Beginning at the earliest ages, our students are bombarded with messages to purchase and consume. From TV ads to vending machines to logo-infested products, they are continually asked to eat and drink and buy. Even drinking water, which should be a basic human right, is now bottled in plastic and sold from machines.
According to Sharna Olfman's book Childhood Lost, the advertising industry in the United States spends more than $15 billion annually in direct marketing to children. Olfman quotes clinical child psychologist Susan Linn who writes, "The village raising our children is dominated by a culture of greed that has a powerful negative impact on all aspects of children's lives. It's unrealistic to think that staying cocooned within our classrooms, offices, or health centers is adequate to the task of mitigating the impact of marketing that targets children."
At the same time young people are asked to consume, they are also receiving confusing messages about beauty and sexuality. While tall models with sunken cheeks and jutting shoulder blades represent an unattainable beauty standard, eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia plague our youth. According to the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, as many as 1 percent of adolescents have anorexia nervosa and 2 to 3 percent have bulimia nervosa. The incidence of these disorders has doubled since the 1960s and is increasing in younger age groups (it is seen in children as young as 7) and in diverse ethnic and economic groups. Though the reasons for these medical disorders are complicated, their prevalence underscores the unhealthy relationship people in the United States have with food.
Rethinking school food includes teaching children to critique food advertising: the vending machines that line the hallways; the ubiquitous cartoon characters that adorn every cereal box, yogurt carton, and tube of toothpaste; and the commercials that are directly piped into classrooms. According to clinical psychologist Katherine Battle Horgen, more than "eight million children, including nearly 40 percent of the nations' teenagers, are a captive audience for two-minute commercials during each school day as part of the Channel One news broadcast. Nearly 70 percent of the ads are for food."
When we look at food through an equity lens, it's clear that we cannot talk about food without referencing the vast inequalities in our society. Despite the fact that the United States, with 5 percent of the world's population, consumes 40 percent of its resources, more than 29 million children in the United States live in low-income families and more than 13 million live in poor families, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty. For many of these children, the school lunches and breakfasts (as inadequate as they may seem) are their main source of nutrition. According to the U. S. Department of Agriculture, on average more than 17 million children participated in the free- and reduced-lunch program in 2005. While striving to improve the quality and nutrition of the meals schools serve, it's important to preserve and improve these essential programs.