By Mark Winne

Early in Free for All: Fixing School Food in America (University of California Press, 2010) former Texas Agriculture Secretary Susan Coombs declares that, “it will take 2 million angry moms to change school food”. Based on what we now know of the dreary state of our children’s cafeteria fare, there must be at least that many mamas, as well as a good number of papas who are ready to storm the barricades. Fortunately for them and America’s 55 million students who gulp down something resembling a meal every school day, they’ve been joined by Hunter College sociologist Janet Poppendieck who gives us the best reasons yet for unconditional school food reform.

We are already indebted to Poppendieck for her earlier works Knee Deep in Breadlines and Sweet Charity where she employed her sleuthing skills to unravel the historical contradictions and compounding irrationalities associated with feeding our nation’s neediest citizens. As she did then, Poppendieck combines her talents as historian and sociologist with those of an institutional psychologist to help us get in touch with our nation’s school food neurosis.

Why, for instance, have we developed three different ways to pay the lunch lady – one for the poor students, one for the nearly poor, and one for those who supposedly drive BMWs to school? The logical answer might be because that’s fair; the rich kids should pay more and the government should subsidize the cost of feeding lower income children, as it does currently to the tune of $11 billion annually. But as Poppendieck peels back the layers of the onion, we find the issue has always been less about compassion for needy children and more about accommodating political and commercial interests. Harry Truman (school lunch is good for national security), Ronald Reagan (ketchup is a vegetable), nutritionists and nutritionism (its nutrients that count, not the quality and taste of food), and various agricultural lobbies wanting to unload their farm surpluses are just a sampling of what has driven the school food agenda. Somewhere low on the totem pole you’ll find concern for the health and well-being of boys and girls.

Like any parent, I love to regale my own children with tales of the good old days.  I tell them about my high school cafeteria which had exactly one vending machine in the 1960s: a mechanically operated metal box that dispensed a red or golden, uncut, unpackaged and unadorned fresh apple for 25 cents. Far from feeling deprived (my children asked me if my school was the same one attended by Abe Lincoln), we were a healthy and reasonably bright group of young people. But today, vending machines (I once counted 51 in just one Albuquerque, New Mexico high school) are as ubiquitous as dog droppings in the melting snow. What has happened during the intervening decades?

Poppendieck’s jargon-free narrative takes us step-by-step through the deals, concessions, and compromises that have bureaucratized the school food process while simultaneously dumbing down the food. Why is so much processed food used to prepare school meals? Because it’s cheaper and “cooking from scratch” kitchens have been removed from the schools. Why does it have to be cheaper when we’re talking about feeding our children? Because the federal government (or anyone else for that matter) will not provide enough funding to enable schools to buy fresh, whole ingredients. (And by the way, taxpayers are spending billions of dollars to subsidize corn and soybeans, the prime ingredients in processed food.) Why do we have so many junk food items sold “a la carte” in our schools? Well, in addition to using a French culinary phrase to disguise what is otherwise crappy food, schools must sell these items to those with discretionary cash – supposedly the ones driving the BMWs – to compensate for the low reimbursements they receive for meals that meet mandated USDA standards. And on it goes.

Perhaps what I found most astonishing, and central to Poppendieck’s thesis, is the evolution of the three-tiered payment system. While the free, reduced-price, and full-pay categories are the “wins” secured by anti-hunger advocates over many years of legislative battles, Poppendieck argues that the cure may have been worse than the disease. The high cost of determining student eligibility, the administrative reporting burdens imposed by USDA, and of course, the stigma that falls on poor students exacts a high toll. On this last point, Poppendieck has this to say: “The biggest problem is the stigma that comes from being different, from being marked as poor, from being unable to pay in a culture that places excessive value on being able to pay.”

Poppendieck has a solution that is as elegant as it will be hard to achieve – universal free meals for all students K through 12. She acknowledges the cost, an additional $12 billion per year (our present wars, please note, are costing about the same amount each month) that would not only feed all students for free, but also improve the quality of the food.

If the arguments for universal school meals – efficiency, equity, no one excluded – sound eerily familiar, then you’ve probably been paying attention to the arguments for universal health care. If nothing else, it’s certainly ironic to consider the consequences of removing each system’s respective middlemen: processed food purveyors for school food, and private health insurers for health care. Might we all be healthier as a result?

In a long chapter called “Local Heroes” Poppendieck acknowledges the pioneering work of many innovative school food directors like Ann Cooper, as well as movements to connect schools to local farms and even create school gardens. These and others have made important contributions, she says, but they all need to be “scaled up” by becoming institutionalized (my word choice here would be “naturalized”) into the system. This by the way is the role of public policy, and it is why every one who cares about what our children eat should be in touch with their members of Congress.  The future of school food will be decided in the 2010 Child Nutrition reauthorization now before Congress.

