Decolonize School Lunch

Greetings, eater-gatherers and new subscribers! Welcome to this week’s post. As some of you might know, for the first time in eight years, I was not an employee of Boston Public Schools on the first day of school. My friends, colleagues, and former students are very much on my mind this week as they return to classrooms and the central office. And now that I’m not thinking about lesson planning or instructional coaching, I think about lunch duty. 

For the first part of last year, I had lunch duty for grades 10-12 four days a week. Initially, it was a joyful time. We were back in person after a long time apart; students reunited at the lunch tables and played basketball or football outside when they were done eating. 

Except most students weren’t eating, even though lunch was free for everyone – as it had been in all Boston Public Schools since 2013, the year the district joined a USDA program called the Community Eligibility Option. This program provides federal reimbursement for free universal breakfast and lunch if a district has a high enough percentage of students identified as low-income or at risk of hunger. The higher this percentage, the higher the reimbursement. (It’s part of the Obama-era Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.) As of 2019, Boston had relatively few census tracts that technically qualify as food deserts, but access to grocery stores and nutritious, fresh food is not equal across the city. But at my school, the free, fresh meals at students’ fingertips went overwhelmingly uneaten. 

I was perplexed. I’d walk from table to table, asking students whether they’d eaten, and if not, were they planning to? Most often the answer was no. The school lunch was “inedible,” so they were just waiting until they got home. 

This, obviously, is unhealthy for growing teenagers. So I went on a PR campaign. I’d bring one of each of the two lunch options, always in plastic containers topped with cellophane, to each table, extolling their virtues. 

“This salad has delicious beans and cheese! I just ate one myself!” 

“Look at this – it’s a personal pizza! Have you ever seen a cuter circular food?” 

“Check out this gorgeous chicken caesar wrap! It’s chicken and salad together in a convenient hand-held cylinder!”

It never worked. I gave up after a couple weeks. Increasingly, the students who could afford it snuck out to the corner deli and bought chicken fingers. A relative few regularly brought lunch from home. The rest just didn’t eat. 

As a staff, we certainly failed to effectively encourage eating lunch. But had we tried, I don’t think it would have worked. The students were right: the lunches weren’t great, despite the best efforts of the central kitchen and our talented cafeteria manager. And, perhaps more importantly, they were mostly irrelevant to students in terms of ingredients, flavors, and preparations.

My school’s students are from, or have culture from, all over Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. They live across Boston and are passionate about the foods they love and that are made by the people who love them. I’ve talked to students about their hometown delicacies; about mofongo, tostones, pupusas, arepas, tamales, and various preparations for seafood, rice, and vegetables completely new to me. One time a fight nearly broke out in a classroom I was observing because someone claimed that Jamaican food was better than Haitian food. Food is culture, and as one of the students in that classroom said, it’s one of the most immediate ways you can share and establish your cultural identity with other people. It is central to identity, particularly in the US where the majority of people are of European descent and the foods of White people, people like me, are often centered. 

The BPS Food and Nutrition Services guidelines include a commitment to “provid[ing] nourishing and culturally diverse food choices according to regulations,” and while the document exhaustively expands on what “nourishing” entails, it does not elaborate on “culturally diverse food choices.” Of the 81 items listed on the September menu, 13 (16%) are non-European in origin, by my count. Meanwhile, 85% percent of BPS students are non-white. It’s wonderful that BPS is committed to vegetarian, vegan, fresh, and nutritionally balanced options. But in a culturally responsive school system, this should be the floor, not the ceiling. And while I truly believe the central kitchen did the best they could with limited resources, how good can penne pasta or a quesadilla be after sitting in plastic packaging for hours, refrigerated and reheated within an inch of its life? 

I used to think that school lunch was a secondary issue in public education, far below issues like teacher quality, rigorous instruction, and physical resources. I thought that as long as free and reduced lunch was reasonably fresh and nutritious, we as a system were fulfilling our obligation to students. However, after observing our students opt out of lunch and learning more about culturally responsive teaching, I think differently. I think that the opportunity for students to gather and eat nutritious, culturally-affirming lunches is central to making them feel welcomed into a school community. Like school is a place for them. Where their amygdalas can relax so that their brains are ready to learn. If we continue to think of students as vessels for nutrients rather than people with complex identities who return home to smells wafting from the kitchen and delicious dishes they’ve loved for years, then I believe the system is complicit in perpetuating White supremacist structures that continue to make schools a place where students of color don’t consistently thrive. (Plus, who’s gonna be a peak performer after damp pizza?)

Am I arguing that serving salads to students of color is racist? Not exactly. I’m arguing that as we think about how to make pedagogy culturally responsive for all students, particularly with so many White educators teaching Black and Brown students, we ought also to seriously consider the ways in which free lunch can play a role in making students feel culturally affirmed, cared for, seen, and therefore ready to learn and flourish. Otherwise we risk students opting out of eating altogether or making less nutritious choices. We risk robbing them of the important social and emotional experience of gathering and eating together, the very subject of this blog. I think what I’m arguing is that it’s a basic human right to have that experience daily, and to deprive students of this opportunity because they rely on a school lunch is inequitable both financially and culturally – in ways that often fall along class and race lines. 

Boston is at the point in its trajectory towards becoming a fair and equitable district at which it has recognized the need to nourish all students’ bodies as well as their minds, no questions asked. The next step is to decolonize the cafeteria – to center the identities of students of color that have so long been marginalized by the systematically oppressive institutions that should serve them.