Cafeteria wars
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It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King with Miles Bryan. Senior reporter and producer for the program. Hello. Hi. You went to public school, right, Miles? Yes. Go South High Tigers. What do you remember about school lunch? I remember sad lasagna shrink-wrapped in little containers. I remember avoiding it. Do you remember the nugs? The chicken nuggets? No.

Yeah, if I had to eat school lunch, that was a pretty good option. I actually liked them. But in addition to being very tasty, those nugs were very processed. And at the moment, America has got processed foods in its crosshairs. It's true. We are collectively very down on processed food right now. None more so than Health and Human Services Secretary nominee Robert Florey Kennedy Jr. I'll get processed food out of school lunch immediately.

About half the school lunch program goes to processed food. Penn, the man who once saved a dead bear cub for a snack, fixed school lunches. Coming up. Amazon Pharmacy presents Painful Thoughts.

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You're listening to Today Explained. I'm Noelle King, and last week, Miles Bryan and I went to Idea Charter School in Northeast D.C. Okay, Miles, the challenge for American school lunches is to get the ultra-processed foods out. And

And the challenger is? My name is Reece Powell. Reece Powell. He's the CEO of a company called Red Rabbit. So Red Rabbit is one of the largest black-owned school food companies, but we're really a social justice company. Red Rabbit's mission is to serve kids, you know, basically the opposite of chicken nuggets. Fresh, healthy, unprocessed. Our chefs prepare meals using whole, real ingredients. Very nice. Sure, that all sounds good, but that doesn't mean it's easy. Take chicken for an example.

If you want to serve chicken and you use a processed chicken, it comes with a CN label. A CN label, that's a child nutrition label. It shows how a food fits into the federal rules around what goes on the plate. You see them a lot on prepackaged school foods. The school food regulations like the CN label because then they can flow through into the school food regulations. And so if you're an operator...

The process of buying chicken, then giving the CN label to the regulators to prove to them that you bought the chicken is a very straightforward one. We don't use processed chicken, we use real chicken. Real chicken doesn't come with the CN label. Neither does any real produce come with a packaging label. And so the process of us explaining to the regulators that we are following the rules and we are doing what's necessary for the children to have a healthy meal is a little bit more complex, a little more complicated because the system isn't designed for you to serve

whole, natural, real chicken. Cerise Powell and Red Rabbit, they have to go the extra mile to make their fresh chicken work for the USDA, which runs the school lunch program. They've got to replicate that process with all their food. And they've got to do it all within the budget the federal government provides, which is about $4 per lunch per kid. And even if you can solve for all of those challenges, you still have to cook the food, which requires a real chef. In this case, in Northeast D.C., that is Darian DeVar.

Wow. Chef, may I come behind the line? I've never... Okay. All right, sir. Can you guys hear me? So today we have spaghetti with whole wheat pasta and we have mixed veggies. That's green beans, sauteed...

peppers and onions, a fresh garden salad. We also have Parmesan cheese and something that I love dearly, which is the brown butter ricotta. It complements very well with the pasta, and the kids absolutely love it. Let me ask you about these green beans, because I am dipping in the past, but you do remember the green beans. I do. You remember they were colorless. Yes, flavorless. What's the word? Gris?

Slimy. Slimy, yeah, exactly. I do. You got peppers in there, you got onions in there, you got spices in there too? Absolutely, spices, garlic, seasoning. There was not a chicken nugget in sight in Northeast D.C. Yeah, that meal looked beautiful. But as the father of a young daughter, Noelle, I have to tell you something. The only thing that really matters here is, are the kids going to eat it? Fair. Fair.

How's it going? Parmesan cheese or ricotta? Parmesan. You're not eating today? I want the pasta.

