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Can RFK Jr. remake school lunch?

3 1
23.01.2025
A school lunch from the Portland School Department’s central kitchen in Portland, Maine, on January 4, 2008. | Jack Milton/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a lot of controversial agenda items if he is confirmed as President Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary: pharmaceuticals, vaccines, fluoride in the water … the list goes on.

But he also plans to go after a facet of American life that doesn’t have many full-throated defenders: school lunch.

“I’ll get processed food out of school lunch immediately,” Kennedy told Fox & Friends last fall.

Sounds good, right? The National School Lunch Program serves nearly 30 million students every day. It’s a vital source of nutrition for many of those kids, but that doesn’t mean they enjoy it. School lunch’s rubbery pizza and mystery meat have been a cultural punching bag for decades (who can forget Adam Sandler’s classic Saturday Night Live sketch “Lunch Lady Land”?).

But making school lunch healthier and tastier is harder than it might seem. And the history of those efforts is an interesting case study that speaks to the challenges Kennedy and the “Make America Healthy Again” movement are likely to encounter as they try to remake the country’s food system.

“This idea that you just buy food and you cook it and you give it to kids — it should be simple. But it has never been simple,” Jane Black, a food journalist who has hosted a podcast on the history of school lunch, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. “At the same time, school lunch is this weird little world, this complex upside down and backward world that is shaped by rules that were made for specific reasons at the time, but that when you’re trying to change things, make it very difficult to untangle and do something that just seems like common sense.”

Black spoke with Today, Explained about the origins of school lunch, how it became the program we know today, and why it has proved resistant to change. A partial transcript of the conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows. You can listen to the full conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find podcasts.

Noel King

If we’re going to tell a history of school lunch in the United States, where does it come from?

Jane Black

So school lunch was born in the Depression. There were a lot of hungry children, obviously, and they were these ad hoc programs at different schools where children were in need. The government helped out by providing money for this, but they also helped out by buying food from farmers because in the Depression they were struggling to sell the products that they needed. So the government would buy these things in order to stabilize prices so that farmers could make a living and take that food and give it to schools. The program became formalized in 1946. It’s called the National School Lunch Act. It was signed by President Harry Truman. And he says this famous line when he signs the bill: “No nation is healthier than its children or more prosperous than its farmers.” And so I think that’s such an important line because this program was never really only about children and nutrition. The program always had two masters. And the fact that the program was controlled and directed by the US Department of Agriculture, rather than, say, the Department of Education or the Department of Health and Human Services shows who is really driving this program. It was agriculture.

Noel King

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