School Lunch Politics (36 page)

If school lunches no longer played a significant role in agricultural surplus markets, their role in the health of children, particularly poor children, was more important than ever. By 1990 the National School Lunch Program was “the largest federal child nutrition program and the second largest source of federal funding for elementary and secondary schools.”
¹²
What is more, school lunches became a significant measure by which the federal government judged the resources and needs of American communities. Schools received federal subsidies based on the number of children in their district qualifying for free and reduced-price lunches.
¹³
Indeed, national estimates of poverty levels in neighborhoods, political wards, towns, and cities were often based on the number of children in the school district who qualified for free or reduced-price lunches. Free lunch had become an indicator of broad social needs and was used to allocate an array of federal and state benefits to schools as well as to other institutions. Indeed, as political attacks on racial affirmative action plans gained traction by the end of the 1990s, the number of children qualifying for free lunch began to serve as a proxy for the racial composition of the school.
¹⁴
In 2002, after a series of court rulings called into question the use of race in school attendance plans, districts began to use income—measured by the free lunch eligibility guidelines—to achieve diversity. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Raleigh, North Carolina, and San Francisco all instituted income-based attendance plans during the fall of 2002. Children in these states were “sorted into schools” based on whether they were eligible for free lunches. “Economic integration is a route to racial diversity that may avoid legal challenges,” opined one reporter. Century Foundation senior fellow Richard D. Kahlenberg predicted this would be “the next big movement in school reform.”
¹⁵
The point was to increase student diversity by ensuring an economic mix of students. The easiest way schools could determine the economic status of students was by counting up how many children in the district qualified for free and reduced-price lunches. Given the other federal and state welfare benefits that would accrue to schools and districts claiming a large population of “at risk” students, there was clearly an incentive for schools to count as many children as possible in their lunch program statistics.

Despite the enhanced significance of free lunches, schools depended ever more heavily on the private food-service industry. Few states had stepped in to pick up the slack as the federal contribution to school meals declined during the 1980s. At the end of the century, 260 of Chicago's 592 school cafeterias were managed by either Marriott International or Aramark. In 1997 a report estimated that 110 more of the city's cafeterias would be privatized by the end of the year. “Privatization has introduced new variety and quality of food products to our students,” boasted Chicago's food-service manager, Susan Susanke. Claiming that privatized cafeterias brought in as much as a 12 percent increase in participation for lunch and 9 percent for breakfast, Susanke praised the food-service industry for its “extensive experience in sales and marketing,” which could not be matched by city school resources.
¹⁶
Chicago was not the only city to rely on commercial food operations. All of Rhode Island's 330 public schools, for example, were run by private companies. The state claimed that the partnership with private industry had resulted in a 31 percent rise in participation rates and a dramatic decline in waste. In Oregon and California, school districts similarly contracted with food-service companies. The South Pasadena school district, for example, reported saving $50,000 a year after contracting with the Marriott Corporation to run its lunch program.
¹⁷

Lunch was, indeed, big business. School food service represented a $15 billion market, or “ten percent of all food purchased away from home.”
¹⁸
By the mid-1990s Marriott Corporation alone managed lunch programs in over 350 school districts (and an estimated 3,500 schools) nationwide and was expanding at a rate of 20 percent each year. Aramark, Sodexho and Dakara followed Marriott in the school food-service market. Sodexho, for example, claimed to serve 360 million school lunches in 2002.
¹⁹
It was the Marriott company that pioneered in bringing the “food court” into the school cafeteria. With this strategy, dubbed, the “Grand Marketplace,” school children visited food centers offering specialized choices such as pizza, bagels, tacos, salads, and hamburgers.
²⁰
“Gone are the scary platters of khaki-colored chop suey or glutinous creamed chipped beef,” noted
Consumer Reports.
But, the journal added, “the most reliable customers are the children eligible for free and reduced price lunches.”
²¹
Indeed, the children with the least choice formed the largest market for brand-name products and fast-food school meals.

Poor children formed the major target for food industry advertisements and new school lunch products. But paying children were still critical to school lunch budgets. To maintain a solid cadre of paying students, school cafeterias offered what they assumed the market desired. Lunchroom operators basically capitulated to the appeal and the lure of the consumer market in order to keep students—whether paying or free—in the lunchroom. In the mid-1990s, for the first time, federal rules allowed nine fast food chains to operate in the schools. These included Pizza Hut, Little Caesar's, Domino's, Taco Bell, Subway, Chic-Fil-A, McDonald's, Blimpie's, and Arby's. PepsiCo, which owned Pizza Hut, opened business in about 5,000 of the nation's 94,000 schools.
²²
Schools also began to offer “brand days” in which the fast-food chains competed with one another for children's lunch money. Brand-name products and fast foods promised to keep school lunchrooms financially solvent.
²³
Indeed, by the year 2000, the Centers for Disease Control estimated that one in five schools participating in the National School Lunch Program had brand-name fast foods in their lunchrooms.
²⁴

The strategy appeared to work. School lunch operators reported that participation rates soared when brand-name fast foods were offered.
²⁵
One Delaware school district claimed that lunch participation went up by 18 percent when Pizza Hut was brought in. The Henrico County School District, which included Richmond, Virginia, actually dropped out of the National School Lunch Program and began to contract exclusively with private companies, including Domino's, Subway, and Taco Bell. According to the district's food service director, Tim Mertz, “branded concepts” accounted for ever increasing portions of school food sales. Mertz's goal was to “have branded food courts in all of its high schools by the turn of the century. “
²⁶
The lure of the market was difficult to resist, particularly when public funds were insufficient to maintain lunchroom operations.