Are the kids going to want to eat their vegetables? We're going to leave you in suspense for a bit because here's the thing. School lunch has a history. It is a rich history. It is a vivid history. It is classic Americana. And it's the purview of Jane Black. She's a longtime food journalist who writes the newsletter Consumed. And she's sort of an expert on school lunch. We went to her house in D.C. The history of school lunch is, I think, a really interesting case study. When you look at the promises that

Make America Healthy Again and RFK Jr. are making, what they're promising to do, which is take out all of these additives and use simple ingredients, it should be really easy, right? This idea that you just buy food and you cook it and you give it to kids, it should be simple. But it has never been simple.

And it's not only because of the money, although that is a big piece of it. It's also for historical reasons. School lunch is this weird little world, this complex upside down and backwards world that is

shaped by rules that were made for specific reasons at the time, but that when you're trying to change things, make it very difficult to untangle and do something that just seems like common sense. And that's kind of why I love school lunch, because I love these wacky little places where you really have to get in there and understand where the rubber's hitting the road, what the problems are. But to somebody just looking in from the outside, you're thinking,

Why can't they just do that? Where do we start if we're going to tell a history of school lunch in the United States? Where does it come from, the idea that if a kid goes to school, the school is going to feed him? So there have always been hungry children in America. And the school lunch program is unofficially born during the Depression.

And they were these ad hoc programs at different schools where children were in need. The government helped out by providing money for this, but they also helped out by buying food from farmers because in the Depression, they were struggling to sell the products that they needed. So the government would buy these things in order to stabilize prices so that farmers also could make a living and take that food and give it to schools.

The program becomes formalized in 1946. It's called the National School Lunch Act. It's signed by President Harry Truman. And he says this famous line when he, famous to school food nerds like me, when he signs the bill that is, "No nation is any healthier than its children or more prosperous than its farmers." And so I think that's such an important line because

This program was never really only about children and nutrition. The program always had two masters. And the fact that the program was controlled and directed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture rather than, say, the Department of Education or the Department of Health and Human Services shows

Who was really driving this program? It was agriculture. I had always wondered that, how ag became so involved. And it's because, oh, it always was involved in this thing. From the very beginning. What's on the plate back in the earliest days? You know, what's funny is it's not that different than the way we picture agriculture.

school lunch right now. You know, it's 1950s food. Lunches are planned by a local school manager whose menus have taste appeal and day-to-day variety.

A good lunch provides from a third to one half of the student's daily needs. It's chicken, it's scoops of mashed potatoes, you know, that you take out with the ice cream scoop. Meats and other foods rich in protein, a combination of fruits and vegetables, bread, butter, milk. In poorer schools, they may have not had a hot lunch. They may have had a sandwich and an apple. But I think that

I think that what you need to know about school lunch at the beginning was that it was cooked in the schools.

Okay, so it's not processed food, a TV dinner that's brought in and just reheated and given to kids. There are lunch ladies, they're cooking it and they're making it fresh and they're serving it to the kids. A nutritious lunch helps a child stay alert. It helps teenagers make that final spurt of growth that develops them into healthy grownups. My husband, who grew up in West Virginia, always tells stories about when he was in elementary school that you could smell the bread baking.

Oh, and you know, what a lovely memory. A lovely memory. Yes, he's not that old. Right. No, he wouldn't. You're saying like within our lifetime, this is something that was done on site. And then, so the food is what we would expect it to be. No real surprises. But then a change did come.

And it was at a point in American history when a lot of things were changing. What happened? Okay, so Reagan is elected president. Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan is elected president. The federal budget is out of control. He comes in planning to slash budgets everywhere that he can. It will propose budget cuts in virtually every department of government. And school lunch is no exception.

And so they cut the budgets. And the way that I often describe it to people is that schools are kind of a lot like families. When a ton of your income disappears, what do you do? You cut back, right? You have to cut costs. And at this point in the 80s, the easiest way for them to do that is to get rid of the staff that are cooking. They have salaries. They also, at that point, had pensions that...

people didn't really want to pay anymore. So we'll get rid of the lunch ladies and we won't have to maintain all this equipment. We won't have to have stoves and refrigerators and walk-ins. We'll just get these

suddenly available big food companies to make all the food, package it, and bring it in. That doesn't mean there was no cooking going on, but increasingly you see pre-prepared foods and processed foods coming into schools because they're cheaper. So we move from the bread is baking in the kitchen in West Virginia to what?

