In October of 2020, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Republican President Donald Trump declared a National School Lunch Week and initiated a USDA program to guarantee all schoolchildren, regardless of income, access to a free school lunch.

Since the pandemic has eased and the federal program expired, though, the issue of free lunch for school kids has fallen back into a more predictable partisan divide.  Despite this trend, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, now the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate,  championed the issue, expanding school lunch programs across the state.

Jennifer Gaddis, an Associate Professor of Civil Society & Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin School of Human Ecology, studies school food politics. She is also the author of The Labor of Lunch, Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools, which was published by University of California Press in 2019.  Prof. Gaddis called in to the Monday Buzz to talk about her research.

Photo of Jennifer Gaddis courtesy of UW School of Human Ecology.

Book cover courtesy of University of California Press website.

Web posting by Monday Buzz producer Nicholas Wootton

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