Six on History: Food
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"For thousands of years the Thames provided London’s inhabitants with a plentiful supply and variety of fish. Until the 1820s locally caught fish was the city’s staple diet. Subsequent pollution of the river drove many professional fishermen and their families into financial ruin because of the collapse of fish populations.
Up until the twentieth century New York Harbor oysters reigned as the quintessential New York food long before pizza, pretzels, bagels, or hot dogs took their place. The metropolis once was a Big Oyster. There too, reckless management of the marine environment led to the obliteration of a huge natural resource.
Dirty Father Thames
Early London loved fresh fish. There was an abundant catch in the River Thames, including trout, salmon and eel, and nearer the estuary there were oysters, shrimps and cockles. Varieties of fish were vended by street merchants known as “costermongers.” These itinerant traders had been a noisy feature of London life since the eleventh century as they cried their trade lines to attract customers. They sold their products in small quantities around the streets and alleyways, at first from baskets, then progressing to barrows and stalls.
By the 1850s, London was the world’s most crowded city with crippling problems of pollution and poverty. Rapid population growth strained the city’s public services, in particular its water supply, waste disposal and sewage systems. The housing crisis was severe. The River Thames became a giant sewer overflowing with human waste, dead animals, and toxic raw materials from riverside factories. Keeping a densely packed population nourished and free from disease was a mammoth challenge to the authorities.
A cartoon in Punch Magazine of October 7, 1848, depicted “Dirty Father Thames” as a vagrant and the river as a repository of refuse and waste. A poem: “Filthy river, filthy river … What art thou but one vast gutter” accompanied the cartoon. The Thames, once the lifeblood of the city, was declared biologically dead. Although a vital resource had been lost through the thoughtless exploitation of a delicate habitat, an alternative supply soon became available.
Battered deep-fried fish (pescado frito) was a legacy of Iberian Marranos who had fled persecution in their home countries and settled in London. Nominal Christians, they were – in secret – practicing Jews who fried fish on Friday and ate it cold on the Sabbath when forbidden to cook. When Thomas Jefferson visited the capital he reported eating ‘fried fish in the Jewish fashion’. Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist (1837) referred to a “fried fish warehouse” where baked potatoes were served alongside fish. High grain prices all over Europe had opened the way to a potato culture. Bread was substituted by spuds; beer replaced by gin. Fish & chips became food for the poor.
The Industrial Revolution helped grow the trade. The launching of steam-trawlers made white fish from the North Sea (cod in particular) widely available and affordable thanks to a network of railways connecting fishing ports and cities. London no longer needed the Thames to feed its population. The river and its main tributaries were neglected. Pollution proliferated.
Passion for Oysters
Having overrun England, the Romans brought with them a taste for shellfish. They developed a rich native oyster culture. When the Saxons invaded after the Romans had left, the oyster lost its status as a delicacy and its cultivation was abandoned. It would take centuries for the oyster to regain its reputation.
By the 1400s oysters were enjoyed by the rich and poor alike (cooked in its own juices with ale and pepper). They were eaten informally in taverns or straight from the barrel at street stalls. Small oysters were slurped down raw, while larger ones were cooked in stews mixed with pork or mutton, or stuffed inside fowl and roasted. In his diary, Samuel Pepys mentions his delight of consuming oysters time and again, often swallowing them at breakfast.
The liberal consumption of oysters continued into Victorian times, while pickled oysters were a regular food of the poor in London. In the words of Sam Weller in Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens’s first novel (1836): “Poverty and oysters always seem to go together.”
By the middle of the nineteenth century, all along the coast oysters were dredged in huge numbers by fleets of smacks (single-masted fishing boats). Mersea Island oysters were the most desirable. Once barrelled up, they were sent from Essex to London over land. Massive supplies made them cheap and available to all. Ever-growing demands from the all-consuming metropolis led to many of the beds being depleted.
Careless production combined with pollution and natural sedimentation resulted in diminishing harvests and made oysters rare. By the latter half of the Victorian era native habitats were exhausted. As a consequence of this man-made disaster, prices rose to such an extent that only the wealthy could afford to put oysters on the table. A once thriving business soon declined.
Oyster Island & Pearl Street
It was a misty morning when on September 3rd, 1609, Henry Hudson sailed the Halve Maen (Half Moon) up the river that now bears his name on behalf of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). He and his Anglo-Dutch crew entered a brackish zone rich in nutrients with a shoreline of rocky shallows. Some 350 square miles of reefs stretched in all directions. It was a Paradise of Oysters that for a long period of time had fed the indigenous Lenape people.
Although familiar with oysters as a food source in their own regions, the type the sailors encountered in these unfamiliar waters were much larger than the ones they had consumed at home. Settlers named Ellis and Liberty Island “Little” and “Great Oyster Island” because of the sprawling beds surrounding them. For a time, New York Harbor oysters remained a seemingly inexhaustible resource. They offered affordable sustenance to an ever growing mass of people.
Discarded shells were traditionally stacked in refuge heaps (middens), but with increased consumption they were used to fertilize crops and pave streets. New York was built on oyster shells. To this day, stone structures such as Trinity Church at Wall Street and Broadway are held together with mortar made from shells ground into paste.
