In this guest blog post, Dr. Janet Poppendieck, Urban School Food Alliance Advisory Council Member, highlights 10 key reasons to support free healthy school meals for all. Professor Poppendieck is the author of Free For All: Fixing School Food in America (University of California Press, 2010).
During the holidays and all year long, millions of individuals and families who struggle against hunger are able to access healthy food with support from the federal nutrition programs. This year, the federal nutrition programs have played a critical role in ensuring people can continue to put food on the table during the twin COVID-19 public health and economic crises.
To celebrate the nation’s nutrition safety net, FRAC is releasing a seven-part “Remember This December” series that will highlight the impact of seven important federal nutrition programs.
This is the second installment of the series, which focuses on school lunch. Read the previous installment on afterschool meals.
October 12–16 is National School Lunch Week (NSLW), an annual weeklong celebration promoting the importance of school lunch and its impact on children both in and out of the classroom. NSLW may look very different this year, but school meals are more important than ever.
At the beginning of March, I joined FRAC’s child nutrition team as a Bill Emerson Hunger Fellow. Two weeks later, schools across the country were closing, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and my team started working to ensure students and their families had access to meals during this unprecedented time. Schools and community partners started offering meals through a variety of models, but families needed more. In its second response package, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, Congress authorized the Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer (P-EBT) program.
