Cafeteria Care around the World: A Conversation with Jennifer Gaddis and Sarah A. Robert

How can public school food programs be transformed to center ideas of justice, equity, and sustainability? In November 2024, I sat down with Dr. Jennifer Gaddis and Dr. Sarah A. Robert to talk about their co-edited book Transforming School Food Politics Around the World, published by MIT Press. The book is a collaborative endeavor with essay contributions from youth, school nutrition workers, social movement activists, farmers, lobbyists, academics, policymakers, state employees, and nonprofit staff, who all showcase the politics of school food programs as they are implemented around the world, with narratives from Brazil, United States, Canada, India, Finland, Japan, Peru, and South Korea.

In our conversation, we discussed the political work that goes into making school food programs a reality, stakeholders whose voices and perspectives should be centered when defining policy, and the power that these stakeholders possess to transform policy problems in their community settings.

We also talked about how school food programs are not simply about feeding children but are a public form of human and non-human care work. They have the potential to renegotiate existing economic and ecological relationships as evidenced in the policy reform of several countries. This book carries forward the conversation on the very important question: who feeds whom, what, how, when, and for what purpose?

Stream or download our conversation here.

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Interview Highlights

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Prerna Rana: Your book, Transforming School Food Politics Around the World, is a scintillating collection of essays that throws light on the political work behind school meal programs in various cultural and geographical contexts. Can you share with our listeners a bit about the book and how you made this collaborative project a reality?

Sarah A. Robert: During the beginning of the pandemic, I realized that ten years had lapsed since the publication of my first book, School Food Politics, and everything that needed to be said about the struggles around who feeds who, what, how, why and for what purpose hadn’t been resolved. In fact, it had evolved and grown in exponential ways. I wanted to revisit that and take the pulse of the field. I wanted to learn with people who are doing this dynamic work, like Jen.

Jennifer Gaddis: I had written my first book, which came out in 2019, called The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools, but I was also really interested in places that were using school food policy much more aggressively to create standards around how school meals are sourced. For example, in Brazil, they mandate that at least 30 percent of the ingredients for school meals be sourced from family scale farmers, many of whom use organic or agroecological methods.

PR: You mentioned in your book that often the political work involved in school food programs is understood in a very narrow sense. How would you describe the people who are actually doing school food politics? Who are they, and how do they engage in this political work?

SR: When we’re talking about school food politics, we’re really talking about the ways that different stakeholder groups are enacting school food policy in ways that honor their perspectives, their dreams, their visions for their particular school community. They’re using politics as I understand it, which is about struggles over resources. Those resources are finite, and they are both symbolic and material. We’re trying to understand from those perspectives how school food programs are working for their communities or not.

JG: Everyday people can be involved in school food politics through social movement activism, pushing for particular kinds of changes or alternative visions around who should have access to food and how the food should be sourced. We see examples in this book of not only mothers and other community members, but also farmers and even youth themselves, playing important roles defining the priorities of these systems that they live within, demanding new kinds of resources or regulations from the state, and pushing back against things that they think are inappropriate uses of power.

One of the things that we really wanted to do with this volume was to help people see themselves as implicated within school food systems and understand that they have not only a right, but also a responsibility to be helping to shape what these public programs look like.

PR: Another central theme of your book is care work, and that school food programs are a valuable form of public care that has the potential to create just and sustainable futures. How do you think school food programs can renegotiate existing economic and ecological relationships?

SR: The way that we’re using care in this book is not only about care for humans, but also for non-human nature. People also talk about the idea of caring at a distance when you have production and consumption separated by a lot of time and space. One of the other big concepts right now within conversations about school food is the idea of values aligned supply chains, where you create shorter supply chains that allow for more transparency and for more relationship-building between producers and consumers.

A lot of times, when people think about care in relation to school food, it’s initially just this idea of providing sustenance to kids, and that’s part of it. It’s also a very helpful resource in addressing gender inequities, both in terms of food access and education access. It’s also about making sure that children are given food in a way that respects them as humans. Part of this conversation around care is about ensuring higher quality food and more participation and more agency from children.

JG: We’re also trying to talk about the vast majority of jobs in school food are held by women. For example, in the United States, over 90 percent of the school food workforce identifies as female, and there are significant discrepancies in wages for a lot of these workers. We have to attend to and value the care work that this workforce does.

PR: How do you think that school food programs and policies can play a transformative role when it comes to food movements, especially with respect to the environment?

JG: South Korea has a universal free program that they’ve also tried to make eco-friendly. What that means is certainly not that all meals are organic at this point, but there are preferential standards for how they’re sourcing food for school meals, trying to get meals produced using integrated pest management or other agricultural practices that reduce synthetic pesticides. And instead of making it individuals’ consumer responsibility to navigate a landscape of different additives and agricultural chemicals, the government is taking responsibility.

SR: Brazil is one of the three largest school meal programs in the world, and they have very specifically wanted to ensure that the school meal program is also a local economic driver. The farmers who provide for the school meal program understood the prioritization that was afforded to them as small holder farmers, family farmers, and that the expectation is that food is or should be produced in agro-ecological and environmentally sustainable ways.

What does it mean for producers? It’s a safer, healthier work environment. It means preservation of knowledge of the land and the ecology that they are a part of. It means that they’re producing in ways that are seasonable and sustainable, and they’re also culturally relevant and sustainable for the populations that are being served that food.

JG: 70 percent of public food programs around the world are school meal programs. That’s worth keeping in mind when we think about how these programs can play an important catalytic role in broader food systems change.

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Featured Image: School lunches at Maplewood Elementary School in Greeley, Colorado. Photo by USDA, 2023.

Podcast music:“Gloves” by Julian Lynch. Used with permission. 

Dr. Sarah A. Robert is an associate professor at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) and an interdisciplinary expert in global education and gender policies and school food politics. Her ethnographic studies focus on how policy and politics shape / are shaped by intersectional qualities of gender. Dr. Robert is the author of the award-winning books Neoliberal Education Reform: Gendered Notions in Global and Local Contexts (Routledge, 2017) and School Food Politics (P. Lang, 2011). She is a trained Latin Americanist who has pivoted to global comparative research. Contact.

Dr. Jennifer Gaddis is an associate professor of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin Madison and an international expert on school food politics and systems change. Dr. Gaddis earned a Ph.D. in environmental studies from Yale University (2014). She authored the award-winning book The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools (University of California Press, 2019) and is principal investigator of a $1.5 million USDA-funded study of the school food workforce. Dr. Gaddis has also published articles in multiple journals, including Feminist Economics, Agriculture and Human Values, Appetite, and The Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development. Contact.

Prerna Rana is a Ph.D. candidate in Civil Society and Community Studies at the School of Human Ecology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include understanding power in civil society and institutional spaces, food systems, and environmental justice. Her chapter contribution to Transforming School Food Politics around the World discusses the past and the present of the school lunch program in India, the role of various stakeholders in making this program a reality, and critically examining the inherent tensions in Indian school food politics. Contact.