Free for All is well researched and written. While Poppendieck studies her subject with the thoroughness of a sociologist, fortunately she doesn’t sound like one. We are treated to a careful review of the facts that flow through a lively and personal narrative. The reader is kept closely by her side as Poppendieck travels through school cafeterias and pores over government reports. Along the way we observe, touch, and taste what 55 million American children consume each school day. Most importantly, she tells us why it’s the way it is, and how, if we could somehow put ourselves in the little shoes of people smaller than us, we would do everything we could to make it better.

Mark Winne is the author of “Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty” (Beacon Press, 2008). His second book “Food Rebels, Guerilla Gardeners, and Smart Cookin’ Mamas” will be released in October.

March 1 – 4 – Missouri: Kansas City (March 2), Columbia(March 3), and St. Louis (March 3 & 4) Missouri - (times and exact locations to be announced). For more information contact Mary Hendrickson @ hendricksonM@missouri.edu.

March 11 – San Francisco – Glide Memorial Church – 6:30 PM – Panel discussion sponsored by Slow Food USA on how to make locally and sustainably produced food available to all income groups. For more information contact Anna Hillgruber Smith Clark at anna@marinorganic.org.

March 16 – Boston – Tufts University – For more information contact Hugh Joseph at 617-997-1861.

March 17 & 18 – Baltimore – John Hopkins University – For more information contact Anne Palmer at ampalmer@jhsph.edu.

April 6 – Charlottesville, VA – University of Virginia – For more information contact Tanya Denckla Cobb at td6n@virginia.edu.

April 10 – Cincinnati, Ohio - Food Congress (times and location to be determined – other Ohio events may occur around that time period). For more information contact Lauren Niemes at lauren@nutritioncouncil.org.

April 11 – Helena, Montana – Growing Community Project Presentation – evening presentation – For more information contact Jim Barngrover at javajim@bresnan.net.

April 12 & 13 – Missoula, Montana – University of Montana – Monday evening community presentation and Tuesday seminars – For more information contact Neva.Hassanein@mso.umt.edu.

April 26 – Tempe, Arizona – University of Arizona – Community presentation for University theatre project titled Whole, Local and Slow (Progressive Dinner) – for more information contact Jeff McMahon at jeff.mcmahon@asu.edu.

May 11 – Cardiff Wales (UK) – University of Cardiff – evening community lecture and presentation – For more information contact Kevin Morgan at morgankj@cardiff.ac.uk.

May 18 & 19 – Anchorage, Alaska – For more information contact Diane Peck at diane.peck@alaska.gov

Stay tuned for updates on appearances:

Reno, Nevada – July – Society for Nutrition Education

Santa Fe, New Mexico – November – Keynote at the Association for Humanist Sociology

November 20 – Massachusetts – Massachusetts Public Health Association 2009 Annual Meeting – Keynote address at 9:30 AM – Westborough Royal Plaza, Westborough, Massachusetts. For information see www.mphaweb.org or contact Valerie Bassett at vbassett@mphaweb.org.

December 4 and 5 – Black Mountain, North Carolina (near Asheville) – Annual conference of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association – half-day food policy workshop on December 4 and panel presentation the evening of December 4 and morning of December 5. For more informaton see www.carolinafarmstewards.org or contact fred@carolinafarmstewards.org.

These harvest-time icons signal the arrival of World Food Day (Oct. 16), the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s annual hunger and food insecurity report (early November), and of course our Thanksgiving bacchanal (Nov. 26). Taken as singular moments in time, these events appear celebratory or simply benign. Looked at over the course of 80 years, however, they remind us of our failure to end hunger because of our inability to address its cause, namely poverty.

When I want to imagine a different path, I think of Maurice Small, a middle-aged African-American who grew up in Cleveland’s housing projects. For a while he succumbed to the urban hustler’s life but grew tired of seeing the same vacant lots as an adult that he saw as a kid. He would eventually redirect his hustler’s energy to lead the charge for what is now a bourgeoning urban agriculture movement. With assistance from city hall, the Cleveland-Cuyahoga Food Policy Council, the nonprofit City Fresh, Oberlin College, Case Western University and the Cleveland Clinic, Small has mobilized people and land to produce more than $2 million of food annually. As he put it himself, “I’m a kid from the projects who’s now selling organic vegetables to white-tablecloth restaurants.”

