Twilight Greenaway

Bringing Healthy School Lunch to the Table

Like victory gardens, home canning, and depression-era resource conservation, Slow Food USA’s Gordon Jenkins believes the idea of healthy school lunches is one worth revisiting.

“The school lunch program was created in 1946 as a measure of national security,” says Jenkins. “The goal was to make sure that our nation’s children were healthy, because only then would the whole nation be productive.”

Four decades later, most of us take for granted the fact that schools serve lunch, and that the federal government subsidizes many of them. Whether they have anything to do with students’ health is another story. “A lot of today’s adults remember school lunch when it was institutional Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes,” says Jenkins. “It wasn’t delicious, but no one expected it to be. Now, the cheapest fast food and junk food is in our cafeterias and it’s fueling the obesity epidemic.”

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Fringe Benefits: a Look at Underground Dining

The roving supper combines eating out with eating in

The small apartment flickers with candlelight. Chairs cluster around the table in the dining room, while two long, low tables crowd the living room. After a few minutes of mingling and introductions, each claims a place to sit and the evening begins.

This Saturday-night event, held in Oakland, California, might be just another dinner party, with a bohemian, homey feel. But the meal — staged by the Ghetto Gourmet, a self-styled “wandering supperclub” — includes 30 diners, two cooks, five volunteer servers and a mid-course comedian, all crammed into a single apartment. And the four-course menu features sweet-potato tortellini, seared ahi tuna, shrimp consommé with homemade seafood sausage, and braised grass-fed beef short ribs.

Only a handful of the guests here tonight actually know the woman in whose home they’re dining. Most are here — in one way or another — because of the Internet. Read more on Culinate