Federal and state dollars pay for so much of what goes into the American public school education of our kids, but it isn't so straight forward when it comes to keeping them fed on school grounds. What movements and laws lead to American school kids accessing lunch? What does it cost, and who has to pay? Jessica Terrell, journalist and host of Left Over podcast and Crystal FitzSimons, Director of School and Out-of-School Time Programs at the Food Research and Action Center are our guides to the first part of our two-parter on school meals in America.
Transcript
Teddy: [00:00:02] All right. It's meatloaf or fish sticks.
Pete Rigley: [00:00:05] Teddy, it's been meatloaf or fish sticks every Friday since school was invented.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:14] Nick, do you remember lunch in public school?
Nick Capodice: [00:00:18] I don't think there's anything I remember better about public school than the lunch we had.
Pete Rigley: [00:00:23] Just for the record, you should know that meatloaf also goes by several other names. Pepper steak. [00:00:30] Swiss steak. A cube steak. And Salisbury steak.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:41] One thing that stands out to me was a dish called American Chop suey, which was basically a macaroni in a pasta sauce.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:47] Yep. Um, I remember a few things. I remember in elementary school, there were always like every day potato sticks, like thin pieces of potato chips, basically. And I always I was [00:01:00] like, why can't we just have full potato chips? Um, and on certain days, I think it was probably Fridays. There was Elios pizza.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:08] Oh, yeah. We always had Friday pizza. It was always rectangular. Yeah.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:11] Rectangle pizza. It was never fully cooked on the bottom. Uh, and then every once in a while there were mashed potatoes and they were served with an ice cream scoop with gravy, and they were probably out of a box. But I am who I am, so I ate them.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:23] The smell of school lunch is something I can't forget.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:26] Oh yeah. No, I remember the smell.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:28] It was like food, but [00:01:30] it wasn't like a good food smell. It's like. It's like food adjacent, if that makes any sense.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:35] It does. I know exactly what you're talking about. There was something almost like antiseptic about it. Um, I also remember that every morning someone would come into the classrooms to collect milk money.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:45] I remember that, too. Milk and orange juice money.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:47] Yeah. Which I always thought was odd. Like even as a child, I thought like, can't you just give us milk for free? Just milk.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:54] Well, Hannah, nothing's free, is it?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:57] Ain't that the truth? The [00:02:00] Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: [00:02:04] I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:05] Today I decided. Wouldn't it be interesting to take a look at how we feed our kids in America's schools? And I was right. It was interesting.
Jessica Terrell: [00:02:14] If you're somebody who cares about gender equality and equal pay and women's rights and children's health and racial inequality and justice and racism and history, climate change, [00:02:30] so many of the things that we're grappling with in society and so many of the things that we were particularly grappling with coming out of the pandemic are all really represented in this one program.
Nick Capodice: [00:02:39] Oh, is that all?
Jessica Terrell: [00:02:40] That's it.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:41] This is Jessica Terrell.
Jessica Terrell: [00:02:43] I am the reporter and host of Left Over How Politicians and Corporations are Milking the American School Lunch. So this is.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:51] How I discovered Jessica's work through this podcast, which I highly, highly recommend, by the way.
Jessica Terrell: [00:02:56] It delves into the National School lunch program, sort [00:03:00] of the origins of it, some of the current challenges and the potential. When the podcast originally started, I was coming out of the pandemic. Um, I had recently become a mother, and there were a number of things in society that I honestly had not taken a very hard look at until I became a mom, and suddenly started looking at different things and thinking about them in a different way. And when I first [00:03:30] thought about school lunch, it was not a very exciting idea for me. I was like, yeah, I don't know that I want to do a podcast on school lunch. But the thing that really compelled me to want to do the project is that there are so many social issues that are wrapped up in this one program.
Nick Capodice: [00:03:46] Now, can we just establish some definitions before we get started? It's like when we say school lunch, we mean the food that public schools provide to kids in America, right?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:57] Both public and private, nonprofit [00:04:00] schools and residential institutions. There are a few other types of places that qualify under USDA eligibility requirements.