On the site of a large midden along the waterfront Dutch colonists built “Paerlstraat,” one of the first roads constructed in the fledgling New Amsterdam settlement. It has been suggested that Pearl Street earned its moniker because it was paved with oyster shells that glistened like pearls in the sun. The street was soon surrounded by taverns selling beer, liquor and – of course – oysters.
The housing boom in New York would spell danger to the oyster culture. In 1658, New Amsterdam’s Dutch Council already showed awareness of environmental damage by trying to limit and restrict harvests. In 1715 and 1719, the colonial government imposed similar measures in order to protect crucial food supplies to the city.
Downing’s Oyster House
By 1850, most major American towns boosted one or more oyster cellars, nearly always in the basement of the premises where it was easier to store ice. Street vending in poorer districts was part of New York’s food distribution system. Oysters were served at cheap eateries and some of the poorest New Yorkers had no other subsistence than (nutritious) oysters and bread. The rich however enjoyed consuming oysters in style.
Thomas Downing was born in 1791 in Chincoteague, Virginia, to parents who had been freed from slavery by planter John Downing once he had converted to Methodism. The couple took his surname and served as caretakers for the religious meeting house. Thomas was educated in the Methodist tradition. As a young man he left Virginia and traveled north to Philadelphia where he met and married Rebecca West. By 1819 the young couple had moved to New York. At first Thomas cultivated oyster beds on the Jersey Flats, but by 1825 he had purchased an eating establishment in the basement at 5 Broad Street, Manhattan.
Downing gradually expanded the business into other spaces on the block at the corner with Wall Street and ran an exclusive restaurant with dishes that appealed to the taste of the local business community. The menu at Downing’s Oyster House included scalloped oysters, oyster pie, fish with oyster sauce, and poultry stuffed with oysters.
Listed in the city directory an “oysterman,” Downing’s success as an African-American restaurateur was a rare story in pre-Civil War New York. During his visit to the city, Charles Dickens dropped by and praised New York’s “wonderful cookery of oysters.”
At the same time, assisted by his son George Downing, Thomas was active in the abolitionist movement. In 1836 he was a co-founder of New York’s United Anti-Slavery Society. When Tomas died on April 10, 1866, the city’s Chamber of Commerce closed for the day to pay its respect to this pioneering figure.
Bluepoint Oysters
By the 1820s demand for oysters outpaced the supply from New York Harbor and merchants began to explore the oyster beds of the Great South Bay in Suffolk County. Overlooking the bay lies the small town of West Sayville. It was here that from the 1840s Dutch immigrants would engage in ‘oystering.’ These workers had acquired skills in their native region and brought these to Long Island. They transported their oysters to the city of New York on schooners until the construction of the Long Island Railroad reached West Sayville. Almost the entire population of the town was constituted of so-called baymen.
Among the earliest settlers was Jacob Ockers. Born in Bruinisse in Zeeland (to this day a center of oyster farming in the Netherlands), he became the town’s major employer. By the mid-nineteenth century Ockers had founded the Bluepoints Company, harvesting oysters and clams until the business closed in 2003. He became America’s largest individual oyster grower and shipper. The firm paid for skilled workers to migrate from the Low Countries and helped them settle in their new environment.
As European oyster beds declined, Long Island oysters were exported across the Atlantic to be served on dinner tables in London, Paris, and other European capitals. Queen Victoria directed that only Bluepoints oysters were to grace Buckingham Palace’s dining tables.
Pollution & Restoration
New Yorkers in the meantime kept demanding shellfish and oyster bars remained popular. In 1906, the menu at Walton’s Old Homestead Oyster and Chop House at Eighth Avenue offered forty-five different entries for oysters. When the subterranean Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal opened in 1913 Hudson oysters were still available – but not for much longer.
The rapid expansion of Manhattan led to sewage pollution while the shoreline was turned into piers. Landfills made oyster beds no longer sustainable. In 1927, the last of New York’s beds was closed because of toxicity. The Big Oyster had become contaminated.
The Bluepoints success story did not last either. Over harvesting crippled the industry. The hurricane that hit the region in 1938 was a serious blow. Extensive damage opened up new inlets from the Atlantic, creating conditions that were unfavorable to an oyster culture.
The restoration of an ecosystem demands more time and effort than its destruction. During the 1950s, there was barely any life in the water of Thames. It took decades of environmental campaigns before cleaning up started in earnest in order to prevent further decline. By 1974, the first salmon started returning to the river.
The original Hudson reefs offered habitats to hundreds of marine species. They also provided a natural defense barrier against storm surges and flooding. After Hurricane Sandy hit New York with devastating power in 2012, a series of concrete oyster walls were built near the southern shore of Staten Island. The Billion Oyster Project was initiated two years later aimed at restoring live oysters to New York Harbor and reviving the marine landscape. It was a worthy cause. Oysters after all are indigenous New Yorkers. They shaped the city’s history."
Illustrations, from above: The Cryes of the City of London, 1687, Plate 9: a female eel-monger (‘Buy my Dish of great Eels’) by Marcellus Laroon; cartoon from Punch Magazine, October 7th, 1848; original cover of Dickens’s [Boz] serialized Pickwick Papers, 1836; Pearl Street in the seventeenth century (NYPL digital collection); portrait of Thomas Downing; portrait of Jacob Ockers, the ‘Oyster King’; and A.R. Waud, Oyster Stands in Fulton Fish Market, 1870.
