The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools

by Jennifer E. Gaddis

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.
 

 

Genres: Food, Nonfiction, Economics, Education

312 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 12, 2019

About the author

Jennifer Gaddis is associate professor of Civil Society and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the award-winning author of The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools (University of California Press, 2019). She is an expert on school food politics and systems change at district, state, and national scales. Her latest book, Transforming School Food Politics Around the World (MIT Press, 2024), discusses how to successfully challenge and transform public school-food programs to emphasize care, justice, and sustainability, with insights from eight countries across the Global North and South. Gaddis is an advisory board member of the National Farm to School Network and an active public scholar. She has written op-eds on school food politics for popular media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, The Guardian, and Teen Vogue. She and her students regularly partner with school districts, labor unions, and social movement organizations on community-based research and advocacy projects related to food justice in K-12 schools.

Reviews

[Kaitlyn Falk · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is incredibly well researched and maybe deserves higher stars, but it just wasn’t MY favorite read. I had to read it for work and it was very eye opening to the National School Lunch Program over the years, but it definitely read like a textbook and took me a loooooong time to get through. I can’t remember when I started it, but it was before February- I had forgotten to log it.

[Emma Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read book. Gaddis masterfully ties together a rich history of food, education, and community organzing with thought-provoking questions. She offers insight with powerful context, and lessons from this book will stay with me.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

The slogan for this book, and the movement, is "Real food; real jobs" in our nation's cafeterias. Real food was a social obsession in the 2010s, with figures like Alice Waters and Jamie Oliver battling "pink slime" and heat-and-eat pork "choppies" in schools. But Gaddis believes that tying food activism to labor activism is the missing piece of the puzzle. What if cafeteria workers were more like chefs and cooks in a restaurant, prepping food from scratch or near scratch, trumpeting their local food "Farm-to-School" connections, and having full-time, respected professions instead of just a few hours a day warming up packaged food?

Gaddis supports universal school lunch [a movement that was picking up steam right when the Pandemic knocked it off its feet] as part of a feminist agenda--taking making beautiful home-packed school lunches off the to-do list of millions of middle-class mothers and helping supply the political and economic clout to turn school lunch from a type of welfare to a full social good.

It's a compelling vision, and I can't say Gaddis is naive--certainly the book is well researched, but it seems very, very expensive, especially given the "school year" of most school districts. Gaddis recommends expanding the vision of school cafeterias beyond the students, but while I suspect most parents would not relish the idea of their children's cafeteria becoming a soup kitch on the weekends, there has been a history of using cafeterias for food education and preservation for the community during WWII and summer employment of cafeteria workers could include selling take-away meals to organizations like Meals on Wheels or hosting community cooking classes for a fee.

[Amina Maamouri · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the privilege of reading an advanced copy of The Labor of Lunch. This book is eloquently written by Dr. Gaddis, who critically examines the national school lunch program and sheds light on the worker’ lived experiences within it. She takes you through an engaging tale about the history of the school lunch program, discusses how the past connects to current structures and conceptions around school lunches, and illuminates a path to a better system.

***
Before reading The Labor of Lunch, I never gave much thought to school lunches; but as I turned each page, I was encouraged to reflect on my past experiences. Personally, I often opted-out of eating school lunches or would just choose to purchase a cookie and chips. Through this book, I realized why the comically gross pizza squares I was offered (and refused) as a child should not be an accepted norm nationwide. I realized how corporate influence had infiltrated my lunches and affected the quality of my diet. I realized how the care I was given by school lunch workers was under-appreciated and under-compensated. I realized that alternative micro-systems exist and can be achieved more widely if everyone ‘opts-in’. These learnings just scratch the surface of the many deeply layered insights this incredible book has to offer.

***
The Labor of Lunch challenges readers to think about this topic- and other related topics- from an intersectional feminist, social justice, and environmentalist perspective. I highly recommend this book if you are ready to look behind the curtain of the school lunch program and contribute to positive change for our shared food and care systems.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book and well-worth reading for anyone who cares about food, children, parents or American workers! It's an engaging look into the current and past world of school food through the lens of the "labor" of lunch -- that is, by centering the (mostly) women who make millions of meals for American children every day. Gaddis effectively makes the case for why we should think about the types of jobs that school food creates and whether we want those to remain as they are now: low-paid, without benefits, and without the support that workers need to create healthy, "real food" meals that students will want to eat. She offers a compelling vision for a school meals program in which schools are an anchor in a food system that is more ecologically sustainable and economically just, while clearly laying out all the reasons that's not currently the case. The first few chapters are a lively and little-known history of school lunch and especially the women who have made it what it is. She then shows us what it's like to work in a school cafeteria today and concludes with straightforward yet visionary suggestions for what school lunch could be like.

Overall, Gaddis does a fine job of balancing between academic ideas, history, and real world examples. The book is very readable while also relaying a clear and well-supported message linking school food, labor concerns, feminism and the food movement.

[Jesek Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall I found this so engaging. So informative. So balanced and compassionate. I was worried from the title that it could get into "NO CHEMICALS GO MILK YOUR GOAT" territory and it never did.

We can strategize till the apocalypse about how to properly care for our communities and the caregivers themselves without further funding. But no sustainable change can occur until we value the people providing the care. It's no secret that we massively underpay caregivers of all kinds in the US. It has never been okay. School cafeterias have the potential to be thriving community hubs, supporting the children as well as providing good, local jobs, as well as a thriving local food economy. We've lost the plot selling this industry to the lowest bidder.

Small criticism is that I needed charts. I needed data to be visually laid out when we were discussing it and org charts to be illustrated. There's so much government structure in this book, and it gets super dense if you aren't familiar with the structures at play already.

[Amberley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dr. Jennifer Gaddis’s "The Labor of Lunch" is a foundational contribution to school food literature, highly regarded and cherished by practitioners and academics alike. Her book not only illustrates the essential yet often undervalued role of cafeteria workers but also presents a vision for school food programs that support good food jobs and real food economies. By blending insightful policy analysis with compelling personal stories, Dr. Gaddis provides a crucial blueprint for transforming the American school food system, emphasizing the benefits of empowering cafeteria workers to prepare real, locally sourced meals for the betterment of students, workers, and local food systems.

- Dr. Amberley T. Ruetz

[Katherine Lavelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been wanting to read this book for three years and it has been worth the wait. This book does an excellent job with analyzing and discussing the problems and systematic inequalities in school lunch from a micro/macro level. I am not a food policy expert, but I really learned a lot from reading this book.

[Hannah Moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

was a thick read and I had to chunk it up a lot, because I would read one page and then think about its implications for a whole day before being able to read another. but it made me view my work from a different angle which was powerful. also an interesting read given the current cuts and rollbacks of farm to school funding

[Nora · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a compelling, beautifully written book-a must-read for anyone who cares about education, labor, or childhood. The history of our school lunch program tells a fascinating story about the vital importance of universalism when it comes to expanding and preserving our public goods.

[Cooper FitzGerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want the real download on what's happening with the national school meal program in the US, start with this book. This has been my foundation of knowledge. Highly recommend.

[Jonah Rebert · Rating 5 out of 5]

DENSE but so good. Honestly pretty depressing stuff too. Jennifer Gaddis is super cool