The National School Lunch Program has long served as a sort of crucible for Americans’ beliefs concerning health and nutrition, acting as a forum in which the normally private and domestic realm of the table becomes a public, political concern and forces citizens to consider the implications and philosophy behind what and how we eat. The first school lunch programs, which date back to the early 19th century, were haphazard efforts more interested in total caloric intake than providing balanced, nutritionally sound meals. The widespread hunger experienced during the Great Depression encouraged that trend; it wasn’t until the 1966 Child Nutrition Act that “nutrition” as such became an explicit concern.
This doesn’t mean, however, that we’ve yet settled on a consensus concerning what nutrition is or how it might be best achieved; remember that ketchup was once counted as a vegetable and that french fries still qualify under modern legislation as “fresh food.” There have been activists in the mode of Alice Waters and Ann Cooper who attempt to revitalize the programs, shifting the focus away from merely providing by numbers (so many grams of protein having taken the place of so many calories per day as the programs’ goal) towards a more holistic set of ideals. Those two are the giants, well-known for their work on a national level; however, many lesser-known activists have been successful in shifting the policies and purchasing practices of their local schools.
Those successes, however, engineered and overseen by people working within their own communities, are being threatened by a piece of legislation recently inserted into the 2009 Agriculture Appropriations bill. It has nothing to do with nutrition as such; it in fact claims to be a measure taken to improve the safety and quality of meat served by cafeterias across the country. Its detractors, however, claim that the National Animal Identification System, or NAIS, will achieve neither of these ends while forcing smaller producers who can’t cover the high costs involved in compliance out of the school-lunch market. The NAIS, basically a tracking program which involves tagging and registering each piece of livestock a farmer owns, contributes to the centralization and industrialization of agriculture, and the economies of scale, as always, are on the side of the biggest producers. It steps away from the recent trend towards local control, the ethic of allowing each community to decide for itself what to buy and where to source it, and towards a heavily regulated system designed around anonymous interactions between producer and consumer.
There are arguments to be made for the program, of course, and its proponents are people with powerful platforms from which to make them. I don’t intend to put forth a polemic on the subject; merely to raise the issue. American public schools serve the nation’s youth, inculcating them with ideas about food that will form the basis of American food culture in the coming years. Further, given the enormity of the purchasing power wielded by the public school system, we really do have to consider what ethical statement is being made by what it chooses to buy. We live, for better or worse, in a consumer culture where ‘voting with your dollar’ is a viable and indeed powerful concept, and it is the public’s dollars that will ultimately make these purchases. If the School Lunch Program is indeed a sort of barometer of the needs and the will of the people is serves, what does this change say about us and our time?
July 10, 2008 at 12:09 am
I used to work for Sysco. It sells food to school lunch programs. The quality of the food is low, below WIC I’d say. So, it is in the best interest of those who buy for school lunch programs to look at the ingredients and see just how much filler – gmo soy, textured vegetable protein (also gmo), etc. – is actually in the food. Better, buy locally grown food when and where you can.
The whole debacle about the downer cows is just that, a debacle. I won’t go into that with you here, but rather I do need to say that NAIS means a loss of freedoms for those people, like me, who want to grow their own food and stay out of the industrialized food system. I am not a global trading partner, why should I be included. One more thing, just the other day, Sec’ry of Ag at USDA, Ed Schafer said that he didn’t think “…”we’ll ever see a totally bacteria-free environment in the United States,”. Is that the kind of thinking that should be deciding the fate of school food in this country?
July 10, 2008 at 8:36 am
NAIS can best be explained like this…what if I had a disease, but because I am rich and powerful, I force you to take and pay for the meds, then I travel the world declaring I am disease free. Makes absolutely no sense at all. Neither you nor I are helped.
But that is NAIS in a nutshell. Corporate ag wants to sell meat on a global scale but they are putting the costs on the rest of us who own animals on a private level. If disease is suspected, depopulation (killing) of an entire 6 mile radius (140 square miles) is what is prescribed in the NAIS business plan. Facts are most diseases can be cured, innoculated against or prevented.
But to the rest of the world, it looks likes the USA has a very good disease tracking system in place.
That is why we are told that NAIS is about tracking disease and keeping our food supply safe….sorry, that is not so. NAIS is a business plan, says so right on the cover of the document. The part about tracking disease was added to make it more acceptable to the public.
Besides, NAIS tracking ends at time of slaughter. Most food safety issues occur AFTER that, during processing.
There are already disease tracking protocol in place, and they work just fine.
Agri biz gets ONE lot number per groups of animals, any one of which could be sick and who would know… while the rest of us have to tag/track every animal individually and pay for it.
If NAIS is about protecting the “national herd” (language straight out of fascist/communist ideologies) why then, when Creekstone Beef wanted to test every cow they process for BSE, the USDA says they could not!!! They claimed it would cost too much money. Creekstone had to take the USDA to court to sue for the right to test for BSE!
How does me telling the govt where I ride in with my horse protect the Japanese from eating mad cow beef?
July 10, 2008 at 10:49 am
Unfortunately NAIS is not a cure for food illness. NAIS tracks animals before slaughter. At slaughter the tags are removed. Almost all food born disease occurs _after_ slaughter due to errors in processing and unsanitary conditions in processing and distribution. NAIS does nothing to fix these issues.
What NAIS does do is chip away at our Constitutional rights and increase government surveillance of individuals owning livestock and small farms. NAIS increases the costs of ownership by about $36 per head for small farmers. Meanwhile, Big Ag gets away with using Group ID lot numbers for tens of thousands of animals and not having to do tagging. NAIS will do is drive small farmers out of business limiting our choices while giving more power to the big factory farms.
For a lot more information about NAIS and about small livestock owners’ battle against it go to http://NoNAIS.org
July 10, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Thanks for writing about the negative impact that NAIS could have on the movement to provide more locally produced food to our school systems and to our consumers.
There is so much written about farmers and ranchers receiving huge payments from the government. For the majority of farmers and ranchers nothing could be further from the truth. Many rural residents live on a small amount of land, have low incomes, and raise cattle, chicken, hogs, and other produce for their own consumption and to supplement their income. The reporting requirements (and the potential of fines and penalties) of NAIS could end this source of food for them and those who prefer fresh-off-the- farm products.
This article describes NAIS well:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071231/pentland_gumpert
March 20, 2009 at 7:18 pm
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