Nick Capodice: [00:04:08] And school lunch is like part of a program.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:10] Yeah, and I'm going to get to that.
Nick Capodice: [00:04:11] And it isn't free or I guess like it's not fully subsidized by the government.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:16] Not fully. It's free for some people if they qualify and apply, it's a whole thing. Also, I'm saying lunch and I'm mostly using lunch as an example in this episode. But lots of schools provide breakfast, snacks, and sometimes even dinner to kids. [00:04:30]
Nick Capodice: [00:04:30] So we're talking about food at school.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:33] Yeah, but it's not as catchy I agree. So I spoke to Jessica. She's our journalist guide. And by the way, a lot of what Jessica is sharing and a lot of what I learned comes from a book by the wonderful Jennifer Gaddis called The Labor of Lunch. I recommend it as the perfect companion to this episode. I also spoke with someone at a nonprofit who deals a lot with school meals. This is Crystal Fitzsimons,
Crystal FitzSimons: [00:04:55] Director.
Crystal FitzSimons: [00:04:56] Of school and out of school time programs for the Food Research and Action Center. So [00:05:00] the Food Research and Action Center, commonly called FRAC.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:03] Frac, is mostly funded by the Community Services Administration, which is under Health and Human Services. It also receives donations from foundations, corporations and faith based groups.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:13] Are we talking lobbyists here?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:15] Yeah, we're talking some lobbying, training, research. They're an advocacy group. They advocate for childhood nutrition programs and food benefits for people with low and no income. So yeah, full disclosure, because not everyone is on board with that kind of advocacy or spending of federal dollars, [00:05:30] I wanted to talk with them because they do a ton of research into food programs in schools.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:35] So it's political.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:36] Yeah, feeding kids is political.
Speaker7: [00:05:42] How?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:43] All right. I'm going to let Jessica and Krystal take this one.
Jessica Terrell: [00:05:46] School meal programs are expected to pay for themselves and be self-sustaining. In many ways. Federal government pays a lot of money to it, but it's not funded the same way that many other things are at a school level. We have had an ongoing fight, and [00:06:00] this is part of the political fight that continues about whose job it is to feed children. Should it be society's job or should it be a parent's job?
Nick Capodice: [00:06:12] So this is basically why school lunch is not just automatically free for all students. Well, to.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:20] Fully answer that, Nick, we gotta go back to the beginning.
Nick Capodice: [00:06:23] Of course we do.
Jessica Terrell: [00:06:25] During the Progressive ERA, you have a time period in America where [00:06:30] there's a lot of new programs going in, a lot of questioning about the role of government, the role of family. And you start to see in different cities across the country movements to provide lunch in schools for children. You see a lot of kids who are going hungry. And at the same time, part of this movement is a movement to really elevate the role of what was often thought of as like women's work, the idea that feeding [00:07:00] children in society, preparing food for kids, all of these things had some sort of like economic and political value as well.
Crystal FitzSimons: [00:07:07] And then in the early 1900s, you know, a number of cities had lunch programs and some of their schools Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Saint Louis, Los Angeles, just to name a few. Um, but school lunch really did start as kind of communities coming together, volunteers coming together, you know, identifying a need and wanting to serve the kids in their community. [00:07:30] Yeah. I mean, I think it really was about looking at needs and looking at assets. And, you know, in those early days really thinking about charity and supporting, you know, families and, you know, rising up with schools and kids attending school.
Jessica Terrell: [00:07:44] And so it was kind of those two things coming together. And some of the cities, not all of the cities that sort of led to this push for, um, women to go into schools and start up lunch programs. And a lot of them were these community based, nonprofit kind of ventures. [00:08:00] And part of it was also food safety. So making sure that what kids were buying while their parents were in the factories was something that was like, safe and nourishing.
Nick Capodice: [00:08:09] By the way, the Progressive ERA is basically the how it started. Half of Civics 101 how it's going and.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:17] How it started school meal wise, was not too terribly dissimilar to how it's going as far as the self-sustaining part works community efforts toward feeding kids. That was fine, right? But they had to do without additional [00:08:30] funds.
