The Great American Food System™ is productive when measured by output, but it is not particularly good at producing wholesome and healthy food for the American people. The nature of healthy food has been argued for the past sixty years, with various food plates, pyramids, and other arrays used to illustrate recommendations of the day. These have been devised by the Department of Agriculture and interested parties such as the American Heart Association. The most recent version is the inverted pyramid proposed by the current Secretary of Health and Human Services. Throughout this process, Big Food and Big Ag have also been involved in the establishment of dietary guidelines, directly and indirectly through support of organizations such as the AHA.
We have discussed this history on several occasions, beginning with the Diet-Heart Hypothesis (here and here) that demonized dietary fat and cholesterol as unhealthy. As a consequence, beginning in the 1970s refined carbohydrates replaced fat in the American diet. [1] The much discussed obesity epidemic ensued. While carbohydrates are often viewed as the logical cause of the increase in obesity and its concomitants such as Type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome, during the same period ultra-processed foods became a dietary “staple,” especially in the United States and the United Kingdom. Marion Nestle, who is the leading scholar on American diet and health, published What to Eat in 2006. Last year she published a revised edition, What to Eat Now: The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why it Matters, which we discussed last December. She is the best guide to the true nature of our food system at her website FoodPolitics.com.
Why and how have we gotten into this mess? It is a long and complicated story. Beginning with The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977), Wendell Berry has shown in his fiction, nonfiction, and poetry how agriculture was transformed inexorably into just another sector of the post-industrial economy. Except that it isn’t. This transformation has been accompanied by the ongoing destruction of the land, people, and culture of rural America. Thus, we as a people have forgotten that eating is, or should be, an agricultural act and not part of the simple consumption that keeps the economy “healthy.” The lamentable Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture from 1971 to 1976, summarized this transformation when he advised American farmers to “Get big or get out!” Secretary Butz meant that “farmers” should plant commodity crops from fence row to farm road on thousand-acre, and larger, industrial sites that are not farms as people generally conceive of them. This is exceptionally well described in Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture (2002, large format edition with photographs). This brings us to what is known as the Farm Bill, which determines how the American agriculture industry (sic) works. [2]
The largest component of the Farm Bill is nutrition assistance in the form of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, previously known as Food Stamps) and the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP). That so many Americans need SNAP to have enough to eat is absurd, but that is for another time. Title I of the Farm Bill is “Commodities”:
Title I, Commodity Programs: Provides farm payments when crop prices or revenues decline for major commodity crops, including wheat, corn, soybeans, peanuts, rice, dairy, and sugar. Includes disaster programs to help livestock and tree fruit producers manage production losses due to natural disasters. Other support includes margin coverage program for dairy and marketing quotas, minimum price guarantees, and import barriers for sugar. (emphasis added)
While these commodity crops can be food (the wheat, corn, peanuts, and sugar cane grown through the 1970s by the farmers of my grandfather’s generation were food), under the rubric of the Farm Bill, they are the primary inputs (actual feed stocks in this case) for the industrial production of ultra-processed foods that fill the center aisles of American supermarkets (see What to Eat Now) and animal feed for the industrial production of meat (beef, pork, and chicken) in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). Much of the corn (maize) produced in the Corn Belt centered in Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa is used for the production of ethanol as an additive to gasoline and high-fructose corn syrup, which is the sweetener for UPFs. Soybeans are used primarily for production of vegetable oil and animal feed, and as we learned earlier in year one of Trump v2.0 a very large percentage of the American soybean crop is, or more correctly was, exported to China ($17.92B in 2022 versus $3.08B in 2025 for a decrease of 83%). Thus, a large part of the income of industrial farmers comes from the export of basic industrial commodities, not food.
How can we change this? The lift will be heavy, but as Jennifer Justus shows in her article in The Bitter Southerner, All Praise to the Lunch Ladies, these women have shown us the way. The only thing we must do is change our priorities by subsidizing the production of real food instead of industrial inputs used to produce the food-like substances that dominate our diet. This is simple in concept but difficult-to-impossible in the post-Citizen United politics of one dollar-one vote in the name of free speech. Nevertheless, proof-of-principle is being demonstrated in school lunchrooms across the nation, despite the abject fickleness of our current and past governments.
