Hungry children are not set up to learn

Free and healthy meals for all children could help transform the U.S. farm system.

by Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan is the author of nine books, including “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food.”

One of Tim Walz’s signature achievements as governor of Minnesota was to sign into law a 2023 bill that made breakfast and lunch available to all public school students, regardless of their ability to pay. When critics attacked the policy and him as too liberal, he shut them down: “What a monster! Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn.”

Walz is onto something big, and Vice President Kamala Harris should take note. Universal school lunch — which was national policy during the pandemic — needs to be part of the Harris-Walz agenda. Hungry children are not set up to learn, and offering school lunch on the basis of need stigmatizes eligible children, limiting uptake.

But the Harris campaign needs to push this powerful idea even further. By building on Walz’s program nationally, we could solve a great many more problems than hunger. Consider a proposal broached by Alice Waters, a California restaurateur (and former Montessori teacher), for something she calls school-supported agriculture. The idea is quite simple, but its implications are tremendous. Indeed, it has the potential not only to improve the health of our children but also to mitigate climate change, reform our broken food system and spark an economic revival in rural America.

School-supported agriculture would have the Agriculture Department, which already pays for some 7 billion school lunches and breakfasts to the tune of $22.4 billion a year, require school districts receiving federal funds to purchase food for the meals from organic and regenerative farms in their communities.

Would this cost more? Not nearly as much as you might think. Much of what the USDA spends on school lunches goes not to farmers or school chefs but to the corporations that turn cheap industrial farm commodities into the ultra-processed foods that many schools feed our children. Bypass these middlemen, and the savings can be used to feed more children, bring cooks back to the cafeteria and support local farmers.

Indeed, the beauty of school-supported agriculture is that it solves several problems at once. Foremost among these is the need to improve children’s health. Today, nearly 70 percent of the calories they consume consists of ultra-processed foods, which have been linked to weight gain and chronic diseases, including diabetes. School-supported agriculture would replace the frozen pizzas and chicken nuggets on school menus with nutritious food cooked in the cafeteria by human beings.

It would also remove the lock that a small handful of food-processing corporations have on the market for school food. Cutting them out would enable farmers to reap a larger share of our food dollars and keep the money in their communities, providing a badly needed boost to rural America.

Another problem school-supported agriculture would address is farming’s reliance on monoculture and the chemical products used to sustain it. Industrial agriculture is a big contributor to climate change. Farmers participating in this program would, as a matter of course, diversify their crops because the schools would need more than commodity corn and soybeans to feed children. By assuring a substantial and steady market for organic and regeneratively grown food, the program would give farmers the incentive to shift away from monoculture farming.

This transition is a critical step toward solving the problem of climate change. Agriculture is responsible for 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions — much of which stems from the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer that monoculture farming depends on. Eliminating this fertilizer would reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture by one-fifth. And a third of the carbon now in the atmosphere was once in the soil. Regenerative agriculture — which improves on the methods of organic farming — includes practices that put large amounts of that atmospheric carbon back in the soil, where it belongs. These practices include rotational grazing and cropping, no-till and low-till farming (since tillage releases carbon), agroforestry and composting. Nothing could do more to spread the benefits of organic and regenerative farming than the predictable demand that school-supported agriculture would create.

You might ask, as I asked Alice Waters, how is it possible that organic food bought from farmers could compete with the processed foods delivered by the Sysco truck? “No middlemen,” she answered. “And by buying whatever produce is in season and at its most flavorful.” Waters recently finished writing a book called “A School Lunch Revolution” (to be published next year) for which she and her co-authors created organic menus that fall within the guidelines of the USDA’s school lunch reimbursement rates. The 2023-2024 reimbursable rate for each student’s lunch was $4.25; for breakfast, the rate was $2.28.

“We found it is possible to create nutritious organic lunches at that rate,” Waters said. “You do it by taking advantage of the low cost of ingredients when they’re most abundant in a school’s area. Local procurement is the key.” (There is one catch: infrastructure. Some schools will need to build kitchens, many of which have been replaced by microwave ovens, and hire culinary workers who can do more than reheat frozen meals.)

One more thing school-sponsored agriculture could accomplish is rejuvenating the movement for healthier and more sustainable food. In recent years, momentum for reforming the food system has stalled in the face of industry opposition and a failure to democratize access to good food. A school-sponsored agriculture program could galvanize the food movement by uniting in common cause all its constituents: the activists focused on social justice and food access, a public health community alarmed by rates of obesity and diet-linked chronic diseases, climate activists and other environmentalists, educators, and, of course, the farmers we all depend on.

If anyone complains that such a program would be too liberal or expensive, let Tim Walz have at them: “What a monster! Kids are eating, so are our farmers and, by the way, we’re feeding the soil, too!”

Read more here.

Reading Kingdom is an online K-3 reading program that uses a new “phonics-plus” model to teach students to read and write at a 3rd grade level with comprehension. Sign up for a complimentary Reading Kingdom trial (or any of our other products) here.

We also have a program for students on the autism spectrum and others who face unique learning challenges called ASD Reading. Sign up for a complimentary trial of ASD Reading here.