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Government-sponsored school lunch programs have garnered attention from activists and policymakers for their potential to promote public health, sustainable diets, and food sovereignty. However, across country contexts, these programs often fall far short of their transformative potential. It is vital, then, to identify policies and organizing strategies that enable school lunch programs to be redesigned at the national scale. In this article, we use document analysis of historical newspapers and government data to examine the motivating factors and underlying conditions that allowed South Korea’s universal free, eco-friendly (UFEF) school lunch program to become a tool for advancing social justice and ecological goals at the national scale. We analyze the socio-historical evolution and current status of the Korean school lunch program, combining the multi-level perspective with insights from environmental sociology and critical food studies, in order to shed light on the factors that enabled the program to become an innovative niche and articulate the opportunities and challenges it now faces. We identify the state-sponsored creation of what we call “precautionary infrastructure” as a key anchoring mechanism between the school food niche and agri-food regime. Precautionary infrastructure includes new supply chains, certification standards, and sourcing policies that provide a stable market for eco-friendly farms and small-scale producers, while minimizing the environmental health risks of school lunch by delivering organic and pesticide-free ingredients to on-site kitchens that serve free lunches to all students. This analysis offers insight into how public school-lunch programs can become protected niches that help drive sustainability transitions within agri-food systems.

Big corporations and food service companies are making millions of dollars from public school meal programs, often to the detriment of students’ health. Jennifer Gaddis explains how government policies and funding shortfalls have affected what is served is school cafeterias. Common cost-cutting measures include serving cheap and easy-to-prepare meals, selling junk food to raise revenues, or bringing in outside companies to manage cafeterias. Parents and community groups have pushed back, trying to bring scratch cooking and nutritious food back into their cafeterias.

There's a problem with school lunch in America. Big Food companies have largely replaced the nation's school cooks by supplying cafeterias with cheap, precooked hamburger patties and chicken nuggets chock-full of industrial fillers. Yet it's no secret that meals cooked from scratch with nutritious, locally sourced ingredients are better for children, workers, and the environment. So why not empower \"lunch ladies\" to do more than just unbox and reheat factory-made food? And why not organize together to make healthy, ethically sourced, free school lunches a reality for all children? The Labor of Lunch aims to spark a progressive movement that will transform food in American schools, and with it the lives of thousands of low-paid cafeteria workers and the millions of children they feed. By providing a feminist history of the US National School Lunch Program, Jennifer E. Gaddis recasts the humble school lunch as an important and often overlooked form of public care. Through vivid narration and moral heft,The Labor of Lunch offers a stirring call to action and a blueprint for school lunch reforms capable of delivering a healthier, more equitable, caring, and sustainable future.

School foodservice is a form of reproductive labor, which is a term meant to encompass various kinds of work—mental, manual, and emotional—aimed at providing the historically and socially, as well as biologically, defined care necessary to maintain existing life and to reproduce the next generation. The increasing reliance on part-time work, convenience foods, and privatization that began in the early 1970s prevents many lunchroom workers’ from performing critical acts of reproductive labor. The unintended consequences of this transformation are now becoming clear in terms of the quality of food served in the nation’s lunchrooms, the nature of school foodservice labor, and the ecological consequences of the industrial food system. For a radical food politics, reversing the devaluing and deskilling of school foodservice provides a tremendous opportunity to engage both workers and students in pursuit of a just and sustainable food system. Much is at stake – over thirty million children participate in the National School Lunch Program each day. Thus the critical question becomes one of how such a radical revaluing and reskilling can be initiated. One possible avenue is through organized labor. In this article, I analyze early efforts to drive such a transformation, drawn from twelve months of participatory research with UNITE HERE! during their “Real Food, Real Jobs” campaigns in three U.S. cities.

Knowing basic science is one part of scientific literacy. In that sense, and in some other ways, we agree with Eric Brunsell, Kevin Anderson, Kelly Steiner, and Tom Anfinson that the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) includes elements of scientific literacy, a term that, unfortunately, has no clear definition. However, we identified many aspects of scientific literacy that we believe should be part of the NGSS but are not. Certainly many science teachers do a great job; first-rate teachers supplement standards and textbooks in creative ways. But what about everyone else? School board members, for example, might be surprised to find no mention of viruses, immunization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or any other scientific institutions in the NGSS, assuming those are basic elements of scientific literacy. The NGSS differs from prior science education documents, which focused on a broader definition of scientific literacy. One key earlier document is A Framework for K-12 Science Education, which Brunsell and his coauthors reference often in their response.

Free lunches for all. School gardens. Cooking classes. Canning and food preservation workshops. Health, nutrition, and biology classes that spark children’s curiosity and widen their ability to think across disciplines through the experiential study of food and agriculture. Children participating in the labor of lunch, learning from and building relationships with well-trained, adequately compensated adults in a community economy of care. Family and neighborhood engagement. This was all part of Emma Smedley’s vision for a nonprofit school lunch program that would operate not as “a mere appendage of the educational system” but rather as “one of the arteries through which

“Have you ever looked at the list of ingredients on the back of a bottle of cheap maple-flavored pancake syrup?” Deb, a foodservice director in a suburban Minnesota town, poses this simple question to parents and administrators any time they question why— in spite of potentially higher ingredient and labor costs—she is so committed to serving real food in schools. Her deadpan delivery of the question hints that the sweet, golden-brown liquid is not a one-ingredient food sourced directly from a sugar maple tree. Aunt Jemima, a best-selling brand of maple-flavored syrup, contains corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup,

The 1960s and 1970s brought tremendous social change to all corners of American society—school lunch included—that shaped what the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) looks like today. These changes, which helped feed millions of poor, hungry children, were the product of widespread community organizing and coalition building. However, unintended consequences stemming from heavy private sector involvement and political inaction caused both food and job quality to suffer. Activists were split on their priorities, but one thing was sure: poverty was hard to ignore, despite all the Cold War rhetoric proclaiming America as the “richest nation on Earth.” Lunch

Empowering school kitchen and cafeteria workers to cook real food from scratch using locally sourced and school-grown ingredients can transform the entire culture of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). I witnessed this in action and interviewed dozens of workers who spoke about how much the shift from a cheap food economy to a real food economy impacted their ability to care for students and for their own families. The real food movement, and the country as a whole, has much to gain from rethinking and ultimately reorganizing the labor of lunch to allow frontline cafeteria workers to do more