Well, I remember from the 80s, you know, there were tater tots, which I loved. There were sloppy joes. And then Friday was pizza day. Pizza day. Yes. Pizza day. And it was not a triangle. It was a square. It was a square. And it had, you know, tomato sauce. And then I always remember it was like the shredded cheese that was kind of spackled.

Like it had never moved. But we loved it. You picked up one edge and you could tear the whole thing off. Exactly. Exactly. And so, you know, that's what there was. I can't believe I'm actually going to consume a school hamburger. What do you want these beef hearts? On the floor. It doesn't look very clean. Just do your job, heart boy. And that's what kids love.

got used to seeing. Not only at school, but increasingly throughout society, we all start eating a lot more processed foods and a lot more fast food, et cetera, et cetera. Coming up, Jane Black comes back to tell us what happened when we tried to make the kids eat some vegetables. And what is a vegetable, anyway? Mmm.

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It's Today Explained. Miles Bryan and I are back with Jane Black. She writes the Consumed newsletter and has covered school lunch for many years. So when we left off, American kids were getting mostly processed foods in their school lunch. And then one woman risked it all. The person who comes along and raises a ton of awareness about what's happening in school food is Michelle Obama. And so when Obama is elected...

in 2008. Michelle Obama, like many first ladies before her, sort of chooses an issue, right? You know, Nancy Reagan had just say no to drugs. Say no to drugs and say yes to life. And Laura Bush was very focused on literacy. Start by reading this book, one of my favorite books, Duck for President. And Michelle Obama is going to focus on healthy eating and healthy kids.

And so a part of that is school lunch. And so you've got her, you know, dancing with Elmo. So how do you guys feel about getting kids pumped up and excited about eating healthy? Oh, well, it's wonderful. Elmo loves this. You've got her bringing chefs to the White House on the newly, you know, planted garden on the South Lawn. Do you know what Swiss chard is?

It's like a green. It's like a collard. It's like a lettuce. She's out there talking about how important school lunch is to children, especially children who are hungry and getting some of their most important calories of the day and how it is essential to make those meals as healthy as possible. How does her advocacy go over? So it really depends who you talk to. Michelle Obama was a hero to so many liberals.

On the other hand, you then have the opposition, the Republicans, who are not into this at all. There is no sign this morning that congressional Republicans are being swayed by First Lady Michelle Obama. The decisions about the lunchroom should be made there, should be made with the parents in the school district, not some bureaucrat in Washington, D.C. I mean, to them, what Michelle Obama is doing is the ultimate nanny state, she's saying.

here's what you can eat, I'm going to tell you what to eat. You know, parents shouldn't have control, kids shouldn't have control. It was very much portrayed as if she was stepping on parents' toes and telling them what they were allowed to feed their kids. The other piece of it that I think is worth mentioning is that there was a big pushback, partially from people in the school food world who were saying, hey, not so fast.

If we give kids quinoa and, you know, roasted vegetables, are they going to eat them? You know, they like pizza. And pizza, which kids and all of us do love, kind of becomes a bit of a flashpoint here. Remind us of this embarrassing chapter. Yes, this was quite a moment. So...

One of the things that Michelle Obama and her team discover when they dive into the school food nutrition rules is that one eighth of a cup of tomato paste, that's about two tablespoons, and conveniently, the amount that is on a piece of pizza counts in school lunch world as half a vegetable. Right?

Which is weird. And they're able to say, hey, wait a minute, look at this. Something is wrong here. Pizzak is a vegetable. Do you see how crazy this has become? And she wrote an op-ed for the New York Times. It was somewhat snarky saying, you know, remember when Congress declared that the sauce on a slice of pizzak

a pizza should count as a vegetable in school lunches. Common sense, it's not a vegetable. What's next? Are Twinkies going to be considered a vegetable? What was really crazy was that she lost that battle. You know, the school lunch people, the food companies, the pizza makers get to members of Congress and they're like, wait a minute, you are not going to say that pizza doesn't count as a vegetable.