Ms. Justus begins with her grandmother, Mrs. Beulah Culpepper, who began a long second working life outside the home at the age of 43. When her youngest child of eight (Jennifer Justus’s father) began school in 1950 his mother went with him as an assistant lunch lady. She eventually became the manager of the cafeteria and retired in the early 1980s. She was known for her “vegetable soups, yeast rolls, and peanut butter cookies.” I began first grade in 1961 (no public pre-K or K then) and we quickly learned to love our lunchroom ladies, who also made vegetable soup, yeast rolls at least three days a week, and peanut butter cookies. All of this was made from scratch or nearly so. The food was good, if basic, and it was real food. The Blue Ridge Elementary School cafeteria was also Beulah Culpepper’s restaurant that county employees also dropped in to join the students for lunch. [3] Mrs. Culpepper was also a force to be reckoned with, like most of her successors:
Students who brought their lunch, often because they couldn’t afford the cafeteria meal, sat on benches along the perimeter. Granny tried to be discreet in making sure those kids had plenty. “What have you got to eat today?” Dad remembers her asking, peeking into their bags and sometimes finding nothing but a leftover biscuit. “She would give them anything she could get her hands on,” he says. She left out extra bowls of grits and gravy or commodity foods for students to share. At least once, the principal scolded her for giving away food for free. “Do I make money for this lunchroom?” she asked him. Yes. “Do I lose money for this lunchroom?” No. “Well, don’t you ever get on to me again for giving those kids food,” my mother remembers Granny recounting. “No kid will ever leave this lunchroom hungry.”
How have things changed since Beulah Culpepper ran the cafeteria in Blue Ridge? The job is getting more difficult, but these public servants – not bureaucrats – are working hard to make sure that children who are their responsibility are properly fed and cared for. And when possible, the food is local rather than in the form of packaged UPFs that arrive frozen from the distributor, ready to be heated and served if not eaten. These UPFs are undoubtedly viewed as cheaper than food prepared from scratch. Maybe so, but only if the negative externalities remain uncounted, and these include what the children eat as well as what these food-like substances (e.g., chicken nuggets) cost. Stephanie Dillard of Enterprise City Schools in South Alabama works hard:
“to get fresh, locally grown food onto kids’ plates. Last year that meant satsumas from a neighboring county to serve with roasted chicken and broccoli. It meant local strawberries and…a special shrimp bowl with the region’s beloved Conecuh sausage.
…
“The greatest joy is just knowing that we are feeding children healthy meals. So many families rely on us daily…I just want to continue to see that all children have equal access to the meals.”
…
Regarding challenges: “Number one, we need more funding, so we can increase scratch cooking and more farm-to-school programs…With the MAHA movement, they’re pushing, obviously, more scratch cooking, and that’s great and grand. I have no problem with less processed foods in schools, but we need the funding to be able to support it.”
Stephanie Dillard is too optimistic about MAHA, which is mostly unnecessary performance art for the Professional Managerial Class. For example:
Kennedy (RFKJr) has advocated for healthier school food even as the Trump administration has cut millions in funding that would make that possible, including eliminating the Local Foods for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program and Patrick Leahy Farm to School Grants.
…
Samantha Goyret and Caroline Ideus, co-directors of the Northwest Tennessee Local Food Network, had a statewide farm-to-school plan ready to implement – at least until the funding was cut.
…
Local farmers earned market values or their products while schools amped up nutrition in ways that appealed to kids. “It’s like, OK we’re finally finding solutions to these problems…Then the government’s like, No, we’re not going to fund you anymore. So, good luck. Just try to figure it out on your own.
