The organization began in Italy as a political stance against the way fast food was changing the local eating culture, and has since grown to 100,000 members in 132 countries, all interested in building a food system that is good, clean and fair. There are groups, called conviviums, in cities across the US that meet to discuss and enjoy food together. Much of the focus of Slow Food has been on protecting biodiversity: their program Ark of Taste promotes plants and animal breeds that have been dying out as industrial agriculture spreads a handful of species through standardization. But now, they’re rolling back their sleeves and setting their sights on food justice.

In Slow Food’s most recent campaign, Time for Lunch, the organization began to bring awareness to the upcoming Child Nutrition Re-Authorization, which will allocate funding to our nation’s school cafeterias — and will help decide if our kids will continue to be the recipient for excess commodity calories, or if instead we’ll start serving them fresh, home-cooked food, featuring the fruits and vegetables we’re told we should be eating more of. During these tough economic times, many children are getting their most important meal(s) of the day at school, so starting there with healthy alternatives could be a down payment on the future well-being of the nation.

Time for Lunch featured over 300 eat-ins in all fifty states, where neighbors gathered to eat each other’s home cooking, and talk about how to organize for better school food. Their campaign has recieved a lot of media attention, and their petition to Cogress requesting an additional $1 for school lunch has garnered 30,000 signatures to date.

With continued focus on child nutrition and more social justice-oriented programs, now could not be a better time to get involved with a national organization that works to build a better food system for all to participate in, and pay what you wish!

Like victory gardens, home canning, and depression-era resource conservation, Slow Food USA’s Gordon Jenkins believes the idea of healthy school lunches is one worth revisiting.

“The school lunch program was created in 1946 as a measure of national security,” says Jenkins. “The goal was to make sure that our nation’s children were healthy, because only then would the whole nation be productive.”

Four decades later, most of us take for granted the fact that schools serve lunch, and that the federal government subsidizes many of them. Whether they have anything to do with students’ health is another story. “A lot of today’s adults remember school lunch when it was institutional Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes,” says Jenkins. “It wasn’t delicious, but no one expected it to be. Now, the cheapest fast food and junk food is in our cafeterias and it’s fueling the obesity epidemic.”

Jenkins and his colleagues at Slow Food USA have spent the summer organizing Time for Lunch, Slow Food’s first nationwide grassroots advocacy campaign focused on getting real meals in front of the 30 million children who eat in today’s cafeterias. At the core of the effort is the Child Nutrition Act, a bundle of legislation including the National School Lunch Program that is up for reauthorization by Congress at the end of this year.

To draw attention to the issue, Slow Food chapters in 49 states have planned a national Day of Action by staging 295 Eat-Ins — or potluck gatherings in parks, civic centers and backyards — as a way to engage communities, build bridges, and show Congress that school lunch is a priority.

“Lunch” might be a stretch

The biggest myth about school lunch, says Deborah Lehmann of the school food policy blog School Lunch Talk, is that kids are eating square meals in the middle of the day. Lehmann has spent the last 8 months visiting school cafeterias around the U.S. and interviewing the people who work there. In addition to kids who bring lunch from home and those who opt for the official lunch option, many of the students she observes piece together a mid-day meal entirely of snacks and so called “a la carte” foods. In one school she visited recently in the Santa Cruz area, Lehmann sat down with an administrator to look through records of what the students were eating and the results were astounding. “There were a number of kids eating a lunch of corn nuts, hot chocolate, Gatorade, and baked Cheetos.”

Because school cafeterias essentially function as stand-alone businesses that get no funding from school districts, they rely solely on the reimbursements they receive for free and reduced meals and the income they generate when students buy what they serve. It’s not hard to see why many have resorted to serving what students will buy. And the drive to create novel, kid-friendly products like bubble gum flavored apples and rootbeer flavored milk means kids don’t have much reason to make healthy choices.

“School lunches have always been a reflection of what people are eating in America,” says Lehmann. “Back when we served casseroles and spaghetti with meat sauce, that’s what kids were eating at home. Today they’re used to eating fast food and frozen food and processed food and restaurant food. So that’s what gets served.”

Fast School Food Nation

Of course, it’s the same forces that have shaped children’s diets outside schools that shape what they eat between classes. The problem dates back to the 1980s, when Congress opened the doors to private food service companies.

When schools are given commodities from the USDA, most send them straight to companies to be processed. Over the years it has become much more cost-effective for schools to send their chicken, for example, to Tyson and to get it back in the form of chicken nuggets, than to prepare it in their own, often under-funded, low-function facilities.

Many of these companies, says Jenkins, have been perfectly happy to sell highly processed foods back to schools “at a below-market price because it meant that they were going to get their brands and products into the lunch room and potentially get customers for life.”

The solution? For starters, Slow Food is asking for one dollar more per student –- an increase that may seem large in light of the current $2.68 the government currently pays for school lunch reimbursements. But because students who pay for lunch would continue doing so, the total increase for reimbursements for free and reduced meals would only be around 18 million dollars, says Jenkins. It’s a modest request that would “give nutrition directors and food service directors the baseline level of support they need to start bringing healthier options into the lunch room.” More funding, combined with education about growing and cooking food, could as Slow Food President Josh Veirtel wrote in a recent letter to the New York Times, represent a “turning point in the food movement” and “signal the rise of a national movement driven by the passion of ordinary citizens.”

Want to show your support for healthy school lunches? Attend an Eat-In this Labor Day: Find one in your neighborhood.

Can’t make it to an Eat-In? Visit the Slow Food USA site to sign the petition.

