Of School Lunch, Farm Bills, Free Riders, and Book Clubs

Schoolchildren eating hot school lunches made up primarily of food from the surplus commodities program. Taken at a school in Penasco, New Mexico, United States, 1941. Photo by Rusinow, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I started a book club about four years ago. It was slow going in the beginning. Only three to five women would show up, and I had to lure them with the promise of both a child and husband free evening and a meal that someone else cooked. Things eventually took off, and once we consistently had 8-10 people at every “meeting” we stopped recruiting to preserve the quality of the discourse (and ration our good wine). I’m proud to say we met successfully throughout the pandemic, occasionally resorting to BYOBs in someone’s driveway or bundled up in ski clothes on a screen porch eating chili in January.

In the midst of virtual school, remote work, and other general upheavals to normalcy, book club was a safe harbor in the pandemic storm. We always talk about the book, but topics of conversation in the spring of 2020 also included who was still hoping to send kids to summer camp, the pros and cons of vaccination if we ever got one, and how to manage households that were no longer empty eight hours a day.

At one early-pandemic-era gathering, one of the women asked, “Are you guys getting the free food from school?” FREE FOOD?! I’ll confess to being one of the few moms who forced and paid for my kids to eat the school lunch daily. I am 100% committed to giving parenting a solid 80% effort. The 20% where I fall short teaches resilience: “Look kids! Salisbury Steak Day!” I figure it will either help them develop diverse palates or learn how to pack their own lunch: life skills! What was this free food? We all wanted to know.

Apparently, our school district had been encouraging residents to receive “meal kits” for kids who were learning at home. Initially it was for students who were on free and reduced lunches, but when the food dispersed fell far short of that number, the offer was extended to any person who lived in the district and was willing to pick it up. Separately and through the blessings of Facebook, district food service workers began literally begging anyone and everyone to come get the meal kits in an effort to keep their jobs. The food could not be donated to food banks or shelters directly from the school, but it could be given to anyone who showed up to receive it. Reading between the lines, one could deduce that ensuring the future of school nutrition for disadvantaged kids meant giving food away to people who might not necessarily need it.

We all decided to get the food. While we all knew “free” government programs aren’t really free, we also knew that feeding hungry kids in the future—at the time–depended on artificial demand. Doing something that felt supportive of our cafeteria workers which also complimented the virtual school experience with reminders of normalcy was comforting during those “unprecedented times.” Every week, our line of mini-vans and SUVs would queue up at the elementary school to pick up seven breakfasts and seven lunches per kid, and our beloved lunch lady would hand everyone in the car a warm chicken biscuit while she thanked us for coming to see her.

My friends and I were committed to using the food we received. Recipes for apple bread and carrot soup were quickly traded, and our covid-prompted air-fryer purchases were put to good use. You really haven’t lived until you’ve air fried a sausage-pancake-on-a-stick or a mini-cheese calzone. At the dawn of the covid-times, it really did feel like “we were all in it together” while we jointly brainstormed family dinners crafted from pizza squares, cartons of milk, apple sauce and copious amounts of baby carrots. I remember feeling like a contestant on “Chopped!,” where all the ingredients were parts of school lunches. We got that food for nearly three months; until the USDA issued waivers allowing states flexibility to accommodate for the realities of a pandemic.

I called my girlfriend when I saw the news: “We don’t have to get the food anymore! The USDA issued a waiver!”

“USDA?” she said. “The department of agriculture? What’s that have to do with school lunch? But also: Thank God we’re done with those damn baby carrots.”

“Well, yeah, I’m tired of those carrots too, but it’s because of the 1935 Farm Bill,” I replied.

“You are such a nerd.”

In 1935, President Roosevelt signed The Agriculture Adjustment Act into law. It was New Deal era legislation with a primary objective of boosting prices for farm goods by stabilizing markets for commodities. One of the ways this was done was to receive surplus milk and crops from farmers and funnel them as commodity donations to schools who would then feed students. The program worked reasonably well in absorbing the surpluses (the objective was to create demand for farmers, not feed kids) until the WWII economy negated the need for artificial markets.

In the early 1940’s, the War Department took over the program and restructured it so that schools would merely be reimbursed for up to half of what they spent on local food This also avoided having to use war-time rationed gasoline to deliver donated commodities. Moving away from commodity donations to reimbursements required Congress to appropriate funds annually, and states became rightly nervous about program longevity.

In response to these concerns, Senator Richard Russell (D-GA) introduced a bill to permanently create and fund a National School Lunch Program. Supporters of the bill, largely conservatives, viewed it as both a way to support their agricultural districts and a military readiness strategy as many young American men had been excluded from service in WWII for diseases that resulted from poor nutrition. But this time around, the objective was to feed America’s hungry children. It was signed into law by President Truman in 1946.

Today, the National School Lunch Program is part of the Child Nutrition Programs administered by the Food and Nutrition Service of the USDA. In 2022, nutrition assistance programs comprise 74% (the largest component) of the $230 billion Department of Agriculture budget. For comparison purposes, Farm and Conservation comprises only 13% of the USDA budget and largely represent discretionary programs. As mandatory, not discretionary (courtesy of Senator Russell’s bill), child nutrition services are not dependent on annual appropriations from Congress. Deviating from the structure of the programs, however, requires something known as a ‘meal pattern waiver.’

It was this meal pattern requirement that prompted ten women from an upper-middle class book club to voluntarily accept “free lunch” as a way to support our district’s nutrition program and to save a local lady’s job. While I’m typically the first one in line to critique the largesse and ineffectiveness of government (food banks were nearly bare at the time), we also shuddered at the thought of hungry children in our community potentially remaining hungry if a program designed to feed them failed in the future under the weight of its own parameters. If we could also prevent people who were part of the fabric of our children’s daily lives from becoming jobless casualties of covid, we wanted to do that too. Does taking the food make us bad citizens because we violated the social code against free-ridership? Perhaps it underscores that we were just moms worried about kids in an evolving environment we hadn’t quite figured out ourselves.

People commonly advocate against nutrition programs or support “lunch shaming” with trite expressions like “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” The claim being that benefits without obligations effectively subsidize poor decision making. That critique may have merit when applied to adults, but at what point should we punish children for the perceived sins of their parents? If social scoring was used as a metric for receiving nutrition assistance (only the Perfect People need apply), it is possible that the only people deemed worthy of receiving such benefit wouldn’t need the benefit at all. That may be the ideal scenario in the minds of many, but given the evolution of the school lunch program, we are kidding ourselves if we wind up in a position that tolerates subsidies for farmers but denies them to hungry children.

Nearly two years later, receiving that food feels like one of those crazy stories about surviving the Great Depression or using ration stamps. A thing that in any other context would make no sense: moms who brought “government cheese” home in Lululemon tote bags. Once the federal and state waivers were in place, food was bussed to folks who couldn’t pick it up. After classes resumed in-person, breakfast and lunches were offered at no cost to all students.

Our kids have been back in person at school since the fall of 2020, and they are all eating at school now. The warm-chicken-biscuit cafeteria lady is still there, but who knows if months of baby carrots had anything to do with that. I like to think that it did.

My son recently told me he needed more lunch money on his account, and I questioned him. “Honey, school lunch is free right now. No one has to pay.”

“I know, Mom,” he said. “But only first-lunch is free. You have to pay for second-lunch. I always get two Salisbury steaks.”

I’m happy to write that check.