By Mark Winne

(an edited version of this piece appeared in the Hartford Courant – July 5, 2009)

Willie Nelson was recently quoted as saying, “Dairy farmers are among the hardest workers I know.” Having hung around with a couple of dozen Connecticut dairy farmers off and on for 25 years, I’m inclined to agree with him. Cows are milked two or three times a day, 365 days a year. It doesn’t matter if it’s Christmas, your birthday, or 10 degrees below zero. They don’t ever give you a day off.

While hard work might earn dairy farmers a better place in heaven, it hasn’t earned them much else. According to figures compiled by Robert Wellington, the chief economist for the dairy co-op, Agri-Mark, Connecticut dairy farmers have made a profit in only 9 of the past 76 months. That’s probably why the state only has 157 dairy farms left – down from 663 in 1980 – and why the Connecticut legislature passed a short term dairy bail-out bill this past session.

But sitting in the boardroom of The Farmers Cow office in Lebanon, one gets a more optimistic impression. Maybe it’s the 300 multi-colored push-pins stuck in a Connecticut map marking the stores that carry this locally branded milk. Or maybe it’s the hand made table fashioned from beautifully finished cedar planks salvaged from a tumbled down grain silo. Whatever it is, you feel like this could be the end of the dairyman blues that have been sung in these parts for far too long.

Robin Chesmer is one of six state dairy farmers who make up The Farmers Cow, LLC. He’s bearded, bespectacled and stout enough to throw and pin a 1200 pound heifer in less than 30 seconds. Not that he would of course. He simply loves his cows too much to ever get rough with them. Chesmer, who with his son Lincoln own the 700-acre Graywall Farm, explains at some length how attentive they are to the cows’ diet, comfort and happiness. “A cow’s utter is a giant fermentation vat with lots of delicate bacterial flora. You have to give her just the right ratio of grass, protein, and energy.” And sounding a bit like an over-indulgent parent, Chesmer adds that “cows need 19 hours a day to do their own thing. They need to be stress-free.” Like all six of his fellow dairypersons, he says you will find neither bovine growth hormones (rBGH) nor antibiotics in The Farmers Cow milk.

But as the Beatles said, “Your lovin’ gives me a thrill, but your lovin’ don’t pay my bills.”  For all his compassionate husbandry and careful land stewardship, the prices he receives for his milk are determined by the federal milk marketing order, one of the more arcane forms of economic wizardry ever developed by a civilized society. In New England, where the cost of producing milk runs from $18 to $20 per hundred pounds, the farmer is currently receiving only about $13.

“We decided to go ahead with The Farmers Cow in 2004 because we’re in the middle of the one of the largest consumer markets in the world, but we couldn’t take advantage of that because we had a faceless product,” said Chesmer referring to the fact that his milk and that of nearly every other New England farmer gets dumped into one undifferentiated regional pool. Graywall Farm, in cooperation with Maple Leaf Farm (Hebron), Cushman Farm (North Franklin), Fairvue Farm (Woodstock), Hytone Farm (Coventry), and Fort Hill Farm (Thompson), collects only their milk in one place. Together, they printed their own milk cartons, created some impressive graphics, and even wrote their own song (though not a Grammy winner, you can hear it at www.thefarmerscow.com). Their milk is now available at small stores and big stores alike, including Stop and Shop, Big Y, and Shaw’s.

That a commodity like milk could establish a commercial scale local identity is just one more symptom of locavore-itis, that near feverish condition afflicting ever growing numbers of people who grave a more intimate relationship with their food. And Chesmer and his colleagues share a great deal of culpability for feeding that frenzy. All six farmers and their families have a non-stop schedule of appearances in stores, at farmers’ markets and festivals around the state to promote their product and educate consumers about cows and farming. “We had a farm tour at Nate Cushman’s dairy that drew 600 people,” he tells me in disbelief.

While The Farmers Cow is a dynamic enterprise that gives the consumer a direct connection to Connecticut’s farms, it’s still not out of the financial woods. The recession has hurt sales because struggling consumers are buying more of the slightly less expensive regional brands. Revenues must be plowed back into the business, postponing any immediate benefit to the farmers. And even though other farmers are clamoring to join The Farmers Cow, there is still excess capacity among the current six.

Outside of the The Farmers Cow’s office window is a landscape to die for – rolling pastures, gently swelling hills and a barn or two are all that you see.  Losing this open and productive land is ultimately what’s at stake. Giving the state’s remaining dairy farmers a chance to make a decent living is also on the line. And satisfying the innate human desire to touch that which feeds us is crying to be met. If The Farmers Cow isn’t a big part of the answer, we better find something that is pretty soon.