Big corporations and food service companies are making millions of dollars from public school meal programs, often to the detriment of students and their health.
"Since the 1970s, Big Food has colonized the school cafeteria. From signing lucrative food service contracts to promoting their corporate brands and dishing out chicken nuggets and other mass-produced, heat-and-serve items, the food industry has done quite well for itself by selling goods and services to schools across the United States, including the 95% of public schools that participate in the government-subsidized National School Lunch Program (NSLP).
In recent years, Big Food companies — and their industry associations — have spent millions of dollars lobbying the federal government to weaken or change its nutritional standards, and these efforts have paid off handsomely. It happened in 2014, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) caved to industry pressure and made it easier for schools to serve French fries and pizza. It happened in 2018, when the USDA loosened restrictions on the amount of sodium, flavored milk, and refined grains that could be served in school meals. And it is happening again with the Trump administration’s latest proposal to make the rules more “flexible” (as Thompson, 2020, recently described in these pages).
At the same time, a fast-growing national movement has emerged in support of scratch cooking and the serving of local food in school cafeterias, led by the 42% of districts with active farm-to-school programs. As of the most recent farm-to-school census, in 2015, cafeterias adopting this model had redirected $789 million of public funding away from Big Food companies and into local food and farm economies. This movement seeks to reclaim power from Big Food while also engaging K-12 students in agriculture- and garden-based experiences in which they learn about the food they eat and where it comes from.
Yet, schools participating in the NSLP often struggle to break away from Big Food, for reasons both economic and cultural. Chief among them is a specious argument often wielded by those who want to maintain the status quo: Since cafeterias are not classrooms, they should not receive state and local tax dollars that are meant to go to instruction in academic subjects like math and English. (But if that reasoning were valid, shouldn’t it also apply to the funding of school athletics, theatrical productions, field trips, and other non-classroom activities?) Further, public education has never resolved its long-standing debate about whose responsibility it is to feed students during the school day: Given that the government requires children to attend school, shouldn’t it provide them (especially needy children) with meals, or is that a core responsibility of parents and other family members?
Facing ideological opposition from those who insist that food has nothing to do with education — and even if it does, that the government has little responsibility to provide it — many school districts are under enormous pressure to cut the cost of their lunch and breakfast programs, no matter how much it hurts their students, cafeteria workers, and communities.
School food finance 101Schools participating in the USDA’s federal meal programs are generally expected to operate their breakfast and lunch service as a financially self-sustaining not-for-profit “business” (Gaddis, 2019). That has never been easy, though, and after feeding millions of children amid COVID-19 school closures, many food service programs across the country are now facing even deeper deficits than usual. As Spencer Taylor, the school nutrition director of Metro Nashville Public Schools told a reporter from Civil Eats, “COVID has wreaked havoc on our reserve balances, and we’re generating a fraction of the income” (Held, 2020).
To cover the cost of food, labor, operations, and other expenses, schools participating in the NSLP have two primary sources of revenue: 1) federal reimbursements for all qualifying meals, and 2) student payments for meals and à la carte items. Some school districts receive additional funding from their state government or local school board, but most state and local funding goes to general education budgets. Thus, it is the federal government that provides the vast majority of the dollars used to pay for the free, reduced-price, and partially reimbursed meals that roughly 30 million American children eat every school day.
The cost of producing and serving school meals depends on a range of local variables, such as school size, average daily participation rates, and local labor markets and food prices. But in most districts, the federal reimbursement rate has always been far too low to cover actual expenses. According to the USDA’s School Nutrition and Meal Cost Study, it cost schools an average of $3.81 to produce each lunch served through the NSLP during the 2014-15 school year, but the federal free lunch reimbursement rate was only $3.32. Breakfast was even more of a money pit: It cost schools an average of $2.72 to produce each breakfast served through the National School Breakfast Program (NSBP), but the reimbursement rate was just $1.88.
How do school food service directors close this budget gap? To cut expenses, they serve the cheapest and easiest-to-prepare (which usually means least healthy) foods they can find, while still meeting federal, state, and local nutrition standards. Many also try to reduce labor costs, either by outsourcing the preparation of meals to faraway factories or outsourcing the entire operation to a food service management company (FSMC).
Even then, many programs can’t make ends meet, so in addition to cutting costs, they also look for ways to increase revenue. Mainly, this means trying to entice children (including the roughly 20 million students who opt out of the NSLP, even though they’re eligible, and the millions more who opt out of the smaller NSBP) to use their own money (some of which the government may reimburse) to purchase school meals or à la carte items. To boost these sales, schools commonly introduce branded food items and “on-trend” concepts from popular fast-casual restaurant chains, exacerbating the commercialization of the school food environment and sharpening existing race- and class-based divisions in the cafeteria.
For the 2020-21 school year, the USDA increased the maximum federal reimbursement rate (for the 48 contiguous states) to $3.75 for a free lunch, $3.35 for a reduced-price lunch, and $0.48 for a paid lunch. That’s progress, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Without a major policy change (such as a shift to universal free school meals), school food service programs will continue to rely on heat-and-serve foods to reduce labor costs and à la carte sales to boost revenue.