Despite all this inconstancy, the students loved the local butter lettuce and purple hull peas that were obtained through a federal grant. Of course, they would! And at the same time, they were learning about their own local food culture, however attenuated it has become
Grants like that provide access for kids to have things they wouldn’t normally have…We were able to provide fresh ground beef….We’re still doing it, but not the (same) extent…It was such a blessing I (Lisa Seiber-Garland of Trenton, Tennessee) didn’t want it to stop. I told my farmers I will do what I can to still buy. One had planted his strawberries (Tennessee, not California) and his watermelons and everything to meet what we needed for that year. And then we lost the grant.
And so it goes with the Great American Food System™. Everything depends on who gets the subsidies. Must they always go to the industrial commodity “farmers”? No. Is it possible for the subsidies to go to local and regional farmers who grow food, animal and vegetable, for the people to eat? Yes. The Farm Bill has become through its requirements an exact analog of Military Keynesianism. Commodity crops are subsidized for the good of industrial agriculture and to keep the money flowing upwards to Big Ag and Big Food. This has come at the cost of unsettling of America, the end of food, and the rise of what John Ruskin called illth as opposed to health.
The general political response is that this is all necessary. It is not. The lunchroom ladies (and fellas, in Jennifer Justus’s words) have shown us a better way. They have done the proof of principle experiments that all granting agencies require before awarding a scientist her grant to study something new. The only thing we must do is switch the subsidies and truly regenerative farming will be possible across North America. The expertise and ingenuity are there. Industrial commodity “farmers” could do this, if they are encouraged to work in a revised system that prioritizes real food for humans. And then perhaps the local supermarket will have more local food to sell except for the items at the endcap of one aisle that is labeled “Georgia or Kentucky or Alabama Grown.” One can buy only so much local blackberry preserves and cornmeal, but there is no natural limit to local meat and vegetables under a new Farm Bill that is the inverse of the old, provided we are willing to “eat in season” as much as possible. Would transformation of the rural landscape into a truly agricultural space from the ground up be better for all than an alternative transformation into a land of data centers that operate from the Cloud down? Yes. This will also be necessary as climate chaos gets worse and the world must get smaller in adaptation to our changed world.
And finally, to the lunchroom ladies (and fellas) out there, in Jennifer Justus’s words: “Blessed are the women (and men) who watch over America’s children.” You have also shown us the way to revive local economies and food cultures, everywhere. Thank you. It is up to the rest of us to pay attention and get things done.
Notes
[1] The journalist Gary Taubes is a good place to start with the history of nutrition and the post-WWII food system. His long-form analyses such as Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007) and The Case Against Sugar (2017) remain standard accounts, and throughout his work he has identified most of the relevant research, that done well and otherwise, since the thorough industrialization of agriculture commenced after WWII. He is a lightning rod, however, and this should be kept in mind.
[2] Daniel Imhoff’s Food Fight: A Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill is in my reading the best description of the Farm Bill, its construction and its consequences. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition seems to be a good source of current information on the American Food System; NSAC supporters are listed here. Organizations working closer to the ground include The Land Institute and The Berry Center. The Land Institute was founded by Wes Jackson, whose book An Inconvenient Apocalypse was discussed at length here three years ago.
[3] This was not as uncommon as imagined. The Chairman of the Board of Education in my hometown was also my Little League Baseball coach and my grandmother’s sometime lawyer while she was the only local woman building contractor in business in the 1950s and 1960s. Later when I was in grades 4-5-6 he and his colleagues could be found eating lunch in the lunchroom, which was closest to his downtown law office. My first job as a college freshman was working at the food distribution warehouse in a county that was one of the last in the nation to substitute the distribution of surplus food for the Food Stamp program. Once a month, families ranging from a single to thirteen members picked up enough real food to supplement their diets. Inmates at the adjacent minimum-security prison did most of the labor. That prison was also a diversified farm that raised vegetables, cattle, and hogs, plus hay. All that was served in the cafeteria and dining room was made from scratch or grown at the facility, from biscuits and cornbread to green beans and pork chops and roast beef, barbecue and beef stew. County employees could eat there for free. It was quite the fringe benefit when I was making $2.00 an hour for 20 hours a week.
