Dayo Olopade looks at a food-justice movement spearheaded by Gulf Coast youths:
President Obama‘s daughters get healthy school lunches. Why don’t I? So asked a pigtailed black girl plastered on buses and billboards around Washington, D.C. The White House blasted the political ad, which promoted healthy food options in public schools, as exploitative — but the little girl’s complaint should resonate with an administration that has prioritized healthy eating and food security, from both the East and West Wing of the White House.
In 2006, a group of New Orleans elementary school children, freshly returned from displacement after Hurricane Katrina, took up a similar refrain about public school cafeterias as part of a citywide leadership-development program known as Rethink. Their version: “We hate sporks!”
