An Iowa corn-man wouldn't be my pick for secretary of agriculture, but Tom Vilsack talked some sense on school lunch programs in this tough, wonky November interview with the student newspaper at Macalester College in Minnesota. Here is Vilsack describing one of the duties of the agriculture secretary:
You have the reauthorization of the school nutrition program. You have to be focused on whether we are doing right by our children in schools across America in terms of nutritious food that we subsidize and we provide in school lunch programs.
The USDA's National School Lunch Program was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Truman in 1946. The primary goal was to use agricultural excess to give students the pure caloric energy they needed to perform academically; anti-poverty crusaders from the early twentieth century on recognized that hunger was preventing many children from learning. But although concern about the nutritional content of school lunches is perennial, the USDA has yet to make a real commitment to creating standards. My public school lunches were so disgusting that if I didn't have a packed meal from home, I would eat chocolate chip cookies or french fries for lunch. We shouldn't be subjecting more generations of American children to these nutritional debacles.
--Dana Goldstein
