Over 187 Billion Served: Food Safety in the National School Lunch Program

Abstract

This paper explores the problem of food safety in the National School Lunch Program. After a brief history of the program and an account of its current operations and structure, particularly its mechanisms for ensuring food safety, I probe the nature and scope of the problem, various organizational and regulatory failings, and specific proposals for improvement. The issue of school food safety has been used as a vehicle for a larger critique of the federal food safety regulatory system; one of the principal suggestions for improving the national school lunch program involves the creation of a single federal food safety agency, where there are now at least 12 agencies with some jurisdiction. While the single agency proposal has not gotten much traction, a controversial safety proposal—serving irradiated food in the school lunch program—did become enacted in 2003. The final part of this paper examines the irradiation policy, and, in my view, its subsequent failure, as the National School Lunch program went through reauthorization in 2004 and prepares for the next decade.