, finding innovative sources of funding – and good business sense.
• - How are you able to take that same funding, and yet transform this into a scratch-cooking operation? Processed food is more expensive than fresh food. One baked potato vs. one bag of potato chips. Which one is the most expensive one? The bag of potato chips is more expensive. There's certainly more challenge at the site level for someone to follow a recipe than it is to reheat a chicken bag.
• So it's a lot more work. It requires constant oversight. When I visit schools, I'll come back and say, "The lasagna was great here. This one was not so great." We have attracted more people that have cooking skills because of the wage we're offering, because not too many restaurants are going to offer you a retirement plan.
• I'm not here to make money. I'm here to invest in the future of our kids. The U.S. public school lunch program definitely has some big, big problems. As a whole, the system faces a systemic lack of funding, a lack of adequate kitchens, and so, so many other issues. We value highly processed, quick, convenient food because that's profitable.
• The quality of the food is sort of hit or miss, depending on where you are. In a lot of places, it's awful. In some places, it's kind of amazing. And each place has its own set of reasons as to how or why it got to be that way. Maybe some school lunch districts have overcome the odds, thanks to some incredible humans with some incredible ingenuity, or maybe even some local private investment.
• But these are exceptional cases that you can't just copy-paste everywhere. And that in itself is the problem: that you can't just copy-paste it so that every student everywhere is guaranteed a fresh, quality meal regardless of class, race or creed. - I think that Minneapolis is a good example of the bounds of what you can actually do within the current framework, and to get beyond that, you actually need further redesign of the system.
• I think we're at a really exciting moment right now where a lot of the solutions are out there. But what we need to do is to push for them to not just be happening in, like, certain places that have, like, a person who's really driving it or have additional resources.
• But to really see a widespread transformation of our school meals program.