20 comments
Comments are closed.
Whilst I agree with your choice of references, I would go back further and highlight the work of Professor John Yudkin whose 1972 book “Pure, White and Deadly” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure,_White_and_Deadly clearly laid out
the problems with sugar. It certainly changed my use of sugar. Unfortunately he was up against Ancel Keys ( The Mediterranean Diet guy) who said that fat was the problem and whose influence meant that a great opportunity was lost for decades. Professor Robert Lustig’s work in 2009 reinvigorated the focus on sugar and as it says in the wiki “The subsequent interest led to the rediscovery of Yudkin’s book and the rehabilitation of his reputation”
John Yudkin is indeed a scientific hero in this story. We discussed his work in this link. Gary Taubes’s recent The Case Against Sugar is useful, too.
Ancel Keys is an interesting study. In my view he received one of the first large grants from the United States Public Health Service to prove that fat and cholesterol are unhealthy, and that is just what he did. It was not a coincidence that he did his survey of the Greek diet during Orthodox Lent, when the majority of Greeks were fasting as I understand it…just one problem with his research. An odd tidbit from Marion Nestle is that she identifies Keys as a cardiologist. He was not, as far as I can tell. He did get his picture on the cover of Time magazine, though.
I’d like to recommend the documentary King Corn that features interviews with Earl Butz and delineates how ethanol, HFCS, SNAP all came to be in an easily digestible manner.
Many thanks for this essay. I also enjoyed the underlying article by Jennifer Justus with its wonderful photo essay of real cooks.
Cooking from scratch. Well, who’da thunkit?
The destruction of the U.S. diet was encouraged as part of the capitalist project from the 1950s on. I happen to have some older U.S. cookbooks, which are now exotics in the Chocolate City. Cookbooks from before the mid-1950s are chockful of recipes and ingredients — including ingredients that some contemporary food writers claim didn’t exist in the U S of A, like the eggplant or broccoli or fiddlehead ferns or duck eggs or kumquats.
The cookbooks I have from around 1960 are suddenly invaded by Jell-O. Everywhere. Even in cake recipes — and according to Italians, a real U.S. layer cake is a glorious thing. [Leave out the pudding mix, ne.]
Marketing and “industrialization” made things worse, indeed. There was also a kind of prejudice that grandma and the can on bacon grease on the stove and nonna and the eggplant put up in reused jars were somehow out of step with what real food is.
So USanians got Jell-O molds with stuffed green olives in them. And frozen pizzas with inedible cheese and cottonseed oil, hydrolyzed, in what passes for the crust.
The church ladies of my youth made “congealed salad” out of Jell-O. Sometimes it was clear and contained fruit cocktail (canned diced fruit in heavy syrup) and pecans. Sometimes it was cloudy because of added sour cream and included marshmallows, a veritable congeries of early UPF. I liked to sprinkle salt on it and watch it melt, one of my first experiments I suppose. IIRC Bluto Blutarsky (John Belushi) scarfed down a whole dessert plate of Jell-O in the 1962 Faber College dining hall before the food fight in Animal House (a fine movie).
You are undoubtedly right about our poor food choices but I’m not sure starchy and overcooked Southern cooking was ever considered health food. Vitamin deficiency diseases among the poor were common. My grandparents did have plenty of whole milk though since their farm included a cow or two. And there were hogs to kill so as to get through the winter and the chickens were always free range. Back then, for the poor farmers around here, it was less about convenience food and more about survival food.
Of course all of this was a lot healthier than McDonald’s every day. Plus all the hard work likely kept waistlines in check.
What a great article with “lunch lady” heroines. It shows that food and eating meals are not just calories but about sharing, caring and basic human kindness. Reminds me of the movie “Fried Green Tomatoes”
The Sodexho/Sysco lobby is too strong and local school district admin bloat (even here in NPR-land) means that the administration would rather be stingy on food if it means keeping an assistant superintendent.
