Michael Pollan

Because Tim Walz gets the importance of free breakfast and lunch in public schools

One of Tim Walz’s most popular achievements as governor of Minnesota was to sign into law a 2023 bill that made breakfast and lunch available to all public school students regardless of their ability to pay. When the Right attacked the policy and him as too liberal, he promptly shut them down: “What a monster! Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn.”

Walz is onto something big and Kamala Harris should take note. Universal school breakfast and lunch—which was national policy during the pandemic—needs to be part of the Harris-Walz agenda. Hungry children are not set up to learn, and offering school lunch on the basis of need stigmatizes eligible children, limiting uptake. 

But the Harris campaign needs to push this powerful idea even further. By building on Walz’s policy, we can solve a great many more problems than hunger. Consider a proposal first broached by Alice Waters, the restaurateur and former Montessori teacher, for something she calls school supported agriculture (SSA). The idea is quite simple but its implications are huge. Indeed, SSA has the potential not only to improve the health of our children, but to mitigate climate change, reform our food system, and spark an economic renaissance in rural America. 

SSA would mandate that the Department of Agriculture, which already funds school lunches to the tune of $17 billion a year, require school districts receiving federal funds to purchase food for school lunches from organic and regenerative farms in the community. 

Will it cost more? Not nearly as much as you might think, since right now much of what the USDA spends on school lunch goes not to farmers or school lunch chefs but to the corporate middlemen who turn cheap industrial farm commodities into the ultra-processed foods schools now feed out children. Cut out these middlemen and the savings can be used to feed more children, bring cooks back to the cafeteria, and support farmers.

Indeed, the beauty of SSA is that it solves several problems at once. First and foremost is the problem of the health of our children. Today 70 percent of their diet consists of ultra-processed foods, which have been linked to weight gain and several chronic diseases, including diabetes. SSA will replace the frozen pizzas and chicken nuggets now on the school menu with real nutritious food cooked by human beings.

The second problem SSA solves is that of a food system dominated by the small handful of corporations who concoct the ultra-processed food and have a lock on the market. Cutting out these corporations will allow farmers to harvest a larger percentage of our food dollars and keep that money in their communities, providing a badly needed boost to rural America.

The third problem SSA has the potential to solve is agriculture’s reliance on monoculture and the chemicals needed to sustain it. Industrial agriculture is one of the biggest contributors to climate change. Farmers participating in SSA will want to diversify their crops in order to supply schools, since they will need a lot more variety than commodity corn and soybeans. By assuring a steady market for organic and regeneratively grown food, SSA will provide the incentive for farmers to make the transition.

That transition is critical if we are ever to solve the problem of climate change. One-third of the carbon now in the atmosphere was once in the soil, before the advent of agriculture. Regenerative agriculture comprises a series of practices—including rotational grazing and cropping, no-till, and arboriculture—that have been shown to put large amounts of that carbon back where it belongs: in our soils.

The last problem SSA could solve is that of the food movement, whose momentum has stalled in the face of industry opposition and a failure to democratize access to sustainably grown food. SSA has the potential to galvanize the movement, by bringing together all its constituents: activists focused on social justice and food access; a public health community worried about rising rates of obesity and chronic diseases linked to diet; climate activists and other environmentalists, educators, and of course the farmers that we all depend on, but who have drifted away from the Democratic Party. And if the Right complains such a program is too liberal or expensive, let Tim Walz take them on. “What a monster! Kids are eating, so are our farmers, and by the way, we’re feeding the soil too.”

Michael Pollan is the author of nine books, including The Omnivore's Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind. He teaches writing at Harvard.