After I mentioned that the Berkeley lunch program was in poor shape, Ann Cooper, the chef in charge, invited me to visit — to set the record straight. It was quite an opportunity; the Berkeley lunch program, some hope, will become a model for the whole country. This is why there was a long New Yorker article recently about what Cooper is doing.
Spending about $1/day more per student, Cooper has shifted the lunch menu far away from the heavily-processed and factory-made food of most school lunches. Far more of the food is cooked in the district kitchens, albeit days in advance in some cases. I took Cooper’s word for it that the students actually eat the new food. This is a great improvement, in my opinion. The big questions are whether these changes are sustainable and what effect they will have.
The single best thing you can do for your health is to eat healthy food (the exact nature of which has yet to be determined, but you get the idea). Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke — all the big American health problems are made much worse by the crummy diet of most Americans. Will Cooper’s improved lunches cause her lucky diners to eat better as adults? If so, $1/day is a great bargain compared to health care costs. (She estimated these changes will cost $2/day across the country.) Will Cooper’s improvements reduce obesity and diabetes? That is obviously the hope.
I wouldn’t say the Berkeley school lunch program is in trouble or in poor shape; I would say it is in limbo. Four things are big question marks:
1. Cooper seemed to be working very hard and not quite enjoying it. Even after a year on the job. This is not a good sign. Her salary is being paid by the Chez Panisse Foundation — not a good sign. She struck me as incredibly dedicated but how much failure and frustration can she and the Chez Panisse Foundation bear? This sort of thing is often much harder than anyone imagines in the beginning.
2. Obesity is a big big issue. Whether the new food will help is unknown. Cooper seems to take it on faith that her food will be less fattening. I am less sure. As anyone who has read The Shangri-La Diet knows, I believe that American food became really fattening not because it was processed or “unhealthy” but because of the increasing popularity of foods that tasted exactly the same each time (e.g., microwave entrees). If she cooks the same recipes again and again, the hoped-for weight loss may not happen. If it doesn’t, will the program continue? Or will $1/day be seen as better spent on something that hasn’t yet failed, such as more physical ed?
3. The effects of Cooper’s changes are going to be measured by UC Berkeley School of Public Health researchers. As far as I could make out, the comparison will be between Berkeley students and students in another school district. You have n = 1 (1 school district) in the experimental group and n = 1 (1 school district) in the control group. This is better than nothing but, given the importance of the question — can better school lunches improve health for the rest of a student’s life — and our great ignorance as to its answer, it is scary bad. It will be so easy to reach the wrong answer. Researchers with this sort of design often act as if they have hundreds of subjects in each group — each student is treated as a different and randomly-assigned subject. This isn’t just false, it’s misleading.
4. While I am sure the researchers can measure obesity, I am less sure they will do a decent job of measuring changes in attitudes toward food. It is not a typical public health question.
I am very optimistic about the future of food — and therefore health — in America, but it’s because of (a) the Food Network, (b) the growth of farmers’ markets, and (c) the success of Whole Foods and similar stores. Not to mention Rachael Ray. Americans are becoming food connoisseurs, starting to catch up with a large chunk of the rest of the world, such as China. The American increase in connoisseurship is trickle-down — from rich people to everyone else. Like cell phones, like TVs, like literacy, like many things. Whereas Ann Cooper is working in a school district that has lots of poor people. Not a good place to start this sort of revolution.
Addendum: This article in New York magazine reminded me that Ann Cooper’s previous job was at an expensive private school. So maybe it is another case of trickle-down after all.
I don’t know, Seth. This idea of trickle-down from rich people as a precursor to being a connoisseur seems a bit misleading. Cellphones started out very expensive, so only rich people could afford them. There may have been some “status” pull because they were associated with rich people, but the rest of us got cell phones because they’re convenient and became affordable. I don’t see how the literacy argument works at all, at least in this country. Why should poor people be less inclined to like good food if it’s available in the cafeteria?
Cell phones became affordable because rich people paid the development costs. If something about cell phones required them to start with poor people, they might not have gotten very far. To return to school lunches, Cooper is trying to do something very difficult — and on a tiny budget. If she had more money, as she would in a richer school district, it would be easier. She would have more money to spend, she could do a better job, the health effects could therefore be larger and more convincing, and she would have more time to do it — her salary wouldn’t be paid by a foundation.
Richer school districts don’t necessarily have more money for lunch. Most of the money that doesn’t come from parents is from the federal government. You can’t ask those on a free lunch program to eat a worse lunch than full-price students, and even in a rich district, parents won’t tolerate their children’s lunch money subsidizing other people’s. A very rich district could subsidize the cost of everyone’s lunch out of it’s general budget (or get Alice Waters’ foundation to help out, as Berkeley does) but for the most part, districts don’t seem to go much past the free lunch subsidy as the amount they will spend on the average lunch. There’s no multibillion dollar infrastructure buildout required to get better lunch food, just more per-student funding, and that is something that has to be done collectively, probably at the federal level.
Let me make a prediction: The next school districts to try to provide much better lunches — as Cooper is doing in Berkeley — will be rich districts, even though childhood obesity is a much bigger problem in poor districts. This will happen before the federal government does anything.
Better School Food is on its way thanks to the soon to be released documentary on school lunch called “Two Angry Moms”. This is not just a movie, it’s a movement. The tipping point is closer this year with the farm bill up for renewal. This film will have a huge impact in the discussion of what we are feeding our kids and why.
To learn more, visit https://www.angrymoms.org
Dr. Susan Rubin
( Angry Mom)
I think schools NEED better choices for lunch, because I have seen students that can’t even fit in the desks!
While I agree that wealthier school districts will generally be on the leading edge — generally because moms in those districts have more time to voice their concerns and spend a lot more time in Whole Foods — we’ve found three charter schools exclusively serving underprivileged communities (95+% of students qualify for the Federal free & reduced lunch program) who are adamant about working with our company to get natural and organic lunches in their schools. Students in those schools are partnering with us to find communtiy and national businesses to subsidize the Federal lunch program. Interestingly, we a higher percentage of students in those schools choose our lunches than what we generally see in richer neighborhoods.
More information is available at https://www.brownbagnaturals.com