This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine will feature a major story on school food, “How School Lunch Became the Latest Political Battleground,” and I was honored to be asked to interview the Times reporter, Nicholas Confessore, for a piece on today’s New York Times Motherlode.
Sarah Anne Ward for The New York Times
For those of you who regularly follow this blog and other sources of school food news, the broad outlines of Confessore’s story will be all too familiar. His piece traces the evolution of the School Nutrition Association, the largest organization of school food professionals, from one-time supporter of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act to its current role as a vocal critic of school food reform on Capitol Hill. It’s also a richly detailed, if depressing, behind-the-scenes account of how Big Food’s lobbying dollars and the rancorous atmosphere in Congress have made healthy school food, once supported by both sides of the aisle, a deeply partisan issue.
Lost in the shuffle, though, are the kids who actually eat school food and, by extension, the parents of those children. So in today’s Motherlode piece I ask Confessore what, if anything, parents can do to be heard on this issue over the powerful voices of lobbyists and politicians.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts, too, either in a comment here or on the Motherlode post.
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