14 - Who Is Responsible for Children’s Food?

Summary

At school, what should kids eat for lunch? Mundane as this question seems, this chapter suggests that the answer we give can put us anywhere along a political and ideological spectrum. On the one hand, if we feel that people should choose their own meals and that parents, not schools, should police what their kids eat, we run the risk of bringing the larger society’s inequalities into the lunchroom. If, on the other hand, we allow for state-sponsored meals, we run the risk of losing control over a basic aspect of our lives, and ceding it to the whims of outside political actors. What to do?. Patico argues that as things stand, in the United States enshrining individual choice and responsibility around student eating habits has led to a situation in which much school food is suspect and wealthy parents are able to separate their own children from eating it. In the context of a society shaped increasingly by market imperialism, this is the downside of privileging an ideal of consumer choice as well as the ideal of taking individual responsibility for optimizing your children’s meals. One possible corrective to this is to consider what school lunches would look like under several different types of collective planning and alternative moral scrutiny which challenges structural inequalities and corresponding differences in the purchasing power of parents.