Americans are increasingly becoming a nation of grazers. According a large study conducted by the Agricultural Department with the Department of Health and Human Services, and cited by Steinhauer, “between 1977 and 2002, the percent of the American population eating three or more snacks a day increased to 42 percent from 11 percent” The possible causes? The end of the traditional family dinner hour, the packed schedule of today’s children which leaves little room for sit-down meals, and fast food companies’ savvy marketing (recent concepts include the marketing of 100-calorie junk-food packs aimed at snacking kids).

“Fast-food restaurants are in on the act, and over the last two years have begun to introduce their own mini-meals, like the McDonald’s Snack Wrap. According to the Agriculture Department, American children get 40 percent of their calories from food of poor nutritional quality.”

But does it have to be that way? A weakness in Steinhauer’s piece is that it largely conflates snacking and junk food. Food conglomerates are great at making children want things they shouldn’t be — and they have been for a long time — but that doesn’t mean we need to give it to them. The snack foods Steinhauer uses as examples in her piece include Oreos, pretzels, Clif bars and Fruit Roll-ups — but why not carrots, apples or bananas? A 2008 piece from the Times recommended that you shouldn’t “restrict food from children” in your house, and instead “buy healthful snacks and give children free access to the food cabinets.”

Feeding kids snacks in between meals, as Steinheauer argues, can be habit forming, but those habits don’t need to be unhealthy. A child’s expectation of a snack after soccer practice isn’t an evil if the child also expects that the snack will be fruit, and healthy adult eating habits can include two snacks a day. That said, the ability to find fresh healthy foods during a recessionary time when junk food is often the cheapest alternative isn’t always simple — nor is it easy when other parents are offering Dunkin’ Donuts after playdates — but it’s worth remembering that it’s not always the snack that’s the enemy, it’s the sugar and fat inside of it.

The stereotype of the subsidized school lunch has never been a particularly enticing one (vomit-colored shepherd’s pie, anyone?), but over the past few decades it’s gotten worse. The National School Lunch Program, created to provide subsidized meals to the country’s impoverished schoolchildren, serves 31 million meals on an average day, but as Poppendieck details in “Free for All: Fixing School Food in America,” her new book about the country’s school cafeterias, many of them are un-nutritious, uninspiring and tasteless (the most popular meal: pepperoni pizza, nachos, a peanut butter cookie and diet soda — with a whopping 1,116 calories and 51 grams of fat).

How did America’s school lunches get so bad? Poppendieck traveled to schools across the country and found that budget restrictions, in-school competition from food conglomerates, arcane federal guidelines (calorie minimums mixed with fat-content maximums), a complicated three-tiered payment system (based on a child’s poverty level) together with the stigmas associated with subsidized food are all to blame for the depressing state of the American school cafeteria. Her suggestion: It’s time for America to start giving not just poor kids, but all kids, a free lunch.

Salon spoke to Poppendieck over the phone about the decline of America’s lunch program, why so many kids are eating pizza, and how to sell meal reform to a country in a recession.

How did pizza, of all meals, come to dominate so many school lunch menus?

Financially, schools have to serve what appeals to the children. It’s become a tyrannical need, in a sense, because it’s very difficult for schools to take risks extending children’s awareness of food. If you serve something they’re not familiar with, and they decide not to buy the meal that day, it has a very negative impact on the bottom line.

Pizza is also made with ingredients that don’t pose a food safety risk — that’s why so many schools are now using burgers that have been cooked in a factory and then frozen and sent to the schools and defrosted and reheated. That way the liability for any burger-related problem is at the manufacturer’s level.

You blame children’s poor lunch eating habits partly on what you call the commercialization of childhood. Why?

Well, when I was a child, kids didn’t have money. We got modest allowances for maybe a trip to the corner store once a week, but children today are major consumers in the economy, and the food industry realized that if they can establish brand loyalty among children they are likely acquiring a lifetime consumer. There’s really a concerted effort to enlist children in the fan clubs of particular brands while they’re young and I think it’s extremely destructive because the items that are heavily marketed to children are not subject to nutrition standards.

When I was a child I didn’t think about the health consequences of how I ate in part because my mother did that thinking for me. We had lots of rules that I just obeyed because they were my mother’s rules, but looking back now I understand they were very much derived from a sense of healthy eating.

So you think the entry of women in the workforce is to blame for these deleterious eating habits?

We aren’t born knowing what’s edible. If parents aren’t going to have enough time with children to provide this guidance and direction and socialization, then the institutions in our society where children spend time have to do it. The increase of parents in the workforce means that the responsibility of schools and after-school programs teaching healthy eating behavior has grown. I’m not blaming it on America’s working mothers.

There’s one moment in the book where a school worker in the Mississippi Delta is told that her school menu doesn’t have, of all things, enough calories — and that she should add another dessert. This makes no nutritional sense to me when we’re concerned about childhood obesity. Why do these kinds of bizarre regulations exist?