September 24 – Boston, MA – Natural Products Exposition – speaking at session at 10:00 AM

September 25 – Seattle, WA – Washington State Food and Nutrition Council – Blackriver Conference Center in Renton, WA – Keynote address at 2:30 PM. For more information contact Acacia Larson at acacia@homegrownnutrition.com or at (206) 459-9378.

October 10 – Des Moines, IA – the Community Food Security Coalition Annual Conference. For more information go to www.foodsecurity.org.

October 16 – Rutgers University – New Brunswick, NJ – For more information contact Amy Michael at amymic@rci.rutgers,edu.

October 19 – Great Barrington, MA – Evening – Contact Ricky Bernstein at penrose@vgernet.net.

Additional appearances not yet confirmed: Celebration of Connecticut Farms, Sept. 13 – Lebanon, Conn.; Marlboro College, Marlboro, VT – date not yet confirmed.

The United Methodist Women, one of the nation’s oldest and largest women-led mission organizations, has selected Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty for their 2010 national reading list. Over 40,000 members of United Methodist Women are organized at the congregation level into reading groups to pursue interests related to the church’s mission work, social action, and spiritual growth. The inclusion of Closing the Food Gap in the denomination’s reading list means that the book’s issues of food justice, empowerment, and equal access to affordable and healthy food will be considered by thousands of socially concerned women nationwide.

After taking two hours to fastidiously set up my campsite, I soon realized I had nothing to do. I grew nervous, impatient; paced around the site and back down the trail I had entered on.

Fortunately, the necessities of wilderness survival intervened. I needed to collect firewood to make a fire. I had to haul water from the nearby stream for drinking and cooking. Boiling enough water for three days took more wood, water and time than I thought. And before I knew it, my worries were over; I would haul water and collect wood, haul water and collect wood, haul water and collect wood.

This act of enforced simplification – reducing one’s daily life to a few essential tasks – became a kind of mantra for me later in life, and rough guidepost for the way I would approach food.

Like my experience with water and wood, I decided to narrow my range of options and take a more mindful approach to what I eat. I am trying to eat locally and seasonally, and as much as possible, assemble my daily menus from an admittedly narrower, but happily tastier range of choices that closer at hand.

I start with my household garden and then move to the farmers’ market for the produce I eat. I buy beef from a nearby New Mexico rancher whom I know personally and whose cows are  raised entirely on grass. I’ve been to the facility where the cows are slaughtered; it’s locally owned, employs 10 people in a small town where every job counts and operates humanely.

Not all my food is local. I buy Organic Valley milk from Colorado farms because our New Mexico milk is produced from hormone-injected cows raised in factory farms. Connecticut is lucky; it has its own small dairies that market their milk locally. Coffee comes from a fair trade company out of Massachusetts. The rest of the I shop at conventional supermarkets for such things as bananas, cereal, and of course, beer and wine (locally produced when available).

The simplifying act is to start with what I have first and to put together simple meals around those foods. A hole, free-range chicken from the natural food store was more the accessory to the carrots, parsnips and onions from my garden a few nights ago. New Mexico beef anchored my dried chiles, canned tomatoes and cold storage potatoes the night before.

I’m not trying to imitate Barbara Kingsolver or eat only the 100-mile diet. I’m not a food purist nor do I while away my days in a state of hyper-anxiety over the health, origin or method of production of the food I buy. I love to garden; it’s my recreation, my fitness club, my calisthenics. I learn about other foods – what’s good and what’s not- when I have time. When I haven’t been fortunate enough to have my own garden, I’ve joined a community garden, shopped more at the farmers’ market and bought a share in a community-supported agriculture farm.

But there’s one more facet to the process of simplification, and its not so simple. In my opinion, it’s not enough to only satisfy your desire for simplicity and good food. You need to be a good food citize as well.

This means two things: The first is that if you believe that you should have the best and healthiest food available, then shouldn’t everybody, regardeless of income? This is what we call food justice. To that end in may be worth supporiting socially disadvantaged farmers, initiatives that protect the area’s precious farmland and projects that encourage the purchase of our local bounty by lower-income families.

The second characteristic of good food citizenship has to do with public policy. Bills will come before out state lawmakers that will promote local agriculture, healthier and locally grown food for students in our public schools, and more opportunities for low-income people to better feed their families. We need to support those initiatives. As good food citizens we need to speak up for policies and practices that promote local and healthy food for all.

This piece originally appeared in the Santa Fe New Mexican (January 1, 2009) and the Hartford Courant (April 19, 2009)

May 15 – Alamosa, Colorado – Presentation and book signing – For more information contact Liza Marin at 719-587-1034 or marronL@vwhs.org.

