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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.

The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) is a policy change to the federally administered National School Lunch Program that allows schools serving low-income populations to classify all students as eligible for free meals, regardless of individual circumstances. This has implications for the use of free and reduced-price meal (FRM) data to proxy for student disadvantage in education research and policy applications, which is a common practice. We document empirically how the CEP has affected the value of FRM eligibility as a proxy for student disadvantage. At the individual student level, we show that there is essentially no effect of the CEP. However, the CEP does meaningfully change the information conveyed by the share of FRM-eligible students in a school. It is this latter measure that is most relevant for policy uses of FRM data.

Whether kids love or hate the food served there, the American school lunchroom is the stage for one of the most popular yet flawed social welfare programs in our nation's history.School Lunch Politicscovers this complex and fascinating part of American culture, from its origins in early twentieth-century nutrition science, through the establishment of the National School Lunch Program in 1946, to the transformation of school meals into a poverty program during the 1970s and 1980s. Susan Levine investigates the politics and culture of food; most specifically, who decides what American children should be eating, what policies develop from those decisions, and how these policies might be better implemented. Even now, the school lunch program remains problematic, a juggling act between modern beliefs about food, nutrition science, and public welfare. Levine points to the program menus' dependence on agricultural surplus commodities more than on children's nutritional needs, and she discusses the political policy barriers that have limited the number of children receiving meals and which children were served. But she also shows why the school lunch program has outlasted almost every other twentieth-century federal welfare initiative. In the midst of privatization, federal budget cuts, and suspect nutritional guidelines where even ketchup might be categorized as a vegetable, the program remains popular and feeds children who would otherwise go hungry. As politicians and the media talk about a national obesity epidemic,School Lunch Politicsis a timely arrival to the food policy debates shaping American health, welfare, and equality.

[...]grader Eliana Vigil checks out in the lunch line at the Gonzales Community School in Santa Fe. In 2014, for example, Diane Schanzenbach and Mary Zaki used U.S. Department of Agriculture experimental data to estimate impacts of universal free breakfast and breakfast-in-the-classroom programs, finding small increases in meal-program participation but little evidence that students increased their overall daily food consumption. Current Programs Under the traditional rules of the school lunch program, meals are offered free to students from families with income under 130 percent of federal poverty line, at a reduced price to those with family income under 185 percent, and at full price to those with family income exceeding 185 percent. The researchers found higher sodium content and fewer servings of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and fluid milk in these lunches than required under National School Lunch Program standards.

When the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID19) pandemic forced most schools to transition from in-person to remote learning in the late spring of 2020, life changed for parents and kids overnight. As parents faced grim and costly choices about whether they could continue to work with their kids at home, children faced unprecedented losses on both academic and social fronts. But many US children lost even more when schools closed: access to healthy meals, health and mental health care, special-needs services, technology, and a safe haven. For Naomi Shapiro of Chicago, Illinois, school closure meant a temporary loss of essential therapies for her child with special needs. Shapiro's youngest son has an 18q deletion, a missing piece on chromosome 18, which caused some developmental delays and hearing loss. Pre-pandemic, her son attended a prekindergarten program through Chicago Public Schools for children who are deaf and hard of hearing. The data on the risks of COVID-19 for children is evolving. Initial reports suggested that children were not getting infected at high rates or contributing greatly to the spread of the disease. Although most infections in children are mild or asymptomatic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has since found that one in three children hospitalized for COVID-19 were admitted to an intensive care unit.1 A Chicago study published in JAMA Pediatrics also found that children infected with COVID-19 had similar levels of the virus on their nasal swabs as adults, suggesting that kids can spread disease.2Although early COVID-19 modeling studies predicted that school closures alone would prevent only 2-4 percent of deaths,3 a later analysis found that school closure was associated with a significant decline in both COVID-19 incidence and mortality.4 In short, closing schools made sense. Yet beyond the health risks posed to children by the virus itself, there are well-known health risks of school closures and the loss of the essential health and social services that schools provide. The pandemic has highlighted the urgent need for policy reforms that strengthen the safety net and welfare system for children, relieving some of the pressure on schools.

