by GEHRY OATEY
[Editor’s Note: Go here Can you say "Transparent Lunch Menus"?
Step 4: We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our schools’ lunch menus.
Good on you if you have owned up to the fact that we do indeed have a conundrum in our school kitchens. As you sit at home with a mask over your face, worried about the pandemic flu likely caused by an industrial hog farm in Mexico, have faith that what your children are eating at school is not from an industrial hog farm in Mexico…or is it?
Sysco, Oakland Unified School District’s vendor of choice (and probably yours too), goes to great lengths to disguise the origins of its meat. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that Sysco’s business plan depends on disguising those origins. Once people start asking questions, Sysco execs have reason to get a little uncomfortable.
But the truth is out there if you care to find it. Here’s the low down on where those sausage dogs come from: Although Sysco has branded its pork line “White Marble Farms,” claiming they use “unique animals…raised on Midwestern farms and specially bred,” the truth is there is no White Marble Farms. They get their pork from Carghill Meat Solutions (could they have chosen a more corporate sounding name?), an industrial farming giant that doesn’t allow its pigs to see the light of day. They spend the entirety of their lives indoors in close quarters, feeding on the entrails of their fallen comrades.
Do we—and by extension, our children—want to be morally complicit in that? But that’s exactly what’s on the lunch menu two days out of five.
But it’s not just Sysco or Carghill that are to blame. It’s a whole network of industrial farms, including the Smithfield factory farms in Mexico linked to swine flu. Right now, as I write this, there is a huge push from our government to protect our kitchens from the byproducts of these farms, such as E. Coli infected spinach, the terrestrial tomato, and Smithfield swine.
HR 875 and S425 are bills being proposed in Congress that call for a new agency to regulate food security. Critics of these bills claim that organic food is going to be prohibited, while supporters believe that such an agency will protect us from unsafe food through regulation.
As educators, parents, and community members, we must realize that although these bills are well intended, they could endanger the ability of the smaller organic farmer to compete with Sysco and the Sultans of Swine. One way we can prevent this is by establishing specific wellness policies in schools that require schools to work with local farmers, thus cultivating a healthy and nutritious local food system of our own design. These wellness policies will help local communities to shape their own ideas about what should be served in schools rather than adhering to fear-based regulations that come from industrial food lobbyists.
We have the ability to prevent an industrial food virus. Through intelligent eating practices that we pass down to our students, we can support school districts in developing transparent lunch menus, where no one has to guess what they are eating.
Check back on Wedneday, May 13th to hear firsthand accounts of “what’s for lunch” from some of my students.
Another issue is that video gaming has become one of the all-time main forms of entertainment for people of any age. Kids have fun with video games, and adults do, too. The XBox 360 is just about the favorite games systems for people who love to have a huge variety of games available to them, and who like to learn live with other folks all over the world. Many thanks for sharing your thinking.