Nicholas Confessore, political correspondent for The New York Times, wrote this week’s cover story about the political battle over school lunches. He answered readers’ questions in a Facebook Q. & A. last week. We had a few more for him.
How did you first get interested in school lunches?
One day this spring I was chatting with Sam Sifton, our dining editor, who noted that there were a lot of Times reporters writing about restaurants, cooking and nutrition, but not as many writing about the politics of food — the hidden battles in Washington that shape what ends up on our plate. This was a topic I found pretty intriguing. I spent some time talking to lobbyists, food activists and government officials, and it quickly became clear to me that the Obama administration’s school-lunch experiment was one of the biggest stories in food politics. I spend a lot of time writing about the intersection of influence, money and power, but it was fascinating to be able to tie those themes to food — something even politically apathetic people care about and have a stake in.
I remember lunch ladies fondly. What do officials call them in public?
There is a bit of a stigma around the term “lunch ladies,” a term some find faintly disparaging or dismissive, and others have tried to reclaim as a term of pride. The polite or safe term is “school nutrition professionals.” The Obama administration’s top food-policy adviser, Sam Kass, likes to call them “school chefs” — these are, after all, the people who have a very tough job feeding our kids, and most of them are working very hard to come up with creative, tasty, cost-effective meals.
Is it wrong to think that Republican opposition to school-lunch reform may be based on personal animosity towards the Obamas, particularly because this is part of Michelle Obama’s signature project?
I think there is a definite link between the Obamas’ political popularity and the fate of school lunches. When the president was very popular and his party had control of Congress, it was easier to get food companies and other interests to go along with changing school lunches. And criticism of Michelle Obama’s food initiatives has definitely become a mainstay of conservative websites and news outlets. I don’t know if it is about personal animosity so much as politics — the tendency of a party out of power to dislike or oppose whatever it is the party in power happens to be doing.
You write about “competitive foods,” fast food that does not have to comply with federal regulations despite being served in school cafeterias. When did we come up with that idea?
Competitive foods have been around in one form or another for decades. But one of the biggest changes the Obama reform brought about was to apply nutritional standards to competitive foods for the first time ever. What’s fascinating to me is that even though competitive foods are a relatively small part of school food, it was those particular standards that seem to have really precipitated the break between the lunch ladies (and their industry allies) and the administration. It’s partly because the rules posed, in the long term, a bigger challenge to the ingenuity and bottom lines of the food companies and partly because they are an important source of income for more affluent school districts.
Has anyone in the School Nutrition Association, or outside it, come up with useful ways to get students to eat the more healthful lunches?
There are many, many success stories in the school-lunch world — school chefs who have come up with creative ways to get kids to eat a broader range of foods, more vegetables and more healthful food. The S.N.A. puts a fair amount of effort into teaching best practices and educating members in some of the success stories. I attended a fascinating panel at their Boston convention this summer featuring Jessica Shelly, who oversees school meals in the Cincinnati public school system and is a kind of rock star in the lunch-lady world. She advocates a mix of creative cooking and creative marketing — where in the cafeteria do you put the salad bar? Have you made the cafeteria and the food stations physically inviting? Can you find a way to allow students to build their own vegetable plates so they feel they have some control? Can you get popular faculty members to eat in the cafeteria along with the students? It’s not always just about the food.
Last, but most important: Shouldn’t pizza technically be considered a fruit and not a vegetable?
In my household, pizza is its own food group.