Jessica Terrell: [00:08:31] And in getting these meal programs in place in the late 1800s, early 1900s, there had to be this sort of bargain that they would not cost the school district money, that they would sort of function on their own.
Nick Capodice: [00:08:44] How long did this last that these programs had to be their own isolated thing?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:49] Well, the Progressive ERA is considered to have ended when World War one ended. And then, well, you know.
Nick Capodice: [00:08:59] Yeah, [00:09:00] I know.
Crystal FitzSimons: [00:09:00] Yeah. Well, the federal government really kind of stepped in during the Great Depression. So at that point, communities were really struggling. A lot of communities didn't have the resources to run the programs on their own. And so one of the first things that happened was in 1936, there were federal funds made available to the US Department of Agriculture, which actually oversees the school nutrition programs. Now, um, to purchase commodities that could be used in school lunch programs. And so that was kind of their first foray into supporting school [00:09:30] lunch at the federal level.
Nick Capodice: [00:09:31] Wait real quick. Commodities.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:33] Yeah. Okay. So that's a pretty important part of the puzzle here. But all you really need to know is that commodities in this case are food purchased by the USDA. And because the USDA can purchase a whole lot of food, it can then sell it to schools for less than they would buy it elsewhere.
Crystal FitzSimons: [00:09:49] And so for every lunch that's served in a school, schools get a certain value of commodities. So the idea is that the commodities do give USDA the opportunity to purchase [00:10:00] surplus food to also support the school nutrition programs in an economical way. But yeah, that really has continued kind of that marrying of commodities with the school nutrition programs.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:12] One other element that convinced the government that they needed to intervene in how their kids were eating, they.
Jessica Terrell: [00:10:18] Found during World War two that a large number of young men who were found ineligible to serve were not physically fit because [00:10:30] they were malnourished. And so suddenly, malnutrition coming out of the Great Depression becomes like this national security issue because it's affecting our ability to fight wars. It's kind of crisis.
Nick Capodice: [00:10:42] Okay, okay. So you've got to support the nation's agriculture, and you've got to support the nation's troops. And making sure kids are fed well in school supports both those things.
Jessica Terrell: [00:10:53] It can do kind of two things. We can make sure that more kids get meals. We're dealing with this national security issue. [00:11:00] And then on the other hand, it becomes an opportunity to also stabilize farmers and food production.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:07] Also, having a stable food production system is a form of national. Security, especially during war when you can't necessarily rely on other nations for food.
Crystal FitzSimons: [00:11:16] Then, in 1943, a Congress authorized $60 million to support school lunch and school meal programs. So some schools ran just a school meal program as opposed to providing the full lunch. And that [00:11:30] program is actually still available. All there are very few schools that participated at most participate in the National School lunch program. And then when we finally got to 1946, that's when the National School Lunch Program was created through the National School Lunch Act.
Nick Capodice: [00:11:46] Okay, there's the law.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:48] Hit Me, otherwise known as the Richard B Russell National School Lunch Act provides low cost or free school lunch to qualifying students. Who is Richard B Russell, you ask?
Nick Capodice: [00:11:59] I [00:12:00] do.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:00] Oh, you do.
Archival: [00:12:02] From Washington. A special report to the people of Georgia by Senator Richard Russell. Here is Senator Russell. We are now confronted on the floor of the Senate with the vicious, iniquitous civil rights bill which has come over from the House of Representatives after passage.
Jessica Terrell: [00:12:21] What happened was during the creation of the National School lunch program, there's this big debate over whether it should be a state issue or a federal issue, [00:12:30] like who governs it, who figures this out. And one of the the main proponents of the national school lunch program is Richard B Russell, who is a southern senator who was a staunch segregationist. And from what I was told by people in the podcast, you know, really one of the reasons why it was kind of left up to states to govern this program in the beginning was because there was concern from Russell that making it a program [00:13:00] could like basically support desegregation.
Nick Capodice: [00:13:02] So a staunch segregationist championed a bill having to do with providing low income kids with lunch.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:10] Staunch segregationist, definitive white supremacist, worked against anti-lynching bills, helped pen the Southern Manifesto with Strom Thurmond.