Even at my brother’s cost-is-no-object public school district, there is a limit to spending—and it’s the food. they also outsource to Sodexho, like our district, lmao
and it’s a ‘collective action’ problem….(some) parents do care, but mobilizing is the problem. and just sending a better bag lunch with the kids is an easier option, except on days that the love the menu on offer.
Southern food may have some faults, and pellagra etc were problems in past poverty-stricken decades. But as recently as the 1980s, 40% of southerners had personal food gardens, many quite sizeable. The classic Southern blue plate had fresh cornbread, sometimes milled from homegrown corn, and three or four vegetables; green beans, fresh tomatoes, field peas or butterbeans, and whatever else was in season: often this was healthy greens modern kids never see now, or salad or root vegetables. The fats used were what we now call ‘good fats’; butter and fats derived from cooking or rendering meats at home. It was remarkably free from industrial processing. Compared to the SAD diet, it was pretty great.
It has transmuted since then into a blue plate featuring deep-fried meat, mac and cheese, industrial corn nuggets, broccoli soaked in commercial cheese sauce, and your choice of jalapeno cornbread or industrial rolls. And fewer people grow their own fresh veg.
Downtown, the people who used to cook fresh foods for the kids are retired, and the remaining skeleton crew now heats up trays of industrially processed crud. The kids would be better off with classic Southern cooking.
My first job in late 60’s as computer programmer was working for a Food Science professor, working on how much actual nutrition was consumed by lower grade school children. The FDA had details on what a serving of most anything would provide. We took 4 random plates from kids on a sample basis, which was mean, but they got to get back in front of the line. Those samples were sent to labs to see what nutrition was there when served. Next we took 25 plates from kids as they returned them after finishing. The contents left of each serving on each plate was weighed and recorded. They of course did not eat all of each serving.
She showed that a)the served food(especially commissary style where it was cooked hours earlier, and delivered) had less nutrition than predicted by FDA handbook, and b) accounting for what was really eaten, the numbers were dismally low, not reaching the required federal guidelines.
I worked as a lunch lady after my kids were grown and loved it. When I was growing up in the public schools in Honolulu, back in the 1960s to 1970s, the food was good! The cooks made the hamburger buns, the salad dressing, the shoyu chicken. We had Hawaiian food on May Day. I graduated high school in 1972. It was as Mr. KLG remembers his school lunch. My husband went to a Catholic grammar school in Honolulu renowned for their school lunches. The ladies would even pick mangoes over the summer and can mango purées and things to serve the kids during the school year. Who would do that nowadays? And they would play with the USDA menu. If homemade sweet rolls were on the menu, they would turn them into ensaymadas. Yum!!
But as an adult I moved eventually to the Mainland and worked in an elementary school kitchen as a lunch lady. We were never given enough food to feed the kids, except for the fries. I remember a woman came once from a head office and told us we’re weren’t giving enough salad. If we had given the salad serving we were supposed to have given, we would have run out of salad half way through service! She didn’t get it. And all the women I worked with really cared about the kids and loved to cook. We just weren’t given the opportunity. One of my hobbies is collecting and reading old home ec textbooks from the 1930s to 1950s, before we got so confused about nutrition. I think RFK Jr. is one of the biggest jerks and jokes on the planet and his inverted pyramid is quite ridiculous, doesn’t he know inverted pyramids are sure to fall over? Anyway, he does have a point about industrial food, and ultra processed food. Of course now he’s Mr. I Support Glyphosate. Hypocrite and fool. My 2 cents.
And, just to add, I love The Bitter Southerner.
Would love to know some titles you’ve read/collected. I have a few inherited from my grandmothers, including a precious, crumbling copy of “Breakfast, Dinner, and Supper” by Maud C. Cook from 1897 that recommends the reader keep raw cranberries in their pocket to eat throughout the day as a cure for dyspepsia, and a Woman’s Home Companion cookbook from the 1940s that lists seven food groups (tomatoes and citrus are a separate group from other fruits & veg) “in accordance with the governments nutrition program”.
