One of the fun things about writing this blog is sometimes getting to review books and films relating to kids and food. Over the summer, Avis Richards of the Birds Nest Foundation was kind enough to send me a screener DVD of the foundation’s 2010 film entitled, simply enough, Lunch. Here’s a preview:
Lunch is a documentary short, not a full length film, and it starts off with a broad overview of the many things wrong with the current school lunch program in most districts, including an over-reliance on what I call “carnival food” (a term I borrow often from Janet Poppendieck’s Free For All: Fixing School Food in America) — i.e, lots and lots of burgers, pizza and other junk-food-like items. Doctors, parents, teachers and advocates are all featured, decrying what the film cleverly calls in its press release “hamburger hegemony.”
The film also outlines in broad strokes the alarming statistics regarding childhood obesity and the early onset of previously adult diseases like heart disease, high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. These facts and figures are always deeply disturbing, no matter how often one hears them, but I did feel that the film might have too closely associated the obesity crisis with school food per se. As I’ve written here before, it’s not necessarily fair to lay childhood obesity at the school house steps (although I have also written that it does seem at least theoretically possible for a child to become overweight via school food.) Childhood obesity is such a multifaceted problem that school meals seem to me to be only one piece of the puzzle.
After the grim facts are laid out, the film becomes upbeat and uplifting as it shows us an innovative farm-to-school food program going on in Baltimore. It’s clearly a wonderful initiative and amply demonstrates the importance – much talked about here on TLT – of letting children get their hands dirty and see where their food is coming from. According to the film, the vegetables and herbs from the farm are served in the Baltimore schools, although it’s not clear how much of the total produce required in the district is supplied this way.
My only real criticism of Lunch is that it makes several mentions of “fixing” school food, but these weren’t terribly fleshed out. My fear is that a viewer less deeply immersed in these issues than I am (in other words, a sane person) might come away with the idea that local farm and gardening programs are the magic bullet to overhauling school food in this country, which would be a facile conclusion. Such programs are wonderful, of course, and I do hope we see more and more of them, but they alone can’t “fix” school food nationwide.
That may be an unfair criticism of a film with too short a running time to really get into school food policy, and meanwhile, Avis Richards tells me there’s a follow-up documentary in production which will focus more on solutions. I look forward to viewing that film when it’s available.
If you’d like to see Lunch for yourself, you can obtain a copy and/or schedule a screening in your area through the Birds Nest Foundation. Thanks to Avis for sharing the film with me, and my apologies for taking so long to write up this review!
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