School children also provided a potential long-term market for food industry products. Food-service industry advertisers viewed school lunchrooms as the perfect place to create and solidify brand loyalty. “Market ing surveys say the younger generation is brand conscious,” said one pizza industry representative in what could only be characterized as an understatement. The ads, said Tim Wellenzohn, product manager at Rich Products Corporation, “helps us get a foot in the door to give the school food service operator an option.” Domino's Pizza encouraged franchisers to enter the school lunch market, offering a royalty rebate to any of their businesses participating in the school lunch program. Admitting that “the profit margin is not very good on school lunch sales,” Domino's spokeswoman Maggie Proctor nonetheless encouraged the company's franchises to get into the program “for the product exposure—to get our relatively new thin crust and deep dish products out there to kids.” One foodservice manager commented that by the time children entered school they were already “intimately familiar” with the different pizza brands. Families eat pizza at home, he pointed out, almost as often as they eat potatoes.
²⁷
The children were, in effect, a captive audience for corporate advertisements, and the schools implicitly endorsed the products. As San Francisco school board member Jill Wynns observed, the food industry viewed children simply as future customers.
²⁸

Food service companies provided more than fast food to school lunchrooms. The National School Lunch Program budget had never adequately funded nutrition education. With the budget cuts of the 1980s, however, education became an even greater problem for school lunch operators. Private food-service companies happily stepped in with elaborate promotional materials that they offered to the schools for nutrition education. Neither the schools nor the Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service could compete with the marketing appeal of the private industry—or with the new products offered on trial in school lunchrooms. When it came to brand names, product advertising, and educational materials, school lunch professionals were complicit partners. The American School Food Service Association regularly consulted with food-service companies and advised them on how to bring their products into compliance with USDA nutrition guidelines. According to one report, the educational materials supplied by food companies ranged “from interactive classroom lesson plans and videos on exercise and nutrition to songs, games, quizzes, and cards filled with fun facts.”
²⁹
The Apricot Producers of California, for example, presented at the ASFSA 2001 Trade Show a new Advisory Panel ready to distribute “new activities and recipes” for school lunchrooms and professional development materials for school lunch administrators.
³⁰
These products and services were particularly attractive in poor districts where supplies and equipment were difficult to obtain and where funds for professional development were in short supply.

Despite the special vitamin-enhanced products, fast food continued pose a problem for school lunch administrators. Often, the pizza, tacos and hamburgers offered by private companies did not meet the Department of Agriculture's minimal nutrition requirements. During the 1990s, for example, the department guidelines required that children receive no more than 30 percent of their calories from fat. As late as the mid-1990s, however, one study found that overall 38 percent of the calories in school lunches came from fat, and 15 percent from saturated fat.
³¹
When parents, nutritionists, and even school officials worried that fast-food companies were not meeting nutritional standards, the USDA assured them that “the Government and private vendors are working together to bring more tasty, nutritious, healthy meals to our Nation's school children.”
³²
In truth, however, the fast-food school lunch often did not meet the test. Taco Bell, for example, tried to re-formulate its products for the school lunch market, but its chicken and bean enchiladas and “fiesta casseroles” were found to contain some 35 percent of their calories from fat. ChicFil-A similarly promised to deliver schools a reimbursable fried-chicken sandwich, but it turned out to contain 27 percent of calories from fat. Subway was the only company that did not need to modify its products to meet the USDA fat requirement. The USDA school lunch administrators were not hard to convince. By the 1990s any qualms about commercial products in school lunchrooms had all but vanished. Agriculture Department spokesman Phil Shanholtzer, for example, had no problem recommending pizza as “a healthy food.” Nutrition guidelines, he pointed out, “are judged over a week's menu cycle rather than an individual meal,” so schools could offer “a relatively high fat item one day and make up for it on other days.”
³³
In 2004, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine warned of an impending obesity crisis among American children. School meals, the physicians feared, contributed to children's “over-consumption of calories, fat, cholesterol, salt, and sugar.” Finding child obesity to be at “an all-time high,” the committee ominously predicted that this generation “may be the first to have shorter lives than their parents.”
³⁴

Department of Agriculture nutrition guidelines were not entirely without effect. To enter the school lunch market, companies did re-formulate many of their products. Thus, although children ate Domino's Pizza and Taco Bell tacos, these products were different in important respects from the pizza and tacos sold outside the school. Taco Bell, for example, offered schools an enhanced breakfast burrito that included an egg, cheese, and sausage that, it assured school lunch administrators, met the USDA nutritional requirements. The case of pizza was instructive. One of the most popular items on school lunch menus, pizza was also one of the most problematic when it came to nutrition. Under the school lunch nutrition standards, any pizza sold as part of the school lunch program had to meet the “2–ounce protein” requirement. That is, in order to qualify as a main dish offering, the pizza had to contain at least two ounces of protein. When Pizza Hut, a major national chain, sought entry into the school lunch market, a company report noted that “the greatest challenge” was trying to reduce the fat content of its pizza slices. Pizza sauce and pepperoni are high in salt, and cheese is a high fat food. After spending “enormous amounts of resources” on a complete nutrition analysis, the company was convinced its product could be presented to schools as part of a reimbursable (and presumably nutritional) meal. “We've always said pizza served with fruit, vegetables, whole grain products and low-fat milk meets the Dietary Guidelines for Americans,” noted company spokesman Chris Romoser. The company finally presented its specially formulated pizza to schools, noting that “accompanied by fruit, milk, and maybe a vegetable,” their product would constitute a reimbursable meal. Not wanting their product to become identified with poor children, however, Pizza Hut stipulated that in schools where there were “a lot of kids that qualify for reduced-price lunches,” their pizzas be sold in the regular lunch line. When the Houston Independent School District adopted Pizza Hut products, for example, the cafeteria manager worked with the company to make sure the pizzas did not appear to be only for poor children.
³⁵