Lunch Gets Schooled

Gastropod

Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley

Science, Food, History, Arts

4.7 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 11 September 2017

⏱️ 50 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Emmy. I was both a brown bagger and a hot lunch just depending on the situation.
0:09.8	My personal favorite school lunches were the French fries, shapes like smiley faces,
0:17.7	and the Snoopy ice cream bars I got at one school every Friday.
0:21.7	My name is George Santos. I grew up in Puerto Rico and over there, school lunches
0:26.8	three out of the five days of the week was rice and beans and then some sort of meat and plantains.
0:34.4	We'd also get a little bag of milk. You have to take a pointy straw and stab it.
0:41.1	We used to like stack up the bags of milk and stab it with a straw and see how many we could drink.
0:46.9	We're very weird but it was ton of fun.
0:49.2	My name is Jane Black. I remember the square pizza.
0:53.2	You know, and it was always on Fridays and it had that sort of, you could tell that it was shredded cheese
0:59.6	that had kind of, you know, melted and then congealed.
1:03.8	That is literally one of only two things I remember about school lunch in my elementary school.
1:09.0	Friday's square mushy pizza. The other is the boxes of milk, nothing else.
1:13.3	We even had that square pizza when I was growing up in England.
1:17.1	It's a cross-cultural school lunch phenomenon.
1:19.8	We asked for all your school lunch stories, not because we wanted to fondly reminisce about our favorite meals,
1:25.4	but rather because we're doing an episode all about the history and science of school lunch.
1:30.4	And this is that episode. I'm Nicola Twilly and I'm Cynthia Graber and you're listening to Gastropod,
1:35.6	the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.
1:38.3	So how did we both end up with Spungee Square pizza on our plates?
1:42.8	In fact, how did we end up with school lunch at all?
1:45.6	Because it hasn't always existed, obviously.
	...

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