The Healthy School Meals Act and The Forgetters Who Abhor It

Photo Credit: PistolPeet

Advocacy group, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) shared a letter that comic, long-time vegetarian, and one of my favorite celebs, Sarah Silverman wrote to her congressman urging him to pass the Healthy School Meals Act of 2010 (H.R. 4870).  The act promotes eating a more plant-based diet by making fresh fruit and vegetables and other plant-based vegetarian meals available to students.  Silverman is not the only celebrity to support and promote the Act; others include Tavis Smiley and Scarlett Johansson.

One thing in particular stuck out to me when I read Silverman’s letter.  She wrote, “Many kids aren’t able to bring lunches from home—they have to eat what’s in the lunch line.” If you know me well enough by now, you know where I’m going with this. And I hope that your mind starts to automatically go there too. Yes, no child should have a diet-related heart condition or diabetes, typically found in middle-aged adults who have abused their bodies for decades (though, this is an epidemic, as well). Yes, childhood obesity and its evil spawn, heart disease and diabetes, are epidemics. However, (now remember my rule of thumb, ha) whatever the wealthy and middle class are suffering from, the poor have it worse. By virtue of being poor, some children will not be able to bring lunch to school. And by virtue of being poor, if they do, it’s likely not an organic, plant-based meal, sourced from Whole Foods. And healthy food can get expensive and when parents have to stretch a buck or food stamps because they are faced with eating at all versus eating an idealized meal that they cannot afford, it’s not fair to say that parents need to teach their kids healthy habits, or that it’s the parents’ responsibility to feed their children healthy food when you have no idea what a parent is teaching a child despite her ability to fill up her shopping cart like a traditional Whole Foods maniac.  Guess which parent has way more resources to her name? Pssht.

Opposition to anything related to healthy food in schools comes mostly from the food and beverage industry. You can read all about it in chapter 10 of Appetite for Profit, which author, Michele Simon, allows you to read for free online. Before getting to the first letter of the first word of this chapter, Simon shares a most horrifying quote by Coca Cola president and COO, John Alm. He said, “The school system is where you build brand loyalty.”

Pause.

Think about that. Vomit in your mouth a little, spit it out. Pat down the fire growing in the pit of your belly.

Yes. The food industry doesn’t care that they are killing you and your children. They want your money.

Yes, the food industry doesn’t care they are killing you and your children, especially if you are poor and/or a single mother and/or a family of color. Gender, race, and class. Social Injustice’s Holy Trinity.

Institutional racism means that policies and procedures are constructed in such a way that they inherently create a disadvantage for people of color, women and  the LGBtQ community, and the poor. Can you see where I am going with this?

Not only is the food industry brutalizing animals, killing you and your children with an overabundance of food (or as Michael Pollan puts it, edible food-like substances), but their business tactics are inherently targeted at putting children who are from certain households (i.e., The Holy Trinity) at the greatest disadvantage.

Moving on.

That being said, articles like, “Invasion of the School Lunch Nazis!” disturbs me because not only does it ramble opposition to this bill, which does nothing but propose good things for our children, but it forgets. And I’m really tired of people forgetting.  While I agree with Sandy Hingston, who wrote the article, that we need to “hit those corporations where it hurts… ,” I don’t agree that this Act is as frivilous as she makes it out to be. What she seems to have forgotten is that some children don’t have any other option at lunch than what’s fed them at school, and if I had my way, corporations like Coca Cola would never have had the opportunity to poison (poor) children as a way to stuff their own pockets like greasy, inauthentic, chain-restaurant chimichangas. In New York City, public schools provide children, 18 years-old and under, free meals, twice a day — breakfast and lunch.  So perhaps middle class and wealthy kids don’t rely on school lunches for their nourishment, but poorer kids sure do. Wake up Hingston and anyone else who forgets. The Forgetters – People who create and/or perpetuate racist and unjust policy, procedure, public opinion, and social infrastructure by virtue of a persistent omission from their memory that they are totally and completely privileged.

But let’s forget about them, quit whining, and make some positive change.

Call your congress person and tell them to help get this act passed! PCRM has provided instructions and tips to make this as easy as possible.

Update (June 29, 2010):

Please be aware that equally important legislation called the Child Nutrition Act should be included in your advocacy work. PCRM’s instructions tell you to ask for the reauthorization of this Act. It includes, but is not limited to, making food available to low-income pregnant women, infants, and children; it’s also the legislation that allows for those free summer meals I mentioned earlier.

(c) Jessica Rowshandel, 2010

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