Nick Capodice: [00:13:18] Strom Thurmond as in racist filibuster against the Civil Rights Act. Strom Thurmond, the.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:26] Very same longest one to date. So yep, this [00:13:30] guy, Richard B Russell, worked really hard to implement this school lunch program. He was all about supporting agriculture in the US and all about getting affordable, nutritious meals to kids who couldn't afford them, often thinking about his own constituents in Georgia. But he was also vehemently anti-desegregation, and it was really important to him to reinforce that the School Lunch Act did not mean federalization of schools, because federalization of schools in a nation that eventually did federalize desegregation would [00:14:00] be wholly opposed to his white supremacist segregationist ideals. The program administration would be left up mostly to the states. Definitely a kind of separate but equal message there. Of course, the equal part never really does pan out, does it?
Jessica Terrell: [00:14:15] So by making it up to individual states, you can kind of choose which schools you choose. I mean, there was no like straight across the board. Here's how much money you have to make in order to qualify for free or reduced price lunch. No guarantee that like every student has to get to it. It's kind of like left [00:14:30] up to states to roll out how they want to do it. And so what ended up happening was you have a lot of money being spent on these post-World War Two newly built schools in the suburbs where a lot of white families were fleeing, like white flight. Um, so families are moving more to the suburbs. A lot of money gets put in them. You've got these really nice school cafeterias that are being set up, and then you have a lot of urban school districts that serve a lot of black students, a lot of immigrant students. [00:15:00] And those districts were not necessarily provided the same funding and support. And so they have to figure out other ways of doing things.
Nick Capodice: [00:15:10] So even though there was this program to subsidize meals for kids who couldn't necessarily afford them, kids in those neighborhoods with greater need. And here I imagine we're talking often about kids of color. They still weren't getting the same quality of meals as kids in other districts were getting.
Jessica Terrell: [00:15:27] There was a promotional video that I found, [00:15:30] and it sort of shows this. I mean, it goes to like a couple different schools and it's promoting the National School Lunch program.
Archival: [00:15:35] Attendance at this school is high and so are the grades. And one reason could very well be a noon day lunch in the National school lunch program.
Jessica Terrell: [00:15:47] And you see, um, like this really nice suburban cafeteria. And then you see, like a kind of cramped, large central kitchen where a lot of black women are preparing kind of cold [00:16:00] sandwiches to put in packed lunches, to deliver to schools, to kind of deliver their lunch with clearly without the same facilities.
Archival: [00:16:07] Of course, there are schools that just don't have handsome. In cafeterias like this, or efficient kitchen facilities of their own. But this hasn't stopped some schools that lack such facilities. They still have a lunch program. A different kind.
Archival: [00:16:24] School lunches are prepared every day in one big central kitchen that services many neighboring [00:16:30] schools with no kitchen facilities of their own. The lunch?
Jessica Terrell: [00:16:36] Um, so then in the 1960s and into the 70s, I believe there's really a kind of major push, um, during the welfare rights movement to kind of address some of these inequities and to make it so that there is a more guaranteed and fair school lunch for children who need it. Um, which is in line with what the original goal of the program was.
Nick Capodice: [00:16:58] Now, Hannah, I have heard that the [00:17:00] Black Panthers figure into this story at some point. Is this where they come in?
Crystal FitzSimons: [00:17:03] So we definitely need to give credit to the Black Panthers for our school breakfast program. And then in 1971, school breakfast was made available to schools with a focus on serving those schools to, um, have students from low income households and working parents. And then back in 1975, the school breakfast program was permanently authorized.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:24] So yeah, school breakfast was not as widespread or nationally thought of a thing [00:17:30] until the Black Panthers made it one. And they essentially put the federal government to shame.
Archival: [00:17:36] But there's another side to this organization in Oakland, in many ways a poor community. The Panthers are also known for their projects, like the breakfast program for school children and for the Community Learning Center.