And they refused to let it happen. I mean, just to complicate the story just a little bit, I did talk to some nutritionists and I think this is really interesting. They didn't really object to the fact that an eighth of a cup of tomato paste does give you some nutrients. In fact, they told me it is about the equivalent of half an orange in terms of vitamins and nutrients. What's crazy though, is just how quickly this was shut down. And I think it shows that

how powerful interests really have a hold on the school lunch program and how difficult it is to make common sense changes. So let me ask you lastly, you've laid out how school lunch in a lot of ways illustrates what American priorities have been for a century, right, since the Depression.

And we see how lunch becomes something that is good for kids, but also convenient for business. In 2025, people like RFK and the Maha movement that has aligned behind him, they are starting to look very differently at not just school lunch, but at the way we eat. And it feels like we really are having a moment. And I wonder, first, whether we are really having a moment. And second,

If we are, if this moment has real potential, real promise. I think we are having a moment. I think there is a lot of energy behind the ideas that he is putting out there, this new frame he's putting out there about companies and powerful interests taking advantage of us. And that appeals both to Democrats and to Republicans who feel it happening in this country.

How you translate that energy into real change, I think, is a big question. And I think that's why school lunch is a really good thing to talk about it because it gives us this example. These things that seem like they should be simple are actually not that simple. And with school lunch, in order to really change it, in order to pull ultra-processed foods out of school lunch, I mean, that's making over the entire menu. That's hiring people.

thousands and thousands of people to cook in schools. That's building thousands and thousands of school kitchens. That costs a lot of money. So people have to put their money where their mouth is. And I think it's the same thing when you look at a lot of the other areas that the Maha movement is talking about, right? It's just not as easy. They're talking about regulating ingredients that they put in foods.

So again, a lot of these are good ideas, but putting them into practice, it's a long haul.

Jane Black, the newsletter is consumed. Check it out. The long haul that Jane spoke of begins in a place like Idea Charter School in Washington, where Red Rabbit is serving unprocessed meals and where Miles and I set out to ask, Will the youths eat real food? Good, good, good, good. What is your name? Wesley Parr. How did you meet you? Wesley Parr? Parr. What are you recording for? We are doing a story about school lunch. Oh, well, yeah. Well,

Well, the one route here is some dog shit. Oh, no. It looks so good. Yeah, it's the best you can get with government money. How old are you? 18. 18. I remember being 18. They were giving us chicken nuggets, canned corn, canned green beans. This stuff is all fresh. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. I'm probably just complaining to complain because I'm a teenager. Yeah, what do I know? What about you, sir? What do you think?

It's good, but I'm not going to eat my vegetables. Yeah, no. No. It's much better than old lunches, at least. That's what I like about it. What were the old ones like? It was terrible. It didn't even look good. Looked like-- Sometimes it looked like sludge, and I wouldn't touch it.

I'm pretty sure I went the whole school year without eating a lunch back then. Yeah, back then it was good to me. Now I feel like it's more healthy, but some certain days it's good. It happens all days. How important is healthy to you guys? Like how important is it to do you feel like to be eating not unprocessed foods and vegetables, things like that? I mean, it's good. We got to watch our figures, you know? But sometimes it's just eating anything.

Okay, here we go. Here we go. First impressions. All right, we got spaghetti, whole wheat, we got meat sauce. It's good. There's spices in it. It's garlic, basil, rosemary. That is really good. Very nice. Whole wheat's a nice touch. The whole wheat's a nice touch.

Thank you to Idea Charter School in Northeast D.C., Wesley Parr, Jamar Jackson, Latia Gregory, and Kiara Roundtree. Thanks, kids. Today's show was produced by... Me, Miles Bryan. Jolie Myers is our editor. Laura Bullard fact-checked the show. Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christensdottir are our engineers. It's Today Explained. I'm a historian. I'd like to explore mostly... I usually like to learn about the Gilded Age and...

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