Outsourcing K-12 food service programs to private management companies has a controversial history. For decades, the practice was outlawed: When the National School Lunch Act was passed in 1946, school food program directors — many of them trained in home economics or dietetics—persuaded Congress that for-profit operators had no place in the not-for-profit world of the federal lunch program. From survey research conducted in the 1920s and 1930s, they knew that commercial vendors tended to encourage children to purchase sugary and salty items (e.g., candies, cakes, soda pop, and pickles) because these unhealthy items were more profitable to sell.
A fast-growing national movement has emerged in support of scratch cooking and the serving of local food in school cafeterias.
In the late 1960s, however, millions of poor students became eligible for free school lunch, which meant that district administrators, particularly in large urban systems, faced a sudden demand to scale up their school meal programs. Lacking resources to build new kitchen and cafeteria facilities, many of them looked to the private sector for solutions. Facing intense pressure also from the National Restaurant Association, a powerful trade lobby representing the food service industry (and often referred to by food justice advocates as “the other NRA”), the USDA then decided, in 1970, to lift its restriction on for-profit providers.
The commercialization of the school lunch program ramped up quickly over the subsequent years. For districts looking for a quick and cheap way to feed lots of students, the easiest option was to outsource the daily work of preparing meals to a frozen food manufacturer and/or to hire a FSMC to run the lunch program, freeing the schools from the administrative burden.
During the 1980s, the Reagan administration pushed schools even further down this path by slashing the federal school lunch program’s budget by 25%. [and classified ketchup as a "vegetable"] Since then, it has only become more and more common for districts to turn their cafeterias over to private corporations such as Aramark, Chartwells, and Sodexo (the “big three” FSMCs), in the hope that this will allow their food service departments to break even. During the 1987-88 school year, reported the USDA, only about 1 in 25 school districts relied on such companies, but outsourcing has grown rapidly since then, continuing to do so even in the 1990s and early 2000s, when FSMCs came under intense scrutiny for their dubious business practices. By 2014-15, according to the USDA’s School Nutrition and Meal Cost Study, one in five districts outsourced their meal programs.
In general, providing meals to students in K-12 education tends to be less profitable than contracting to institutions such as colleges and universities, which are subject to fewer regulations and allow vendors to charge significantly higher prices. Still, though, school contracts can be lucrative, particularly in very large urban districts with high free and reduced-price meal eligibility rates. This, along with regional variations in labor costs, helps to explain why the outsourcing of school meals is quite common in some parts of the country but practically nonexistent in others.
School districts in the Southeast are least likely (fewer than 1%) to outsource to FSMCs, while those in the Mid-Atlantic region are most likely (48%) to do so. Nationwide, just seven states (New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona) account for nearly 50% of all food service outsourcing in K-12 education — school officials in these states cite high labor costs involved in running their own cafeterias as the main reason for outsourcing (Jacobs & Graham-Squire, 2010). Still, despite regional variations, the effects of outsourcing have been felt everywhere. In the 50 years since the USDA opened the schoolhouse door to Big Food, the whole K-12 cafeteria sector — even in districts that don’t outsource — has seen a decline in labor standards and a dramatic increase in the sales and consumption of branded, prepackaged food products.
Cultivating consumersCafeterias’ heavy reliance on heat-and-serve items like chicken nuggets and pizza allows Big Food companies like Tyson and Kraft to reap large profits from the school lunch market (worth an estimated $20 billion per year).
In 2004, the USDA mandated that by the 2006-07 school year, all districts in the country were to establish a local wellness policy to prevent the in-school marketing of unhealthy foods and drinks. As of the 2011-12 school year, however, researchers found that 70% of students in the elementary and middle grades still encountered such advertising at school (Harris & Fox, 2014), either because the wording of local policies was not strong and specific enough to deter marketers or because districts failed to implement their policies effectively (Harvey, Markenson, & Gibson, 2018). As a result, school continues to be one of the primary sites at which young people are exposed to branded fast-food items, which are served weekly in 30% of high schools and 10% of elementary schools (Terry-McElrath et al., 2014). And, of course, marketing occurs outside the cafeteria, too. For instance, teachers often hand out coupons for fast-food franchises as a reward for students’ good work. Companies set up rewards programs (e.g., General Mills’ Box Tops for Education) to incentivize students’ families to purchase their products. And students often encounter food and beverage advertisements on donated equipment and educational materials.
Branded foods are especially common in the à la carte offerings that “compete” with regular school lunches and breakfasts and which are designed to appeal to those students who do not qualify for free or reduced-price meals or who want to purchase food with their own money. For example, according to a USDA study of the food served in public, non-charter schools in 2014-15, 87% of schools offered branded foods for à la carte purchase during
The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, passed by Congress in 2010, included a stipulation to improve the nutritional profile of these foods by the 2014-15 school year. This rule, known as “Smart Snacks in Schools,” places limits on the amount of fat, sugar, sodium, and calories of à la carte foods sold during the school day. In response, however, many Big Food manufacturers simply reformulated their products, creating Smart Snack-compliant versions of Doritos, Cheetos, Fruit by the Foot, and other popular items, using the same brand names and logos as the original, less-healthy items they continue to advertise and sell in stores. Thanks to these copycat snacks, they continue to rake in profits, but students are left confused as to whether these foods are healthy, and the overall nutritional environment of the school cafeteria suffers (Harris, Hyary, & Schwartz, 2016).