June 8 – Hartford, Connecticut – Hartford Foundation for Public Giving – Presentation to the Catalyst Fund. For more information contact Mary-Ellen Powell at mepowell@hfpg.org.

June 10 – Montgomery Village (Jay Peak), Vermont – Field to Plate Seminar – Food Dialogs: Moving the Discussion beyond the Pyramid – June 9-13. Presentation to seminar participants on June 10. For more information contact Amanda Archibald at amanda@fieldtoplate.com.

June 18 – Albuquerque, New Mexico – National Association for Rural Mental Health Conference – Keynote presentation at 8:45 AM. For more information contact Helene Silverblatt at hsilverblatt@salud.unm.edu.

June 28 – Salt Lake City, Utah – Unitarian/Universalist Association General Assembly. 11:00 AM. Presentation: “Closing the Food Gap: Sustainable Food for All – Salt Palace 255 B. For more information contact Claudia Kern at claudia.kern@valley.net.

(First appeared in the Kennebec (Maine) Journal)

By Mark Winne

Let me say from the outset that I eat well. Not well in a maternal, “please finish your broccoli, dear” sense. I mean very well. I cultivate a large organic garden, buy grass-fed beef from a local rancher, and when I’m feeling particularly flush with cash, frequent my local Whole Foods.

I’ll even eat at one of those bastions of gastronomic elitism like Stone Barns in New York or that citadel of all things “foodie”, Chez Panisse in Berkeley. On one such occasion I celebrated my son’s college graduation with a dinner at Stone Barns where the tab for the two of us came to a cool $325. It dawned on me as I was staggering out of the restaurant that I could have paid for 126 low-income children to eat school lunch that day at the current USDA reimbursement rate of $2.57 per meal. Better yet, 283 food stamp recipients might have had dinner on me that night at the average meal allotment of $1.15.

Such disparities in the way that different classes of Americans eat are disconcerting. With our nation teetering on the brink of economic meltdown, a record 31.8 million of us are receiving help from the food stamp program. Nearly 190,000 Mainers currently receive food stamp benefits, 15 percent more than last year.

Food banks and food pantries have been overrun as well. Over 25 million Americans are using emergency food assistance annually. Maine’s Freeport Community Services’ Food Pantry alone received 20,000 visits from people seeking food last year, but estimate that will grow to 28,000 this year.

In light of the fact that demand for “free” food is reaching levels not seen since the Great Depression, at a cost to the taxpayer of $73 billion a year and climbing, it might seem odd that there is also an infatuation with higher-priced local and organic food.

Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters, regarded by many as the nation’s premiere food elitist, appeared recently on 60 Minutes to proclaim the virtues of local and organic.  She snootily dismissed its high cost by saying, “some people buy Nike shoes, two pairs, and other people want to nourish themselves.” And in a recent New York Times op-ed, Waters slashed the quality of the nation’s school lunch program, pronouncing that its federal subsidy should be doubled to $5.00.

But when it comes to the cost of good food for our children as well as for those who have hit a rough patch on the economic highway, I find the arguments over food elitism a bit spurious. Why can’t our society ensure that all our well fed? After all, aren’t we a nation that just bailed out the financial industry to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, including bonuses for those who put our economy in the toilet?

Perhaps it was this group of financial elitists who were among the party of 12 at Spaggio’s, Chicago’s premier eatery, (yes, the Obamas’ “special occasion” restaurant) who spent $18,000 on one meal this past November. Not only would that feed 15,652 food stamp recipients, it makes my dinner at Stone Barns look like a Happy Meal.

The fact of the matter is it will take money to make sure that everyone eats well. And I place the emphasis on well because we must ensure that everyone has regular access to healthy food. If we don’t, we run the very real risk of sustaining one food system for the poor and near poor, and one for everyone else – a divide, my friends, which is as unconscionable as it is unsustainable.

While the Maine state legislature should be congratulated for its support of school breakfast and lunch programs, the answers are not all about government spending. They are also about commonsense and compassion, qualities that I have found Mainers have in uncommon abundance. Take the new Fresh from the Pantry program currently being devised by the Freeport Food Pantry and two area CSAs farms – Laughing Stock and Tir na NOg. Together they will use the pantry’s ability to help people, the growing skills of the farmers, and the generosity of their CSA members to bring the best food to people who need it the most.

Ideas like Fresh from the Pantry combined with a citizenry willing to support the simple notion that all should be well fed will lift both the economic and personal health of the nation. And in the end, we all may become little food elitists. Wouldn’t that be grand!