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This article is based on 18 months of ethnographic field work in an elementary, middle, and high school cafeteria in the Midwest to analyze how school food service employees (i.e., lunch ladies) challenged and adhered to common portrayals of them in popular culture through the use of emotions. Utilizing Collins’ concept of “controlling images,” this article explores media representations of lunch ladies from television, film, literature and music to describe two reoccurring depictions—“the mother” and “the witch.” Then, by drawing on participant observation and interviews, this article shows how lunch ladies simultaneously challenge and adhere to these controlling images in their everyday work by invoking a range of emotions. Consequently, this article illustrates how lunch ladies can find meaning in this low-status, low-paying occupation, in a society that devalues and underpays feminized occupations.

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.

Abstract Purpose This ethnographic study of school food service employees at an elementary, middle, and high school in the Midwest introduces “feeding labor,” a concept to signify a form of gendered labor that entails emotional and bodily feeding activities. Methodology This chapter is based on 18 months of participant-observation and 25 in-depth interviews. Findings I illustrate three characteristics of feeding labor: (1) the physical labor of attending to the feeding needs of customers, (2) the emotional labor of managing feelings to create and respond to customers, and (3) variations in the gendered performance of feeding labor as explained through the intersection of race, class, and age. These dimensions vary across different field sites and emerge as three distinct patterns of feeding labor: (1) motherly feeding labor involves physical and emotional attentiveness and nurturing with mostly middle- and upper-class young white customers, (2) tough-love feeding labor involves a mix of tough, but caring respect and discipline when serving mostly working- and lower-middle class racially mixed young teens, and (3) efficient feeding labor involves fast, courteous service when serving mostly working- and middle-class predominantly white teenagers. Implications These findings show that a caring and nurturing style of emotional and physical labor is central in schools with white, middle-class, young students, but that other forms of gendered feeding labor are performed in schools composed of students with different race, class, and age cohorts that emphasize displaying tough-love and efficiency while serving students food. Examining this form of labor allows us to see how social inequalities are maintained and sustained in the school cafeteria.

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act was adopted unanimously by Congress and signed by President Obama in December 2010. In September 2012, the requirements implementing the new law took effect and the response has been anything but bipartisan.

First lady MichelleObama,aformer hospital executive, has made the war on obesity her defining cause, and put the school lunch program in her crosshairs. During the Depression, when farmers were surrounded by mountains of unsold commodities and schools were full of hungry children, New Deal políticos had used the USDA to funnel surpluses to school cafeterias. [...] when it came time to designate an authority for the new national lunch program, the USDA seemed a natural choice.

First Lady Michelle Obarna recently expressed concern that our nation's security is being impacted because more than one in four young people are unqualified for military service because of their weight. From a historical standpoint, Michael Pollan points out that food science has been a poor substitute for the art of cookery, and the trust placed in scientists to make dietary guidelines has too often led to worse food and poorer health outcomes.20 Particularly when science has been corrupted by industry sponsored \"self-serving nutritional research\" and the influence of political pressures, the resulting government nutrition advice has left a miserable track record.21 For instance, Pollan blames \"official nutritional advice\" for introducing margarine and trans fats into our diets.22 This history of nutritional failure is particularly detrimental to the impoverished, since poor nutrition advice leads to poor nutrition in school meals which engenders yet another example of funds being expended on, but failing to help, those in need.

'Breadwinner welfare states' are characterized by the distinction they draw between work and family life, between earning fathers and caring mothers. Dutch welfare arrangements organized do-it-yourself mothering more radically than elsewhere in Europe. Married women participated less often in the labor market and collective facilities for child care were absent. Since the 1970s, the number of working mothers has increased; after the 1990s it became official policy to stimulate labor participation from all adults, mothers included. But saying goodbye to the Dutch heritage of traditional domestic mothering remains problematic. The increase in paid employment for mothers causes confusion about the relationship between public and private domains. Welfare schemes are ill-adjusted to a situation in which both men and women participate in the labor market. This can be especially seen in the unsystematic organization of school dinners, modeled on the patterns found in the home. Dinner ladies work in the margins of the employment market; what they do is not seen as 'real work', they are not trained to 'educate' the children, schools tend to regard them as outsiders and treat them with condescension. Children will then imitate the arrogant behavior they observe from their teachers and parents.