Jessica Terrell: [00:17:47] So the Black Panthers started a free breakfast program in cities, and it was wildly popular. I mean, it was it was incredibly popular program. Even people who maybe were not big supporters of [00:18:00] the Black Panthers or their cause were really big supporters of this meal program that they were doing, feeding kids. You know, there's a lot of food insecurity. And so the Black Panthers started this breakfast program, and there was a concerted movement to quash it because, um, there was a sense that this was going to, you know, really make the Black Panthers more of like a mainstream accepted, like make them really popular. And so I talked to people who could remember people [00:18:30] coming in. There's I think in some of the FBI files, there's notes of people coming in and FBI agents coming in and, like, destroying the breakfast in schools.
Nick Capodice: [00:18:39] I'm sorry. What?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:41] Oh, uh, j Edgar Hoover is what?
Nick Capodice: [00:18:43] Ah, okay.
Archival: [00:18:45] A b c d e f g g and g man.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:49] Who. Now, for some of you, that will already be shorthand for autocratic, law breaking, dogmatic extremist who was working in and supported by a system plagued by lawbreaking, dogmatic [00:19:00] extremists. Hoover was the head of the FBI for 47 years. He saw the Black Panthers free breakfast program as one of the greatest threats to efforts to destroy the Black Panthers, in part because it won the hearts and minds of liberal whites and the loyalty of black children. So yeah, among many other tactics, he would send FBI agents into places where the Black Panthers were serving breakfast and have those places raided and pretty much destroyed. Mm.
Jessica Terrell: [00:19:27] It's horrifying that that actually like, it's documented [00:19:30] reality. But what it did do was put pressure as well, um, on the federal government to start offering breakfast in the school meal program. And so the national school meal program that we have today, where breakfast is a part of it for kids who need it, I think really directly stems from the work of community feeding in the Black Panther programs and some other programs, but mostly the Black Panthers. That really kind of embarrassed the federal [00:20:00] government for the fact that they were not doing this. And here were these community members being painted as just, you know, kind of out there militants who were doing this really important community service without funding.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:10] So it's in this swirl of social pressure that Congress is like, fine, fine, we get it.
Jessica Terrell: [00:20:17] So Congress goes ahead and amends the law. So basically what happens is they go ahead, they change it, but they don't provide extra a lot of extra funding. There's a little bit of funding that's provided for some facilities, [00:20:30] but it's not like, okay, we're going to make this huge expansion of school meals and we're going to really fund it so that we can finally have this really robust, really great program. Everybody's going to have access to it. It's more like, okay, we're gonna expand it, but you're gonna have to figure out how you're going to pay for more of it.
Nick Capodice: [00:20:47] So how do they pay for it?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:49] We'll follow the money just after the break.
Nick Capodice: [00:20:55] But before that break, just a quick reminder that our show is listener supported. We [00:21:00] could not make it without you. If you're a fan of our mission to constantly unpack how our democracy works, head on over to our website, civics101podcast.org, and support us in any way you can. And thanks.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:18] We're back. We're talking meals in schools. And Nick, before the break, you asked me how exactly schools were able to expand their meal programs without an expansion of their pocketbooks. And when Congress first expanded [00:21:30] the school lunch program, they added a small but significant provision.
Jessica Terrell: [00:21:35] And so the one change that they made at the time was to allow the entry of private businesses into the national school lunch program. Back when the national School Lunch program initially passed into law. Some of those early reformers, they made a lot of concessions because they wanted this national program. And one of the things that they managed to walk away with successfully was like [00:22:00] sort of keeping private businesses out. They'd always been kind of suspicious of like private business, you know, the people who were there selling candy to kids or bread laced with sawdust as filler, you know? So like there'd been this push from the very beginning to, like, make school lunch like a social enterprise, a nonprofit thing. Charities could run it, keep the businesses out. And so that changed. And that is like sort of the beginnings that we see really, of all of a sudden this move toward processed food, [00:22:30] centralized kitchens, heat and served meals, which is the situation a lot of school districts today, um, really starting with this expansion that happened without the funding to to really do well cooked from scratch meals, build the kitchens needed in these districts.