Taking back the school cafeteriaThere is a better way to serve meals to children, but it requires schools to break their ties to food service companies and Big Food corporations.
In a 2011 New York Times opinion piece, reporter Lucy Komisar described what she called the “increasingly cozy alliance” between companies that manufacture processed foods and the FSMCs that prepare and sell those foods in school cafeterias. These businesses are “making students . . . fat and sick while pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits,” she observed, citing research from the University of Michigan that found districts with privately managed cafeterias offered less healthy meals and made unhealthy snack items more widely available in schools. Further, the researchers found, many food service companies failed to deliver the economic savings they promised (Zullo, 2008). Compared to district-operated cafeterias, they spent less on food and labor, but they spent that much more on fees and supplies.
Districts with privately managed cafeterias offered less healthy meals and made unhealthy snack items more widely available in schools.
In those rare cases when private companies do run school meal programs at a lower cost (usually because they’ve replaced a district-operated program that was sorely mismanaged), they’ve done so mainly by exploiting their workers and securing kickbacks from food suppliers. For instance, while school-run cafeterias are staffed by district employees, FSMCs are able to hire hourly workers, paying them at lower rates and providing them with fewer benefits. A 2009 report on contracted food service workers in New Jersey’s K-12 public schools found that outsourced employees earned $4-$6 per hour less than those hired directly by districts (McCain, 2009). That’s the primary strategy by which these companies carve out their profits within the cash-strapped, not-for-profit world of public education.
Their other main strategy (used by large FSMCs, especially) is to leverage their bargaining power, obtaining rebates, discounts, and other benefits that make food prices lower than what an individual district would pay on its own. A union-funded 2010 study found that national FSMCs pay as much as 13% less for food than a typical district would pay for the same items. Further, FSMCs simply pocketed these cost savings until the 2009-10 school year (when the USDA required them to begin passing these savings on to school districts). They’ve compensated for this loss of extra revenue by increasing their management fees (MacDermott, 2010), or they’ve shifted more of their attention to less-regulated markets, such as university and college dining, where they can continue to seek these kickbacks (Apoliona-Brown et al., 2020).
Despite the shaky record of food service companies, parents and other community activists have long struggled to convince school board officials to bring food operations in-house (Stapleton, 2019). In recent years, advocacy groups have risen to the challenge, though. Earlier in 2020, for example, Real Food Generation (a nonprofit that seeks to leverage the power of youth and higher education institutions to shift money away from Big Food companies and toward real food economies) published a report that carefully documents the ways FSMCs manipulate prices for food and cafeteria supplies, both in the K-12 sector and in the food industry more broadly. Looking specifically at the “big three” companies (Aramark, Chartwells, and Sodexo), the report sheds much-needed light on how this secretive procurement system functions, how it harms communities, and how it reinforces the power of multinational corporations that have a terrible record of abusing food-chain workers and the environment (Apoliona-Brown et al., 2020).
Meanwhile, a number of other national nonprofits — including the Center for Good Food Purchasing, Urban School Food Alliance, Chef Ann Foundation, National Farm-to-School Network, and Food Corps — have organized efforts to improve school food procurement and preparation practices across the country. And in 2019, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) introduced a congressional bill, the Universal School Meals Program Act, that would provide free meals to all students, increase the federal reimbursement rate for school meals, and create incentives for schools to serve locally produced food.
These are positive steps, and we should applaud such efforts to hold our government accountable. We can and should expect our public schools to serve students nutritious, eco-friendly, and culturally relevant meals and to provide good-quality jobs for food and farm workers. It’s past time to prioritize students, workers, and communities over the needs of Big Food corporations."
References
Apoliona-Brown, P., Dunn-Wilder, E., Guthrie, L., Robbins, P., Steel, A., & Strader, K. (2020). Be-trayed: How kickbacks in the cafeteria industry harm our communities — and what to do about it. Cambridge, MA: Real Food Generation.
Gaddis, J.E. (2019). The labor of lunch: Why we need real food and real jobs in American public schools. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Harris, J.L. & Fox, T. (2014). Food and beverage marketing in schools: Putting student health at the head of the class. JAMA Pediatrics, 168 (3), 206-208.
Harris, J.L., Hyary, M., & Schwartz, M.B. (2016). Effects of offering look-alike products as smart snacks in schools. Childhood Obesity, 12 (6), 432-439.
Harvey, S.P., Markenson, D., & Gibson, C.A. (2018). Assessing school wellness policies and identifying priorities for action: Results of a bi-state evaluation. Journal of School Health, 88 (5), 359-369.
Held, L. (2020, June 29). As school meal programs go broke, a renewed call for universal free lunch. Civil Eats.
Jacobs, K. & Graham-Squire, D. (2010). Labor standards for school cafeteria workers, turnover and public program utilization. Berkeley Journal of. Employment and Labor Law, 31, 447.
Komisar, L. (2011, December 3). How the food industry eats your kid’s lunch. The New York Times.
MacDermott, T. (2010). Hard to swallow: Do private food service contractors shortchange New Jersey schools? Kinston, NH: Clarion Group.
