Needham elementary school lunches have changed quite a bit in the decades since I was a student at Broadmeadow. Each morning, our teacher would collect cash from the kids who wanted to buy that day’s lunch, stuff it in a metal Band-Aid container, and send the money down to the cafeteria so the workers knew how many meals to prepare for lunch. My favorite days were when they served pizza rectangles or tuna salad sandwiches, but others – such as American Chop Suey day – I was very happy to have brought lunch from home.
Now 40 years later, the cash and Band-Aid container are long gone, as basic meals are free, and my daughter has a four-digit code she enters into a computer to pay for any supplemental food she wishes to purchase. The other significant change is that instead of offering just one meal choice as they did when I was a kid, the cafeteria now provides an array of options. The main meal varies day to day and includes chicken in various forms, cheese nachos, pastas, hot dogs, hamburgers, “breakfast” foods such as assorted cereals, and different styles of pizza. Students who are not psyched about a given day’s main meal can choose from alternative options, including bagels, soft pretzels, and sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwiches.
Our daughter says that over the course of the year, she had each of the alternative options at least once, except for one: the chicken Caesar salad. When I asked her if any of her classmates routinely got the salad, she rattled off five or six names, all of whom are girls. According to her, rarely would any male students get the salad.
With this information in mind, I thought about cultural norms and how children learn expected gender roles and behaviors at such an early age. Since our daughter was in kindergarten, we have had to counter messages she has picked up, like science, math, and sports are for boys, but not girls. Add “salad is a girl food” to the list.
Then I remembered a lesson that I learned at the very beginning of my nutrition career: cultural norms vary between settings. My first job as a dietitian was a research position that had me traveling the country gathering data regarding elementary school lunches and eating behaviors. On a typical day, I left my hotel room early in the morning in order to get to the school as soon as it opened so I could observe the cafeteria staff’s process for preparing the day’s food from the very beginning. My job involved taking a detailed look at the foods and their nutrient profiles, documenting the school’s food environment – including photographing the cafeterias and any nutrition-related signage that may have existed – and observing the children as they ate their meals.
The variations between locations were striking. In one Chicago suburb, eating vegetables was considered “uncool.” Because students were more likely to use veggies as ammunition for food fights rather than for consumption, cafeteria supervisors intercepted the kids exiting the lunch line and removed the vegetables from their trays before they sat down. I remember looking into a trash can and seeing thousands of peas that were served but never had a chance to be eaten. In contrast, I visited a Tennessee hill town where the school was trying to figure out what to do about students trying to eat too many vegetables from the self-serve salad bar. I watched the cashiers ring up students with one hand and pick vegetables off the trays with their other hand in order to keep portion sizes in line with system guidelines.
Given the contrasts, one could reasonably argue that cultural norms regarding what, when, and how much to eat are not inherent to age or gender, but are rather externally created and imparted upon our children. “Salad is a girl food” – or at least it is here in Needham, where very young girls have already picked up said message – but the situation could be different. What would school lunch selections look like if we taught our children to base their eating decisions upon internal cues rather than external expectations?