Nick Capodice: [00:22:47] So we're left with a bunch of schools without kitchens. And the easiest thing to do is to acquire pre-made meals from giant food corporations. And just why is that easier? [00:23:00]
Hannah McCarthy: [00:23:00] All right. So these giant food corporations, food service management companies, or FSM, CHS, in case you want to know the names, the big three are Aramark, Chartwells and Sodexo. They are able to provide a lot of meals that meet USDA standards for feeding kids, and at a price that schools are able to pay. Now, let me clarify that under the school lunch program, qualifying meals for qualifying students are reimbursed by the federal government. The rest is paid for by students, parents, caregivers, or, [00:23:30] I'm sure in some cases, students themselves.
Nick Capodice: [00:23:32] So this is the mostly self-sustaining thing.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:23:35] This is it's like running a business within a school. Now, the USDA has studied the cost versus reimbursement of lunch program meals. Bottom line is the meals cost more to produce than the government reimburses. So schools mostly go with two options to make up for this gap. They choose the cheapest, easiest options from those FSM, CHS and offer kids a la carte options. [00:24:00] So these are usually not necessarily super healthy. Often like fast food or trendy foods that are definitely super kid enticing.
Nick Capodice: [00:24:10] Can I hazard a guess here? Hannah? You sure.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:24:12] Can.
Nick Capodice: [00:24:12] This might mean not super great or healthy meals.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:24:16] Yeah, let me give you an example. Or actually let me give you thousands of examples.
Nick Capodice: [00:24:21] Oh man. Okay.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:24:22] Yeah. So.
Jessica Terrell: [00:24:27] I think one thing that a school nutrition director [00:24:30] pointed out very early on in the reporting, which really stood out to me, is like, if you look at the menu, if you pull up a menu of a school district in Minnesota and another one in California and another one in Louisiana, pull up half a dozen school districts across the country, and chances are you're going to see the same food being served in each school district. And the point that he was trying to make is like, why is this when we have such regional differences, when you have, [00:25:00] like Latino students in this district in Southern California and like all these different communities, and yet they're eating Tony's Galaxy Pizza, which is like a really, really popular item that you'll see on a lot of them. So what happens in a lot of districts, they order big bulk orders of precooked meals that are often manufactured specifically for the school lunch program. They come in these boxes that have information on the side that tells you exactly [00:25:30] how many components that are required for the school meal program are contained in each item.
Jessica Terrell: [00:25:35] So two whole grains, two servings of whole grains, 1.5oz of meat, all of these things that they will eventually be ordered for and have to prove that they're serving kids in each meal. And you can order Galaxy Pizza or Nacho Dippers or beef Taco sticks was one of the less appealing sounding ones, and it really streamlines things for these districts. I think the districts [00:26:00] do the best job that they can to make these meals as appealing as possible, and they have that, you know, taste servings with the kids to try and sample it up. But at the end of the day, what you have is a lot of people who, you know, are like unwrapping individually wrapped plastic meals and reheating them. In large convection oven and then putting them out for kids whose parents are sometimes unaware of what their kids are eating, sometimes happy with it and during the pandemic, increasingly distressed about it because they [00:26:30] started to actually kind of see stuff and see the 30 odd different ingredients that are listed that you can't pronounce on the wrapper.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:26:36] During the pandemic, the federal government, specifically the USDA, issued waivers that would allow all kids, regardless of income levels, to access no cost meals subsidized by the federal government. And participation in the school lunch program went way up during this time. This was a super popular move, even if the food itself wasn't all super popular. But [00:27:00] of course, that program ended. Jessica also learned that these USDA requirement meeting meals, while healthier often than a lot of what kids eat during the day, also have things like sodium restrictions, basically akin to what you might give someone at risk of heart attack or stroke.
Nick Capodice: [00:27:18] Meaning the food has basically no taste.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:27:21] Yeah. In fact, some school nutrition workers encourage kids to ask their parents to pack them salt packets for lunch. She also made the point that, you know, [00:27:30] while these meals may have X number of vitamins and minerals and whole grains, they might also come as highly processed, highly preserved food and reheated plastic packaging. And then even if you do want to eat that food, can you afford it?
