This Labor Day we’re joining forces with Slow Food USA and hundreds of people across the country in support of school lunch reform. By having a giant eat-in on Boston Common with as many good eaters as we can round up, we’re participating in a national day of action — and of eat-ins —  to say that children should have access to real food in school. And that the policy behind our national school lunch program should make that possible.

From 12-2:30 we’ll be eating, chatting and signing petitions in a picnic-style spread by the giant gazebo. Please bring your own picnic lunch — bring extra to share, if you like — and join us.

At the same time people in all 50 states will be sitting down to share a meal together too. We’ll be making a polite but important statement that schools shouldn’t be feeding kids “food” that’s been processed into oblivion, food that makes them feel sick, food that makes them struggle to concentrate and food that forms the kind of habits that make us fattest, most disease-prone nation on the planet.

To read more about the Slow Food USA campaign for school lunch reform, you can go here. But this is a little of what they’re saying: “We’re making this statement is by bringing neighbors together in the spirit of good will and for the joy of sharing good food. That is the heart of our movement.”

Our friend JJ Gonson, who is helping us organize the picnic tomorrow, kind of perfectly got at the on her blog. But here’s a taste:

A while back, I asked a very nice man, who has to think about how to feed many, many children with a very small budget, why there were tuna sandwiches on the school lunch menu. He told me, that in spite of the fact that we had been told that children should ‘never’ eat tuna (and we were starting to suspect their might be some issues around the cans to boot) that tuna could not come off the school lunch menu because canned tuna is “free”.

What that means is that it is subsidized, by the government, and offered on a list of “free” food items that schools can choose from. The way our system is set up, quite a lot of the food that gets directed to public schools is from subsidized packages, made available to the public school buying systems, for “free”.

Sadly, the power that be’s does not appear to subsidize small, organic farms who are practicing sustainable farming resulting in chemical and GMO free eatables. The food that gets thrown into the happy “free” basket is often full of corn, soy and parts of animals that are not known to be particularly nice to look at.

Basically, we take the worst of the food and feed it to the most vulnerable, and arguably the most important part of our society- the growing bodies and minds who will become our decision making adult public.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 7th, 2009 at 2:54 am and is filed under Events, Localvores USA. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.