We should note that WBEZ invited representatives from Michelle Obama’s office, Chicago Public Schools, including their caterer Aramark, and the United States Department of Agriculture, which oversees the lunch program, to speak for this story. They all either declined or did not respond.
According to both Waters and Cooper one big fundamental flaw in the system is that so many districts hire large for-profit companies to cater the meals. They say the program should be about maximizing quality rather than profits.
“The school district is trying to pay the least amount of money possible because they have a tight budget,” Cooper said. “Then they hire an outside contractor who is trying to make the most money possible because that’s their job as a multi-national corporation. So it’s really at odds with teaching children about food and serving the best food. It’s just a lose-lose situation for children.”
In 2010 Sarah Wu stepped into this lose-lose situation. She took the school food world by storm by simply buying daily lunch, photographing it and writing about it on her anonymous blog called “Fed Up With Lunch.” It gave many readers their first glimpse of what was really on the plate, and in 2011 it became a book by the same name.
It was then that Wu finally revealed herself as a Chicago area mom, CPS speech pathologist and, finally, an open lunch crusader.
“I think that I came to the conclusion that it’s such a thorny thing,” she said. “There are a lot of people who have stakes in the business of school lunch and I really stepped into a hornets nest when I stepped into that. And I think I was a bit naive about how much it could really change.”
These realizations and the arrival of a second child prompted Wu, last December, to drop out of the school food reform movement. At least for the time being.
But for those still in the fight, like Cooper, there are at least five major challenges that remain:
“Food, finance, facilities, human resources and marketing,” Cooper said. “We need to be able to find [food] and make sure that it’s good. The USDA foods have to be healthy.
The idea that we can have highly processed foods in schools has to change, but if we are going to change that we need to have kitchens and we need to be able to cook. If you are going to go from chicken nuggets to roast chicken you need ovens.”