McCain, M. (2009). Serving students: A survey of contracted food service work in New Jersey’s K-12 public schools. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Center for Women and Work.
Stapleton, S.R. (2019). Parent activists versus the corporation: A fight for school food sovereignty. Agriculture and Human Values, 36 (4), 805-817.
Terry-McElrath, Y.M., Turner, L., Sandoval, A., Johnston, L.D., & Chaloupka, F.J. (2014). Commercialism in U.S. elementary and secondary school nutrition environments: Trends from 2007 to 2012. JAMA Pediatrics, 168 (3), 234-242.
Thompson, E. (2020). Why nutritious meals matter in school. Phi Delta Kappan, 102 (1), 34-37.
Zullo, R. (2008). Privatized school food service and student performance in Michigan: A preliminary report. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations.
"Plant-based diets are more popular in Black communities than you might think. According to a Pew Research Center survey, 8 percent of Black Americans consider themselves strict vegans or vegetarians, compared to just 3 percent of the general population. A recent Gallup poll found that nearly a third of people of color in America reported cutting down on meat, compared to about a fifth of white Americans.
The plant-food industry is also now a multibillion dollar market, but what about Black-owned plant-based providers? Well, Misha’s Kind Foods is one. The vegan cheese brand recently secured an investment from NBA star Chris Paul and Lizzo even created a TikTok
“If you’re trying to live a plant-based diet and you want to give up dairy, one of the hardest things for most people is cheese,” said Aaron Bullock, CEO and co-founder of Misha’s Kind Foods. They also have no intention of forcing people to become vegans.
“The beautiful thing is that most of our customers are not vegans. They just want to try making a slight change,” explains chef and co-founder Ian Martin. “They buy it for their vegan daughter or pick it up for a spouse who can’t eat dairy and now the whole family eats it. You don’t have to be vegan to want to help the planet or eat more plant-based foods.”
Reviewed:
The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste into Wealth and Health by Lina Zeldovich University of Chicago Press, 259 pp., $26.00
A World Without Soil: The Past, Present, and Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath Our Feet by Jo Handelsman, Yale University Press, 262 pp., $28.00
"A few years ago I attended an open house at the Stickney Water Reclamation Plant, southwest of Chicago. It was a lovely Saturday morning, and I was surprised by how many people had decided to spend it touring a sewage treatment operation. The crowd was so big that we had to be divided into groups. My group first watched a video, which explained that the plant’s effluent would be released into the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, a thirty-mile-long waterway built in the late nineteenth century to rid the city of its ordure. After the video, we boarded a bus that shuttled us around the 413-acre complex. I was particularly struck by the aerated grit tanks, in which swirled a revolting brown liquid that resembled chocolate milk left out too long in the sun. At the tour’s conclusion, we all received goody bags containing a pair of plastic sunglasses and a postcard that cheerily proclaimed, “I followed the flush to the Stickney Water Reclamation Plant, the largest wastewater treatment plant in the world.”
I thought about my visit to Stickney several times while reading Lina Zeldovich’s The Other Dark Matter. Zeldovich, a journalist who now lives in New York, grew up in Russia, about five hundred miles east of Moscow. Her family had a small farm on the outskirts of the city of Kazan, and the farm had a small septic tank. Every fall her grandfather would don a hazmat suit and empty the contents of the tank into buckets. Then he would pour the glop around the tomato plants, under the apple trees, and into holes he dug in the strawberry patch. “My grandfather wouldn’t let all those riches go to waste,” she explains. In the spring, there would be more tomatoes, apples, and juicy red strawberries. The experience of watching her family’s filth transmogrified into food had a profound effect on Zeldovich, as she describes in a chapter titled “How I Learned to Love the Excrement.” Here was life coming full circle, from poop to produce and back again.
When Zeldovich immigrated to the US as an adolescent, she was dismayed to learn that most Americans were uninterested in sewage. She understood that New Yorkers didn’t have septic tanks or, for that matter, strawberry patches; still, it seemed to her there had to be a way to prevent all those “riches” from going to waste. Apparently the thought stayed with her, because when she grew up and became a journalist, she decided to specialize in what she calls “the science of poo.”
According to Zeldovich, the problem of how to deal with our “dark matter” has plagued humanity for millennia. As soon as people stopped moving around in pursuit of prey, the stuff began to pile up. Neolithic farmers may have had no idea of germ theory, but they were smart enough to know they didn’t want to live next to—or on top of—their own shit. They dug pits or ditches out in their fields to serve as open-air toilets. As the number of people living in close quarters grew, pits no longer sufficed. People turned to more sophisticated waste-disposal methods, usually involving water.
The first city known to have had a municipal sewage system was Knossos, on the island of Crete. At its height, around four thousand years ago, Knossos had some 100,000 inhabitants. Ceramic pipes directed its residents’ output to the sea, and the palace even had an early version of a flush toilet, with a bowl that could be emptied by pouring water from a pitcher.