Ed Wilkins, Director of Student Nutrition Services for the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), said the biggest obstacles for SFUSD are inadequate staffing, out of date kitchen equipment, lack of infrastructure and training for school lunch employees. SFUSD is the largest feeding program in San Francisco and is facing a $20 million financial shortfall this year. Though San Francisco has one of the highest costs of living, it is not allocated additional school lunch funds. Simply put: the money just does not go as far as it might in other cities. Wilkins believes a critical first step in improving the system is more integration of local farmers, producers and prep staff.

Colleen Kavanagh, executive director of Campaign for Better Nutrition, gave the audience a brief history of the National School Lunch Program which feeds nearly 30 million children each day. Originally, it was established to absorb farm surpluses and provide food to school-aged children. In 1966, President Johnson signed the Child Nutrition Act to help meet the nutritional needs of children. Over the years, we have shifted from combating hunger to fighting childhood obesity. The important thing was just to feed children. Now, study after study shows that children perform better in school when fed a nutrition-rich breakfast and/or lunch. Kavanagh noted that we cannot reform the dietary guidelines through the Child Nutrition Act but we can advocate for additional funds and source more fresh (and local when possible) food items.

Lena Brook, parent of a first-grader at SFUSD and founding board member of Urban Sprouts, recently launched a parent advocacy campaign to reform school food programs in the SFUSD. Brook explained that SFUSD operates under the auspices of the California Department of Education, rather than the City and County of San Francisco. Politically, it is important to build support and leadership within the school board first. “Wilkins and his staff are doing the best they can within current constraints but do not have options at their disposal,” said Brook. The parent group is aiming to raise money to support a feasibility study that would look at three to five options for a new food program. Before proceeding with this plan, it requires buy-in and formal support from the School Board and Superintendent Garcia. The SFUSD food program needs more resources to work with if we are to see a real change.

There’s still a lot of hard work ahead for those fighting to improve school lunch, but the issues are finally in the forefront of the public dialog and solutions are gaining momentum.

What Can You Do?

• Join SFUSDFoodFuture, the list serve for the SFUSD parent advocacy group on school food.

• Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a key player in terms of the Child Nutrition Act Reauthorization. During the fall, as Congress takes up the reauthorization measure, San Francisco constituents can call or email her office to ask for her support of child nutrition programs.

• If you are a parent at an SFUSD school and would like to assist the Student Nutrition Services department with compliance (i.e., ensuring that applications are completed, working with the school leadership to ensure that rules are enforced, etc), please email Lena Brook.

• Spread the word! Let your community–in the broadest sense of the word–know that this parent advocacy effort is underway. At this point, they need representation from schools throughout the City, but especially from the Southeast and Northern sections.

• Support Slow Food USA’s Time for Lunch campaign, sign the petition and/or attend one of the 294 Eat-Ins across the country on Labor Day, Sept. 7.

Kitchen Table Talks is a monthly conversation series about the American food system. The next session will be held on Tuesday, September 29 and will focus on Mayor Newsom’s new Executive Directive for Healthy and Sustainable Food for San Francisco. To receive information about Kitchen Table Talks, please send an e-mail to ktt@civileats.com.

Today in America we have steadily rising rates of childhood obesity, and if you were born after 2000, you have a startling one-in-three chance of developing early-onset diabetes. Meanwhile America now has more prisoners than farmers, and among those few remaining farmers the average age is 57.1 and rising. The equation becomes quite simple to understand: No farmers equals no food.

In an effort to raise awareness and rally support behind changes to the upcoming reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, Slow Food USA has created the Time for Lunch campaign. This campaign is calling on Congress to provide the resources schools need to serve real food for lunch. Those involved in making the day-to-day dietary decisions for our children do not have the adequate resources to provide healthy, nutritious, and yes, tasty food for our kids. This must change. It’s time to invest in children’s health, protect against food that puts children at risk and teach children healthy habits that will last through life.

All the talk in Washington right now is on health care reform, and that’s a good thing. But no matter what solutions they craft to meet America’s health care needs, their system will be bankrupted by skyrocketing rates of preventable illnesses that began when we started using our schools as a dumping ground for agribusiness surplus and as a proving ground for corporate marketing to our children. With the red herring of providing the “freedom to choose,” the conglomerates who peddle edible food-like substances have weaseled their way into what is, for many children, the most important (indeed sometimes only) meal of the day: lunch. They tell us the kids should be allowed to choose between a salad and a Twinkie, milk and Coke. And schools fall for this because their resources are constantly being cut, and the junk food pushers offer a cheap and easy way out.

Under the National School Lunch Program, the USDA reimburses schools for every meal served: $2.57 for a free lunch, $2.17 for a reduced-price lunch and 24 cents for a paid lunch. Since these reimbursements must also pay for labor, equipment and overhead costs, schools are left with only $1.00 to spend on food. How can schools be expected to feed our children and protect their health with only a dollar a day? It’s time to build a strong foundation for our children’s health by raising the reimbursement rate to $3.57.

That amounts to an increase of $5.4 billion over an academic year. Serious money to be sure, but when obesity-related healthcare costs are $147 billion annually, it shouldn’t be too hard to come up with an extra buck a day for our children.

Senator Harkin and Congresswoman Woolsey are to be commended for their efforts in this area. Their Child Nutrition Promotion and School Lunch Protection Act of 2009 will put a stop to food companies profiting from selling obesity to our kids. We need more though. We must fund grants for Farm to School programs and school gardens, simultaneously improving local economies, supporting local farms, and raising our children’s awareness of where food comes from and why it’s important.

We can even create jobs by training unemployed and underemployed Americans to be the teachers, farmers, cooks and administrators that our school cafeterias need. President Obama has called for an end to childhood hunger by 2015; let’s answer that call by putting Americans to work building and working in school kitchens nationwide.

This Labor Day you can help by joining or organizing an Eat-In, a National Day of Action being coordinated in communities all over the US. Details are at www.SlowFoodUSA.org/timeforlunch.