Lunch Gets Schooled (encore)

Gastropod

Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley

Arts, Science, History, Food

4.7 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 21 September 2022

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Across the United States, school lunch is being transformed, as counties and cities partner with local farms to access fresh vegetables, as well as hire chefs to introduce tastier and more adventurous meals. This is a much-needed correction after decades of processed meals that contained little in the way of nutrition and flavor. But how did we get to trays of spongy pizza and freezer-burned tater tots in the first place? While it seems as if such culinary delights were always part of a child's day, the school lunch is barely a century old—and there are plenty of countries in the world, like Canada and Norway, where school lunch doesn't even exist. This episode, we dive into the history of how we got to today's school lunch situation, as well as what it tells us about our economic and gender priorities. Listen in now for all that, plus the science on whether school lunch even matters. (encore) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's September, and that means it's back to school season.
0:05.8	And we're celebrating the return of classrooms, playgrounds, and chalkboards, or whatever the
0:10.8	kids have these days, with a special encore presentation of one of our classics, the
0:15.7	School Lunch episode.
0:17.6	This is a super fun one filled with listener memories of cornflake tarts, lunchables,
0:22.4	and caramelized catfish.
0:24.1	And stay tuned through the credits at the end for a brief update on some good school lunch
0:28.0	news.
0:29.0	Next week with a brand new episode, but for now, sit back and let that school lunch
0:33.7	nostalgia blanket you like a floppy pizza square.
0:37.5	Enjoy.
0:40.5	My name is Emmy.
0:42.0	I was both a brown bagger and a hot lunch just depending on the situation.
0:47.6	My personal favorite school lunches were the French fries, shaped like smiley faces.
0:55.5	And the snoopy ice cream bars I got at one school every Friday.
0:59.6	My name is George Santos.
1:00.7	I grew up in Puerto Rico.
1:03.1	And over there, school lunches, three out of the five days of the week, was rice and
1:07.6	beans, and then some sort of meat and plantains.
1:12.6	We'd also get a little bag of milk.
1:15.8	You have to take a pointy straw and stab it.
1:18.8	And we used to like stack up the bags of milk and stab it with a straw and see how many
	...

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