School Lunches in New Orleans
The Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools website states:
Our vision is simple: a great education for every kid in our city, no matter the color of their skin, what neighborhood they stay in or how much money their parents make.
This statement, combined with the New Orleans location, led me to guess that the organization favors parental choice in education. “What neighborhood they stay in or how much money their parents make” sounds like a reference to the traditional district system, in which school assignments are based on geography and the alternatives are open to people who can pay tuition. And choice policies have shaped the New Orleans school system to a degree reformers most places can only dream of: Children who temporarily relocated from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina received vouchers to attend public or private schools of their choice, and New Orleans has a larger percentage of students attending charter schools than any other city.
I read further and saw that my guess was wrong. The “What We’ve Done” section of the website is all about school food. Of the 12 recommendations for change, two call for more local food in school lunches. One suggests that schools establish gardens on their premises because “Students need to grow fresh food and taste what they grow.”
Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools is lobbying for something peripheral to a great education. It doesn’t matter where school food was grown, as long as students get a nutritionally complete meal. And gardening, while it’s possibly educational and rewarding, is not a basic human need. If you think of school priorities, like creating a safe environment and teaching students to read, maintaining a garden would be pretty far down the list.
I hope Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools will reevaluate its goals and stay true to its original mission. A couple of questions to consider: Are the most pressing inequities already addressed, so that we can now devote our attention to gardens? Or do neighborhoods and parental income levels continue to keep a great education out of reach for many students, for reasons that have nothing to do with food?
Hi Sarah!
I’m glad that you checked out the Rethink website. The reason that Food Justice is so heavily emphasized on our website is that we are a youth-driven organization. That means that the work we do is determined by the students: we treat them as experts on their own education and they live up to the challenge.
For the Rethinkers, what they eat for lunch is not a peripheral issue in the slightest. Since Katrina, very few (if any) schools actually cook their food on site. Meals (which are not nutritious and are barely edible) are prepared in off-site consignment kitchens and shipped to schools frozen, where they are reheated. Students report that the food is often still frozen when it is served, and is often unrecognizable. They consider this an affront to their dignity!
In addition to Rethinking school lunches, the Rethinkers have designed Green bathrooms, reimagined school security and discussed what it means to be a good teacher. Not all of this is covered on our website, but look for more info soon.
Again, thanks for your interest in Rethink. It’s great to know that people all around the country know about what we do.
Best wishes,
Rachel Lee
Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools
Comment by rachel — December 6, 2009 @ 5:36 p.m.
Obviously you’ve never been a black kid in a poor inner city school where they serve you the ’spent hens’ and bacteria-infested meat that prisons and McDonald’s pass up. At least, that’s not what you’d ever consider eating if you’re spending $40,000 a year at undergrad and the worst food you have available to you is the fresh salad bar at Bartlett Commons.
Comment by Eapen Thampy — February 11, 2010 @ 3:27 p.m.
Eapen: I agree that meat standards for public school lunches need to be improved. I wrote about that in this post:
http://www.showmedaily.org/2009/12/meat-in-school-lunches-good.html
Comment by Sarah Brodsky — February 12, 2010 @ 11:45 a.m.
Seriously? You’re slamming an organization of inner city kids and their community for having the gall to suggest that their school systems don’t feed them well. These are consumers expressing preferences! Who are you to judge them?
You literally suggest that these kids (and the people who advocate for them) don’t know the most pertinent impediments to their own educational achievement! You don’t seem to understand the basic link between eating good food and the simple ability to cognitively function in a classroom. And don’t forget, as their website literally reads, some of these kids had never seen school bathrooms with toilet paper or hallways with lockers. Do you think that they got any semblance of a decent meal at these schools?
Armchair theorizing is fine but at some point the fact that you seem to have literally no concept of their reality besides what you read on a website should give you some intellectual humility. Maybe you should interview one of these children.
Comment by Eapen Thampy — February 17, 2010 @ 10:15 p.m.
The point is that a focus on local food has nothing to do with food quality. If they’re truly interested in improving the quality of their meals, they should ignore locale entirely.
Comment by Eric D. Dixon — February 17, 2010 @ 10:45 p.m.