INTRODUCTION Poppendieck, Janet
Breadlines Knee-Deep in Wheat,
04/2014, Volume:
53
Book Chapter
“For the American farmer, 1932 was a year of singular misfortune,” reported theNew York Timeson New Year’s Day, 1933. Between January and mid December, average farm prices had fallen by more than 18 ...percent, following a drop of nearly 50 percent in the two previous years. Two days later, a more detailed report on farm prices predicted a continuation of the rock bottom levels: “The huge surpluses of leading agricultural products that have been accumulated during the last few years are expected generally to preclude more than a moderate recovery in prices in 1933, even if there should
The problems inherent in a one-size-fits-all eligibility threshold and the myriad opportunities for error in the means-testing process are not the only problems with the three-tier eligibility ...structure for school food. In fact, they are not even the biggest difficulty. The biggest problem is the stigma that comes from being different, from being marked as poor, from being unable to pay in a culture that places excessive value on being able to pay and a school food subculture that increasingly views children as “customers.” Let us begin then by looking at how this stigma undermines the program.
Depending on what
FOOD FIGHTS Poppendieck, Janet
Free for All,
12/2009, Volume:
28
Book Chapter
To an outsider, many of the rules, policies, and arrangements that the Any Town High School staff and other school food service professionals take for granted seem perplexing. Why does the United ...States Department ofAgriculture(USDA) administer the program at the federal level? This isschoolfood, after all. Don’t we have a Department of Education? And given the long and fiercely defended tradition of state control of education, why are therefederalnutrition standards when there are not, for example, federal textbook standards or teacher certification rules? And since there are federal standards, why are they enforced by
SCHOOL FOOD 101 Poppendieck, Janet
Free for All,
12/2009, Volume:
28
Book Chapter
My odyssey began in a kitchen, specifically, the kitchen of a high school cafeteria in a small city in a large northeastern state. I’ll call it Any Town High School, or Any Town HS.¹ I arrived at the ...back door of the school’s cafeteria at 7:00 a.m. on a cool October morning. The cafeteria manager looked at me quizzically when I introduced myself, then remembered: “Oh, yes, we have you this week.” The district food service director had agreed to let me volunteer in the kitchen in order to observe the day-to-day realities of preparing and serving school food. In
CONCLUSION Poppendieck, Janet
Free for All,
12/2009, Volume:
28
Book Chapter
Many years ago the historian of science Thomas Kuhn altered our perception of the way in which change takes place in scientific knowledge. InThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he argued that ...science does not proceed, as many imagine, by the gradual and orderly accretion of knowledge. Rather, he suggested, it proceeds by the accumulation of “anomalies,” data that do not fit the dominant theories of the age, until some new model is proposed that does a better job than the old one of making sense of the facts. The result is a paradigm shift. I think public policy proceeds
LOCAL HEROES Poppendieck, Janet
Free for All,
12/2009, Volume:
28
Book Chapter
The road that leads up the Maunawili Valley on the windward side of the Island of Oahu is rutted and uneven. When the truck had bounced along for a mile or so, my host, Mark Paikuli-Stride, stopped ...to open a forest gate and say a brief blessing. The valley, he told me, was sacred. In that almost mystical setting, it was easy to absorb his reverence for the fertile land and clean water that are needed to produce taro, the most traditional of Hawaii’s traditional crops. Paikuli-Stride is both a taro farmer and the executive director of the Aloha ‘Aina
THE MISSING MILLIONS Poppendieck, Janet
Free for All,
12/2009, Volume:
28
Book Chapter
Expecting controversy, I took a seat at the very back of the enormous ballroom in the Austin, Texas, Hilton Hotel, a vantage point from which I could observe the audience as well as the speakers. The ...School Nutrition Association’s Child Nutrition Industry Conference was in full swing. The overall theme for this gathering of upper-level school food service staff, school business officials, and representatives of the food industry was “Managing the Forces of Change,” and the morning’s opening plenary had been devoted to the childhood obesity epidemic. The afternoon’s session was billed as a “Town Hall on Commercialization and Its
The prevention of hunger is the most widely agreed upon goal of school food programs, and school meals make a crucial difference in the lives of literally millions of American children every school ...day. I asked Dr. Suzanne Hallings, the superintendent of schools in Benoit, Mississippi, the school district where Patsy James serves lunch and breakfast, what she saw as the role of school food in the overall educational experience of Benoit students. “For our students,” she replied, “I think it is very important.” She went on to explain why:
I think many of them do not have food at