Background The Healthy Options for Nutrition Environments in Schools (Healthy ONES) study was an evidence-based public health (EBPH) randomized group trial that adapted the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI) rapid improvement process model to implement school nutrition policy and environmental change. Methods A low-income school district volunteered for participation in the study. All schools in the district agreed to participate (elementary = 6, middle school = 2) and were randomly assigned within school type to intervention (n = 4) and control (n =4) conditions following a baseline environmental audit year. Intervention goals were to 1) eliminate unhealthy foods and beverages on campus, 2) develop nutrition services as the main source on campus for healthful eating (HE), and 3) promote school staff modeling of HE. Schools were followed across a baseline year and two intervention years. Longitudinal assessment of height and weight was conducted with second, third, and sixth grade children. Behavioral observation of the nutrition environment was used to index the amount of outside foods and beverages on campuses. Observations were made monthly in each targeted school environment and findings were presented as items per child per week. Results From an eligible 827 second, third, and sixth grade students, baseline height and weight were collected for 444 second and third grade and 135 sixth grade students (51% reach). Data were available for 73% of these enrolled students at the end of three years. Intervention school outside food and beverage items per child per week decreased over time and control school outside food and beverage items increased over time. The effects were especially pronounced for unhealthy foods and beverage items. Changes in rates of obesity for intervention school (28% baseline, 27% year 1, 30% year 2) were similar to those seen for control school (22% baseline, 22% year 1, 25% year 2) children. Conclusions Healthy ONES adaptation of IHI’s rapid improvement process provided a promising model for implementing nutrition policy and environmental changes that can be used in a variety of school settings. This approach may be especially effective in assisting schools to implement the current federally-mandated wellness policies.

OPIOID OVERDOSES First, opioid overdoses are the leading cause of accidental death in the United States: in 2015, 55 403 people died of opioid overdoses, and just over 2.5 million people had a substance use disorder involving opioids.1 Nearly half of these overdoses are from prescription drugs.2 While on the campaign trail, President Trump made repeated promises to address this crisis, increasing the already appropriately high level of attention to the issue. Policy options that would address the foundational drivers of this epidemic might include expanding and improving prescription drug monitoring programs, providing states with increased resources for treatment and prevention, and improving the timeliness and quality of the data needed to study the epidemic so that we can craft effective interventions.2 TRAFFIC INJURIES AND FATALITIES As a second example, there are more than 30 000 traffic fatalities every year in the United States, and traffic accidents are the leading cause of death among children aged 5 to 19 years.2 Traffic injuries and fatalities resulted in more than $44 billion in medical costs and lost work in 2015.2 Safer road environments are a proven antidote to traffic injuries and fatalities. There is also a risk that public health ideas that would otherwise be noncontroversial will become divisive along party lines; political scientists have shown that issues become more partisan when a president makes them a priority, in part because the stakes are elevated for interest groups and because the opposing side is hesitant to give the president a legislative victory.4 At the same time, political science research has shown that support on either side of the aisle for public health ideas about issues such as obesity can increase depending on how they are framed.5 Now is an important time for public health leaders to engage in the political debate over the future of health reform in our country.

Background: For the first time, public health, particularly obesity, is being seen as a driver of EU agricultural policy. In 2007, European Ministers of Agriculture were asked to back new proposals for school fruit and vegetable programmes as part of agricultural reforms. In 2008, the European Commission conducted an impact assessment to assess the potential impact of this new proposal on health, agricultural markets, social equality and regional cohesion. Methods: A systematic review of the effectiveness of interventions to promote fruit and/or vegetable consumption in children in schools, to inform the EC policy development process. Results: School schemes are effective at increasing both intake and knowledge. Of the 30 studies included, 70% increased fruits and vegetables (FV) intake, with none decreasing intake. Twenty-three studies had follow-up periods >1 year and provide some evidence that FV schemes can have long-term impacts on consumption. Only one study led to both increased fruit and vegetable intake and reduction in weight. One study showed that school fruit and vegetable schemes can also help to reduce inequalities in diet. Effective school programmes have used a range of approaches and been organized in ways which vary nationally depending on differences in food supply chain and education systems. Conclusions: EU agriculture policy for school fruits and vegetables schemes should be an effective approach with both public health and agricultural benefits. Aiming to increase FV intake amongst a new generation of consumers, it will support a range of EU policies including obesity and health inequalities.

The implementation of school meal reform in Poland in 2015 has been withdrawn in because of vast social resistance. The analyses of press discourse in daily newspapers reveals how the critics and resistance has been shaped. The use of content analysis and critical discourse analysis helps to identify how power relations and ideologies connected to the anti-junk-food law has been contested and redefined. The changes were manifested by abandoning healthist framing in favour of construction of new discursive worlds. In the discourse of resistance, cultural food symbols such as hunger and satiety, the ceremonial nature and pleasure of eating, economic freedom and consumer freedom were employed, and the status of taste in consumption among children was highlighted. Historical and cultural context has given the basis for such redefining and provided cultural meanings for undermining expert narrative, which has been reform’s rationale and hegemonising frame.

In this paper we investigate the relationship between income shocks and food insufficiency for U.S. households. Using Survey of Income and Program Participation data on U.S. households, we test the importance of both stable and transitory income components in determining food insufficiency. In a logistic regression model, we find that both the level of income and negative income shocks affect the predicted probability of food insufficiency, while positive income shocks do not. Although we do not have a definitive measure of a household's liquidity constraint status, our work suggests that negative shocks may matter more for households that face liquidity constraints. Understanding the role of income shocks in determining food insufficiency is especially important in light of recent policy changes. It is likely that welfare reform in the U.S. increased the volatility of income in the low-income population. Our findings here suggest that this increase in volatility may not be without consequence.