Two thousand years later, Rome’s population was approaching a million, which meant it was producing ten times the excrement that Knossos had—roughly five hundred tons a day. The Romans built the Cloaca Maxima—the “greatest sewer”—to funnel waste into the Tiber. The tunnels of the Cloaca Maxima, “vaulted with close-fitting stones,” were so huge, the historian Strabo wrote, that there was “room enough even for wagons loaded with hay to pass through them.” The Romans also erected foricae, or public toilets, where dozens of people would sit, cheek by cheek, to do their business. (Primarily the lower classes used the foricae; the rich had private latrinae inside their homes.)
Even as sewage systems like Knossos’s and Rome’s solved one problem, they created new ones. Shit may not have been piling up on the streets, but now it was contaminating waterways. When cities like London and Paris became major commercial centers, in the Middle Ages, they too relied on rivers to rid them of their ordure. Ditto for New York and Chicago hundreds of years later. The dangers of this practice became acutely apparent when cholera, a waterborne disease, reached Europe and North America in the early 1830s.
Meanwhile, by flushing their waste out to sea, cities were forfeiting their collective “riches.” In 1843 Justus von Liebig, one of the pioneers of organic chemistry, lamented how much potentially valuable fertilizer was simply being washed away: “The quantity is immense which is carried down by the drains of London to the River Thames, serving no other purpose than to pollute its waters.” Inspired by Liebig, Edwin Chadwick, a prominent British lawyer and social reformer, advocated a system of “sewage farming,” by which London’s waste would be piped out to the countryside to be used as liquid manure. Some European cities—but not London—did indeed adopt sewage farming in the nineteenth century; Zeldovich reports that Berlin briefly ran a successful system. But the systems routinely ran into problems—too much of a good thing could cause land to become “sewage sick”—and eventually they were abandoned. The waste they had carried was once again directed out to sea.
At least in the Global North, much has changed since Chadwick’s day. Sewage treatment plants like Stickney manage, by and large, to keep raw sewage out of waterways, and this has mostly eliminated outbreaks of cholera as well as typhoid. But the practice of washing nutrients down the drain remains as big an issue as ever. “We are continuously taking nutrients from some parts of the planet and discharging them in others,” Zeldovich writes.
Of all the nutrients we’re redistributing, probably the most significant is nitrogen. It’s difficult for plants—and, by extension, plant eaters—to obtain nitrogen. In the air, it exists in a form—N2—that most living things can’t utilize. For hundreds of millions of years, plants have relied on specialized bacteria that “fix” nitrogen into a compound they can make use of. When people started farming, they figured out that legume crops, which harbor nitrogen-fixing bacteria in nodules on their roots, replenish soil. Manure and human waste, or “night soil,” also provide nitrogen for plants.
When synthetic fertilizer was invented, in the early twentieth century, the world was suddenly awash in nitrogen. This enabled people to grow a lot more food, which, in turn, enabled them to produce a lot more people, who produced a lot more shit. Via our wastewater treatment plants, we now introduce vast quantities of nitrogen into coastal environments, where it’s wreaking havoc. (Fertilizer runoff also contributes to the problem.)
Excess nitrogen in aquatic environments has many unfortunate consequences, one of the most visible being algae blooms. Depending on the algae, blooms can be toxic to fish and even humans. They can also produce aquatic dead zones, areas of low oxygen where few organisms can live. One of the world’s largest is in the Baltic Sea. Every summer, another large dead zone forms in the Gulf of Mexico, and officials in Washington State are concerned that dead zones could soon start forming in Puget Sound. “Fish and other marine life are struggling because most wastewater treatment plants currently do not have the technology in place to remove excess nutrients,” a recent press release from the state’s Department of Ecology explained.
As Zeldovich observes, our waste treatment methods have set up a vicious cycle. Since we don’t return our nitrogen output to our fields, as her grandfather did, our soils are getting depleted. They therefore require more synthetic fertilizer, which puts more nitrogen into the water. “Farm soils turn to dust while waterways suffocate from toxic algal blooms,” she writes.
It’s her contention, though, that “the sewage tide” is now turning. “Scientists and entrepreneurs all over the globe are finally looking at excrement in the same way as our thriftier ancestors did several centuries ago—as a resource, not as waste,” she writes. She spends much of The Other Dark Matter traveling to see the latest in toilet technology. In Israel she tests an apparatus that looks like a quilted tent. The unit, made by a company called HomeBiogas, converts poop into liquid fertilizer and also into methane, which can be used to power a stove. In Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, she visits a firm called Loowatt, which provides its customers with waterless latrines, then collects the contents and converts them—once again—into fertilizer and biogas. In the town of Elora, about fifty miles west of Toronto, she watches as fecal sludge is converted into a soil additive called LysteGro.
Zeldovich is an engaging writer. She loves puns and poop jokes. (Who doesn’t?) And her travels around the world are, in their own scatological way, inspiring. The projects she visits, though, are so small in scale that it’s hard to imagine them diverting more than a few buckets from the sewage tide. I don’t know how many units HomeBiogas would have to sell to treat as much waste as the Stickney plant, but probably the figure is in the millions. As Zeldovich herself notes, “In North America, most forms of sewage…are unwanted, so every municipality tries to get rid of them cheaply and quickly.” Will humanity ever get its shit together? Not in the foreseeable future, it seems.
Jo Handelsman, a plant pathologist who runs an interdisciplinary research center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is also interested in “dark matter.” Handelsman, however, uses the term to refer to soil. And the problem she’s concerned with is not that we have too much of the stuff, but too little. “The plight of the world’s soils is a silent crisis,” she writes in A World Without Soil.
