Illustration: Rob Dunlavey
Making lunch an integral part of education
By Michael K. Stone
Before 2005, lunchtime at John Muir Elementary School in Berkeley, Calif., was not very different from school lunch periods across much of North America. The food was nondescript, greasy, and calorie-heavy, often delivered in preprocessed, heat-and-serve "units" shipped from thousands of miles away in wrappings bearing corporate logos. For students, lunch was a detour on the way to their real noontime goal: the playground.
Eager to get to the lunch recess, many children rushed through their meals. Muir 5th-grade teacher Stephen Rutherford recalls that "children were claiming to be done with their lunch in five minutes and were leaving a huge amount of food waste, bag lunches uneaten and school lunches just tossed, because their only mind-set was to get out on the playground and have fun." The school had no system for waste management, Rutherford notes, so children would "pour their waste into this or that bin in an atmosphere of chaos and neglect."
Despite rushing through lunch, children were often left with as little as five or 10 minutes to play (of the total 35 minutes allocated for lunch and recess), because so much time was lost as aides attempted to calm the children, establish order, and get them to the playground. For both teachers and students, lunchtime meant a break not only from the school day, but also from each other. One Muir teacher described the noisy, rowdy lunchroom as "just not the place where you wanted to be." As in many other schools, tussling and shoving in the lunchroom often carried over into bullying on the playground and sometimes into classes afterward.
Today, the situation has changed dramatically as a result of actions taken while Muir served as a pilot school within the Berkeley School Lunch Initiative (SLI). A joint effort to design and implement curriculum and food service innovations in Berkeley public schools, the Berkeley SLI was launched in 2004 by the Berkeley Unified School District, the Chez Panisse Foundation, and the Center for Ecoliteracy. The Muir community had generated various ideas for innovations, but many of them, such as radically redesigning the lunchroom or revamping the district food service, were determined to be too expensive or out of their control. They needed a starting place, something they could do that didn't require extra money but had high visibility and good prospects for early success.