Hi Stephanie, I’m sorry this is so late, I hope you still see it. I’m moving soon so lots of my books are in boxes, and I can’t remember all the titles and authors, bI have my grandmother’s high school cooking textbook, 1915. She got married first, then several years later, went back to get her HS diploma. She obviously didn’t care very much about cooking because the book is full of iterations of her new married name, in her beautiful handwriting! But my two newest books are HS texts also. The first is Every Day Foods, by Jessie Harris and Elisabeth Lacey Speer, edited by Alice F. Blood, PhD, 1933. The second is The Family’s Food, by Gorell, McKay, and Zuill, edited by Benjamin R. Andrew’s, PhD, 1937. I get most of my books from EBay or Etsy, unless I can find them cheaper on Thriftbooks, or another used book store.
And, yes! Seven food groups! I stick to about 1930- 1960, or thereabouts, because earlier I find the cultural context of food and cooking to be almost too different. And later than about 1960 and you’re into the really processed foods, the nutritional information is dumbed down, and the writers want the recipes to be “quick “.
I hope this is helpful. I have never met someone else who reads old home ec books! And I apologize for the lateness.
I did come back to take a peek – thank you! Two titles to hunt for. Funny about your grandmother’s doodles – my grandmother also had almost no interest in cooking, and would have had a good laugh if she knew how much time I’ve spent reading her old cookbook.
Great essay, thanks KLG.
Getting actual food into schools is doable, but apparently there is also some infrastructure needed. Our local elementary school has a really nice program where the 4th grade kids would plant a garden in the spring before school got out, and then harvest it in the fall as 5th graders when school started up again. Then they’d cook a banquet and serve it to the younger kids. Great program, and I volunteered to help keep up the garden during the summer while school was out. I later asked the woman who headed the program if it could be expanded so that the food grown on school grounds could become a more regular part of everyday school meals. She said that as things currently stand they could not do that, because most of the cooking equipment went away years ago and all the school had now were ovens designed to heat up the frozen trays of ultra processed junk.
Love the lunch ladies. Thank you, KLG!
As for the US Ultra Processed Food industry, when people tell you who they are, believe them:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/25/campbell-soup-executive-comments
From 11/25 — Still germane.
i put the bitter southerner thing on my local faceborg feed.
that kinda shit is important to me, but its been difficult to getany interest that leads to actionable endeavors.
our ISD, even way the hell out here, is part of the club as far as corpse cafeteria having taken over….and betty, the head lunchlady for 30+ years, is now retired, with frelled knees and working in an icehouse on the river, making smash burgers.
she and i have a mutual respect thing that is still ongoing..;.so we talk, whenever im out there.
and she has nothing good to say about what has happened to the kitchen she ran for so long.
i, in my turn, talk about things like this, and farm to school…and shes all for it…but wheres the $?
and how do we counter the bottom line thinking on these matters at the local level.
as for supply….there are others doing better than me at the small scale farming, but i dont get out enough to have met them.
(this another of my pioneer stories,lol…i changed the menu of this place with bold cookng, and i also introduced alt-ag to this place…took me 30 years, and i get no credit for either triumph,lol)
point is, if there were $ in some kind of structured thing…where tiny-small farmers could count on it, that could lay the bedrock upon which a community rejuvenates itself..with a real local economy…instead of the one our local ptb have decided on: which is deer hunting, birdhunting, and wine tours….and, of course, land speculation,lol, because that always turns out so well for the Help.
Wikipedia led me to 1977 debate between Earl Butz and Wendell Berry https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M_zCCy46QXo
Then there’s what the French do for school lunches. I’ve heard first hand from French work colleagues (this was over a decade ago though), and seen Youtube videos delving into it. Multiple courses, with vegetables. https://www.chowhound.com/1597242/difference-between-french-and-american-school-lunch/
The flip side is what would many American kids eat? Processed foods, to the point of literally sucking down food pouches well into adolescence. I’ve run into too many adults who barely eat vegetables.
You and I grew up not too far away, though probably a decadeish apart. Last i checked the yeast rolls were still there!