According to the US Soil Taxonomy system, soil can be divided into twelve orders. These include gelisols, which are partially frozen and mainly found in the Arctic; oxisols, which are iron-rich and found mainly in the tropics; and mollisols, which are deep and dark and loaded with organic matter. The “silent crisis” Handelsman is concerned about encompasses all soil orders, but it’s the loss of mollisols that really worries her, since these feed the world. Ukraine, blessed with tens of thousands of square miles of mollisols, is known as “the breadbasket of Europe.” Every year, the country sheds more than 500 million tons of soil, and the losses are beginning to affect yields. Similar trends afflict the midwestern US. The mollisol-rich state of Iowa produces more corn and soybeans than most countries. The state has already “lost enough soil to see disturbing yield reductions, and the projections for the future are bleak,” Handelsman reports.
Agriculture requires rich soil, but most modern practices are, unfortunately, terrible for it. Prairie grasses are mostly perennials, with deep root systems. Plowing them up destroys the soil’s “architecture,” leaving it vulnerable to erosion. Trees have even deeper root systems; cutting down forests to carve out farmland leads to yet more erosion. The crops that replace trees and prairie grasses are usually annuals, with shallow root systems. These don’t hold soil well, and, in any event, get plowed up every year themselves. Corn, Handelsman writes, is a prime offender: “There is a saying among soil scientists that for every kilo of corn harvested, the field loses a kilo of soil.” A trillion kilos of corn, she notes, are harvested every year.
New soil is, of course, always being created as rocks break down and organic matter decomposes. But the process is far too slow to compensate for the damage that’s being done. The natural rate of soil production, according to Handelsman, is at best nine hundred pounds per acre per year. Around the globe, the annual loss from erosion now averages around six tons per acre per year. “That’s not sustainable!” she observes. And climate change is making matters worse. Increasingly, rain falls in intense bursts; the more force the water carries, the more soil it washes away. Fertilizer use can mask the effects of erosion, but only temporarily and at the expense of fish and other aquatic organisms. “As soil erosion intensifies worldwide, many countries may experience crop loss simultaneously, creating unprecedented food shortages,” Handelsman warns.
Like Zeldovich, Handelsman is concerned about feedback loops that turn big problems into insurmountable ones. Soils store tremendous amounts of carbon; according to Handelsman there’s three times as much carbon in the ground as in the atmosphere. When soils erode, carbon can be “mobilized” and released into the air, where it contributes to climate change. This leads to more erosion, and, well, you get the picture.
Handelsman extols traditional agriculture: “Long-lived agrarian societies tend their soils with care.” She points to the example of Papa Stour, one of Scotland’s Shetland Islands. For more than a thousand years, the inhabitants of Papa Stour practiced what’s known as plaggen agriculture, building up the island’s thin soils with copious quantities of manure, seaweed, and turf. She seems to suggest that today’s “silent crisis” could be solved, or at least ameliorated, by returning to traditional methods, but then admits this isn’t likely to happen. “These interventions may be too radical or difficult to scale up for widespread adoption,” she writes. And even if they were scalable, it isn’t really feasible to feed today’s world with medieval methods. It’s estimated that synthetic fertilizers support almost half of the 7.9 billion people now alive, and it’s tough to imagine how seaweed and manure and turf could make up for that (not to mention the fact that cutting turf is obviously damaging to the carved-up area). The addition of human waste might help, but Handelsman doesn’t go there.
Handelsman is a big advocate of no-till planting. “Conventional” planting on modern, industrialized farms involves turning over the top layer of soil before sowing. By contrast, no-till planting “preserves crop residue from the previous crop by drilling seeds directly into the soil through the stubble,” she explains. The practice preserves the soil’s architecture, significantly cuts down on carbon emissions, and improves water absorption. Compared with conventional planting, it reduces erosion by roughly three quarters. When the practice was first introduced, or rather reintroduced, in the 1970s, it was projected that by 2010 nearly 80 percent of the major crops grown in the US would be produced via no-till planting. In 2021 the figure was only 21 percent.
Farmers prefer tilling because it controls weeds. Those who “transition to no-till practices must adopt alternative weed-control measures,” Handelsman writes. These methods often involve herbicides, which cause problems of their own. One of the most widely used herbicides in the US is atrazine. The compound is suspected of being an endocrine disruptor and has been banned by the European Union. The US’s most popular herbicide is glyphosate, which is the active ingredient in Roundup. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer has identified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. Handelsman is well aware of the hazards of herbicides but argues that these have to be weighed against other significant dangers, like climate change and “a world without soil.” “We aren’t even having the right conversation about risk,” she writes.
Handelsman is clearly frustrated by the world’s indifference to soil, without which, she points out, the surface of the planet would be barren and moonlike. She doesn’t seem to have much faith in her own ability to capture the public’s attention—she notes that only half the adults in the US read even a single nonfiction book per year—but instead wonders if a soil-themed video game might do the trick. Alternatively, perhaps Hollywood could produce “a scientifically accurate and spellbinding box office hit movie” that would finally raise awareness about soil. I had a hard time imagining the plot, but its title could be Let’s Get Dirty."
