Food Chain Radio Show #1199

Michael Olson, Author & Urban Farming Agriculturalist

Revolt of the School Lunch Ladies?

Guest: Jennifer Gaddis, Associate Professor of Civil Society and Community Studies, University of Wisconsin, and author of The Labor of Lunch

Having hosted 1,199 Food Chain Radio shows, I came to the conclusion, some place along the line, that three observations seemed to hold true, and so, with literary license in hand, I claimed them as Michael Olson’s Three Laws of the Food Chain.

Michael Olson Food Chain Radio – Revolt of the School Lunch Ladies?

Here, simply stated, is the Third Law of the Food Chain: Cheap Food Isn’t!

I have observed that food is made cheap by taking the food out of it, and by having others subsidize its true cost of production. Thus the cheap food promised is really the expensive food delivered.

I ran across this same sentiment expressed in a scholarly tome entitled: The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools.

Here is how the author of Labor of Lunch, Dr. Jennifer Gaddis, expressed that sentiment: “… for over seventy years, the National School Lunch Program has failed to escape the trap of ‘cheapness.’ Cheap, in the way I use the term, isn’t just a synonym for low-cost. Rather, it is the guiding political and economic philosophy, business strategy, and consumer expectation that shapes our every day lives– one that has had disastrous effects on the healthfulness of school lunches and the wider world.”

Given the cheap food we feed our school children, we simply must ask …

Leave a comment below: Can schools do a better job of feeding our children?

Tune in here, for the syndicated the Michael Olson Food Chain Radio Show #1199 August 24, 2019 Saturday 9AM Pacific

Nationally syndicated Food Chain Radio airs live Saturday mornings 9-10AM Pacific.