A 9-year-old black kid at Palm Elementary School in Lorain, Ohio, refused to eat the boxed waffles that had been placed on her lunch plate on Nov. 21. A White cafeteria monitor compelled the girl to grab them from the garbage and eat them at a table after she tossed them away. Both the monitor and the school principal were ousted within weeks. The narrative, however, did not end there. The district published footage of the incident in January, and it is being used as evidence in a civil rights complaint.
Whatever the outcome of the lawsuit, it has highlighted flaws in the country's long-standing commitment to feeding the more than 30 million public school pupils who rely on the National School Lunch Program every day. It also highlights the tragic, fixable problem of how institutions handle critical food resources, from our viewpoint as anthropologists who specialize in waste and food studies.
Food waste has long been entwined with moral issues. But it doesn't go far enough to explain what happened here: what alternatives can a school provide for meals that students don't want to place on their trays and don't want to eat?
Examine the following three critical decisions made in this situation: the kid opted to throw away the waffles; the cafeteria monitor, seeing this as wasteful, decided to teach the youngster a lesson; and the district administration, seeing the shame, decided to dismiss the monitor and the principal. The basic act of wasting food becomes more difficult with each decision in the chain: on one hand, individual judgments about eating (or not) and educating others to make good choices; on the other hand, individuals condemning one another's choices and wanting them to consume or educate differently.
This youngster is in desperate need of and deserves justice. However, we also encourage policymakers to think about what it means to eat well and waste well in the context of American public schools. It's especially crucial at a time when political authorities are discussing universal free public school meals and an increasing number of families rely on them. We see the video of the waffle incident as an example of what occurs when trash is horribly misinterpreted, even as it joins the never-ending spectacle of racially heated material spreading on the Internet.
We use the word "grossly" on purpose. It is debatable if eating food from the trash can is "gross," particularly if the container has never been opened. Forcing a youngster to consume something they don't want to eat is, nonetheless, unethical. (And not just a child: Force-feeding has become a problem in a society where institutions such as schools, hospitals, and prisons are entangled with racial and class politics.)
If the administrators at Palm Elementary were truly worried about waste and wanted to recover extra food, they might have set up alternative containers beside the trash cans and collaborated with local food banks and homeless shelters to redirect edible garbage to those in need. Instead, a 9-year-old and an adult who happened to be in the room were tasked with handling the issue.
What other moral lessons may students — and those who educate them — learn if offering mutual help through leftover food became a reality? Food recovery is at the center of a big and crucial issue: a required, comprehensive transformation in how American institutions think about edible waste.
Scenarios like the waffle scene are likely to persist if we continue to associate food waste with moral rights and wrongs. According to the World Wildlife Fund, public schools in the United States squander 39.2 pounds of food and 28.7 cartons of milk per student every year. We need to rethink the value of wasted but still edible food in a way that allows people to consume what they want, set aside what they don't, and transfer surplus food to locations where it can be enjoyed.
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