Customer Reviews

Free for All: Fixing School Food in America (California Studies in Food and Culture)

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Free For All: Fixing School Food in America, is a fabulous guide to the intricacies of School Food change. It's a must-read for those interested in how the system came to be so convoluted but unlike many similar books this one is loaded with examples of how ordinary people have organized to improve school food. Poppendieck believes that the time to transform School Food is now--it's the moment in which education and health are joined in the public eye. She also shows how environmental activists determined to slow global warming can accomplish all of the above by signing on to the now-vibrant School Food reform movement. Well-written, easy to read, very thoughtful book.

This book has all the information of the most erudite academic publication and the fun of a good read as you follow the author's journey through the world of school lunch. It is more than Food for Thought: it strips the issues down to a Naked Lunch and is a pleasure to digest. School lunch feeds the future, so get informed and get active. Enjoy!!!

To be perfectly honest, large parts of this book were painfully dry and difficult to hack through. I read plenty of dense books, but for some reason this one was especially rough. That said, it's practically the only book you'll ever need to read on the subject. The author did excellent research on all aspects of the question and provided a rare balanced and effective response.

I'm a blogger about school food (among other topics) (thelunchtraydotcom) and I'm constantly relying on, citing and recommending this book to my readers.

In clear, readable and extremely well-researched prose, Poppendieck lays out for the reader everything you'd ever want or need to know about the school lunch program, from its historical roots (which explain the sometimes perplexing regulatory thicket governing the program now) to what it's like behind the scenes in actual school kitchens. What I like best about Poppendieck is that she approaches the subject with no agenda, hidden or otherwise - even as she promotes reform, she clearly has empathy for school districts which are trying, under intense financial pressure, to provide meals that are compliant with federal regulations.

If you care about the issue of school food in America, this is a MUST READ.

This book was certainly eye-opening about the politics of school food. Reading is a bit tedious at times with many repetitions of information but interesting enough to slog through it.

Free for All is a historical analysis of school food programs in the US since their inception during the Progressive Era -- with a strong emphasis on two points: (a) who pays? and (b) how did we get ourselves into such a muddle? The history is in many ways remarkably like that of almost any other major social program: early implementation during the Progress Era based on localized funding, broad scale enactment during the Depression, another surge during the War on Poverty, a defensive posture since Reagan. What is unusual is the extent to which a byzantine bureaucratic madness has infected the program, thanks to early commitments to helping farmers and to the rise of nutritional science, in which the federal government has tried to legislate healthy meals by legislative quantities (e.g., total calories, percent fat), which leads to bizarre anomalies like a school district having to add a chocolate pudding dessert to their lunches to meet dietary standards.

This is in many ways an extremely well written book and one that deserves a wide audience. Indeed, it's hard not to describe the audience for this book without sounding like a grandiose blurb off the back cover of a book (e.g., everyone who cares about the future...). Instead, I'll simply point out that it was recommended to me by an anti-hunger advocate as the one book to read on US federal food policy.

Other books talk about how it is `thorough' or `has dry stretches'. This isn't especially the fault of the author. She writes well for a sociologist. She resists the temptation to use or invent jargon and she lays out the problems as clearly and with as much sympathy for as many of the people involved as possible. The problem -- and this is one of the few that she doesn't address -- is that the topic itself has become so legalistically and financially convoluted that it is beyond the casual grasp of ordinary busy parents or anyone who simply believes that it is a sin that any child in our republic should be hungry at school.

George Orwell once complained that liberals are better at `at pointing out what is desirable than at explaining how to achieve it.' Poppendieck is clear about what she thinks is desirable, the same thing that many school food service professionals think is desirable: universal free lunch (hence the title of the book). As she points out, the price for this (which she maddening withholds until the last twenty pages) is probably $15 billion. In federal budgets, this is chump change. And she still offers concrete suggestions for getting it.

Jan Poppendiek's "Free for All" is a Manifesto for school food reform, showing us how to achieve a profound overhaul of the way we feed our children and nourish their future. It's a road map of where we've been, where we are, how we got here, and why and how we must fix school food with national intention.

Through a sociologist's lens, we learn the fundamental importance, possibilities, and power of school meals. If you want to understand and have meaningful discussions about school food, you've found the most critical work on the subject.

Poppendiek was my guest on Food Sleuth Radio on 12/16/10. Links outside Amazon are not allowed in the reviews, but you can hear her speak about her book if you do a Google search for iTunes + Food Sleuth.

Melinda Hemmelgarn, M.S., R.D.