Crystal FitzSimons: [00:27:45] Any child can participate in the National School Lunch program, but the question is how much you pay. And so kids who come from households with low income actually can be certified for free or reduced price school meals. And so free school meals, [00:28:00] it's 130% of the poverty line, or below 130% of the poverty line or below. You qualify for free school meals 130 to 185% of the poverty line. You qualify for reduced price meals.
Nick Capodice: [00:28:13] So what is this percentage of the poverty line thing mean?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:28:17] The federal government sets the poverty line each year based in part on the economy. So there's one for the contiguous United States. And then there are two separate levels for Hawaii and Alaska, respectively. The 2023 number for a family of four [00:28:30] is $30,000. So 130% of that is 39 grand. All right.
Nick Capodice: [00:28:37] Got it.
Crystal FitzSimons: [00:28:37] And then there's certain groups of kids who we consider vulnerable and want to make sure they have automatic access to free school meals. And so kids whose households participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which a lot of people think of as the food stamp program, kids who are homeless or in foster care, or migrant, um, [00:29:00] who participate in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program or the food distribution program for Indian reservations. And in some states, they automatically certify kids who are from low income households and participate in Medicaid. So there is a big effort to try and link kids who need free school meals to automatically receiving them. And if kids who are eligible aren't certified that way, then they have a school meal application process where families fill out a school meal application, convey their [00:29:30] income, and then they get certified for free or reduced price meals. And if you're not certified for free meals, if you're certified for reduced price meals, you can be charged $0.40 for lunch and $0.30 for breakfast. And kids who are not certified for free or reduced price meals generally are charged close to the cost of the meal, which you know is set in some ways by the school district.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:29:56] Now during the Obama administration under the healthy, Hunger-Free [00:30:00] Kids Act, something called the Community Eligibility Program was rolled out. The reimbursement itself is multilayered, but what you need to know is that low income schools and districts can offer free meals to all students without ever making parents apply for those meals. All right.
Nick Capodice: [00:30:16] So this is basically what we did during the pandemic.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:30:19] It is. But in this case, of course, it's limited to those low income districts. And that pandemic era provision was time limited.
Crystal FitzSimons: [00:30:26] It wrapped up at the beginning of the 2022 [00:30:30] 2023 school year. So a lot of schools actually went back to that community eligibility option. And we had over 40,000 schools then last school year that continued to offer free meals to all students using that option. And then we had a number of states that decided to go ahead and pass healthy school meals for all and commit state funding to making sure that that continued in their state because they just thought it was so important.
Nick Capodice: [00:30:59] Wait. Hold [00:31:00] on. There are states that just go ahead and make meals available to everyone, like for free.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:31:09] There are states that just go ahead and do a lot of things, Nick, and not all of it is rosy and surprise. This is just the beginning. This was, for the most part, the federal part of the picture, the big laws and the big business. There is way more going on with the students, the nutrition workers and [00:31:30] the states. And you know, not everyone's got time for that all at once. So we went ahead and put it in another episode. Check out our feed for part two. Come and get it. How [00:32:00] do you feel about your school's lunch program? Do you love it? Do you hate it? And what do you remember most about school lunch? Record us a voice memo and email it to Civics 101 at nhpr.org. That is Civics 101 at npr.org. Don't forget to include your name and where you're from, and we might just play it on the show. That does it for this episode. It was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy with Nick Capodice. Christina Phillips is [00:32:30] our senior producer. Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer. Music in this episode by Mary Riddle, Walt Adams, June Rosenfeld, Sven Lindvall, Daniel Friedel, Alexandra Woodward, Elliot Holmes, OTE, Baegel, and the New Fools. Also shout out to Pete and Pete, one of my favorite shows of all time. And the origin of that clip you heard at the beginning of the episode. And finally, shout out to all of the school nutrition and cafeteria workers in America who are doing everything they can to keep kids happy [00:33:00] and healthy, sometimes with the leanest of resources. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.