“Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are,” the French gastronomist Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, in 1826.
Today aspect of the aphorism is so widely accepted as to be trivial: food and health are intimately connected.
Another implication of Brillat-Savarin’s aphorism is receiving increasing attention. Food—its production and consumption—impacts what we eat, and where we eat; it is a major part of the economy; and it is a significant contributor to environmental effluents.
Only recently have the moral dimensions of food come into focus. And now scholars are homing in on the ethics of school lunches. Aptly named Suzanne Rice, professor of educational leadership and policy studies, at the University of Kansas, is the editor of a special issue of the Journal of Thought and the organizer of symposia to examine not only the nutritional aspects of school lunches but also how the animals used for meat at school lunches are raised and slaughtered, the ways in which food for schools is sourced and the role of women in the food service industry, the ‘lunch ladies’ in particular.
"I'm really thinking of this as a moral phenomenon," Rice said. "The provision of food is such a basic human need. You can also think of school lunches as a training ground where young people learn, or fail to learn, how to treat and interact with each other."
Rice further explains, "We're so focused right now on 'does this math program or that reading program help kids succeed,'" Rice said. "But many of the things children remember from school happen outside the classroom. The school lunch experience matters to students in multiple ways."
Which lesson do you think is the most important, the one in the health class about the food pyramid or being served fries for lunch; is it the economics class that teaches treating employees fairly or the low wages paid to school cafeteria personnel; is it the class on slaughter house conditions or having franks on the menu?
If you want to know what a school teaches, you are told to look at the curriculum. But there is the invisible curriculum. How teachers are treated by the administration and how teachers treat students is more powerful than what is said. School lunches are part of the invisible curriculum.
Rice and her colleagues are onto something important. Children learn more from example than they do from lectures and projects. The example set by the school is more important than classroom lessons. If you think it is important that animals being treated humanely, if you think that the planet should be habitable and if you think that workers deserve fair wages, a good place to begin is by examining the school lunchroom.
Children’s moral education begins with their stomachs.