Consuming Identities: Law, School Lunches, and What it Means to be American

Food, eating, and the rituals surrounding food impact people as individuals, as groups, and as citizens. Through direct regulation, food aid, subsidies, and property rights, law shapes and even determines food choices in America. With it, law shapes, reflects, and may even--at times--dictate American identities. Perhaps nowhere is the law's impact on food and identity more immediately apparent than in the context of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). Federally subsidized school meals feed over fifty million students a day and serve over seven billion school meals annually. Whether it is pork's removal from snack lists being likened to "fatwa" or cafeterias segregating paying and non-paying students, the lessons of school meals go far beyond nutritional content and send resounding messages about civic values, inclusion, and exclusion. In recent years school meals have come under increasing scrutiny, but as legislative consideration of nutritional goals in the school lunch program has improved, discussion of political, social, and cultural goals has lagged. This Article is the first to examine the social and political dimensions of school meals, and concludes that current treatment of these values in food regulation undermines key values in American civil society. The school lunch program teaches students a simplified, uniform, and even discriminatory account of what it means to eat and be American. Students under this regime must choose to either be American and sit down at the table with the "normal" kids or retain your beliefs, your identity, and perhaps even your health and well-being. This is a choice no child should have to make--especially not on an empty stomach.