When the recommended dietary allowances were first created, during World War II, the focus was on making sure that people got enough food because people were anticipating the onset of rationing. From the mid-’80s on, the concern has been about overconsumption: too much fat, too much sugar and too much salt. So in the mid-’90s Congress passed a law requiring school foods to comply with the dietary guidelines for Americans, which suggested that no more than 30 percent of calories should come from fats. You need to create a low-cost meal in which no more than 30 percent of calories comes from fat and meets that calorie minimum. Schools across the country discovered that adding another dessert to the menu might be the cheapest way to do it.

Obama has asked for an extra $1 billion for school lunches, which translates to an extra 30 cents per meal. Do you think that’s enough to make a difference?

It’s actually an additional billion for child nutrition, which means the billion would be spread over a number of programs, not just school lunch and breakfast programs. If I could get another 30 cents a meal across the board in the school lunch program, I think it would be enough to make a difference. I don’t think it would solve all the problems, but for another 30 cents per meal, I think you could serve better food. But I don’t think $1 billion will give you anything near that.

You visited a lot of schools around the country. How do the lunches being offered in the wealthy areas compare to those in poorer parts of the country?

There are maybe 14,000 school districts participating in the national school lunch program. I visited both wealthy and poor districts, but not enough to generalize. The town you mentioned in Mississippi was one of the poorest places I visited but the meal was terrific. It’s a town where poverty was so high they had what amounts to universal free school meals in the school — and they had something called Provision 2, where the government essentially pays the school money to serve meals.

So the children’s stigma of buying a subsidized meal was more spread out.

Yeah. There are two ends of the spectrum when it comes to subsidized school meals: You can get very poor communities where schools have opted to use Provision 2, and very wealthy communities where the kids can easily come up with the $3 per meal. It’s in communities where the student body is more mixed, where they’re dealing with a tightened budget, that the meal quality tends to be less good.

You argue it’s time for America to start serving universal free lunch meals for schoolchildren. Given that many Americans are opposed to even giving people a public option for healthcare, do you think it’s realistic?

You mean my pie-in-the-sky proposal? [Laughter] Well, let me make my case. The argument for universal free school meals is that we stop selling food to children in competition with the school meal. Did you ever go to summer camp?

Sadly not. I lived a deprived childhood.

Typically in summer camp, there’s a meal and everybody eats it. There isn’t the alternative of going across the street to the 7-11 or McDonald’s. When it becomes the only game in town, then I think you can serve a much healthier range; you have a much freer hand to introduce foods unfamiliar to kids and give them a chance to get used to them, put more emphasis on fruits and vegetables. It gets rid of the stigma.

If we want to use school food as a way of improving children’s eating habits and helping them integrate what they eat with what they might be learning in a health or nutritional education class, then we need to get rid of the unhealthy alternatives that are widely on sale. In the long run, it would save money. The healthcare costs associated with obesity and diabetes and the other conditions that follow on obesity are going be so high that we’re going to be sorry we didn’t invest in healthy school meals.

Right. What would be necessary for that to happen?

We need to achieve a change in attitude about taxation, because as long as we’re operating in this zero sum situation, I think that doubling the cost of national school lunch and breakfast programs is probably not politically feasible.

Especially during a recession.

On the other hand, the number of people in our society who are in situations where healthy meals served free to kids at school would take a major worry off their minds has grown enormously with the recession. I think the recession could factor in as a positive.

It seems like a Catch-22. More people are dependent on school lunches, but fewer people have money to provide them for other people.

Fair enough, but there is much essentially nonproductive labor involved in doing it the way we’ve been doing it. This three-tier system, where every meal has to be accounted for as free or reduced price or full price is an extremely expensive way to do it. It adds layer after layer of procedure and activity. It’s cheaper per meal to serve the meal free to everyone because it eliminates a substantial administrative burden.

If we can move it to a basis where cafeterias can plan on the number of children that are likely to eat in any given day, they will then be able to reduce the waste, get rid of the layers of administrative activities. It’s a huge investment in essentially making sure that no child who isn’t poor enough eats free. 

But most people, Severson writes, aren’t buying it because they’re intimately familiar with the Jewish dietary laws that govern kosher eating (which include, “rinsing blood from carcasses with salt and water, never mixing meat and dairy, and allowing fin fish but not shellfish”) but because they associate the food with humane farming, health, and good taste — three assumptions that, Severson explains, may not actually be correct:

• Jewish dietary law requires that animals be treated well and slaughtered swiftly, but not all manufacturers obey these rules rigorously, and the level of animal treatment depends on the individual farm operation.
• While one study found that salmonella levels were lower in kosher chickens than in conventional chickens, as a result of the kosher practice of salting and rinsing the bird, another found that kosher chicken had the highest levels of listeria (which sickens people relatively rarely, but can also be deadly).
• There’s little taste difference between a normal foodstuff that’s been blessed by a rabbi (kosher Oreos?) and its non-kosher equivalent — and, while some chefs prefer kosher chickens, including Cook’s Illustrated magazine founder Christopher Kimball, it’s more likely the quality of the chicken, not the kosher-izing, that’s the clincher.

The New York Times isn’t the first publication to catch on to the growing popularity of kosher foods (the New Yorker recently ran a piece about China’s growing kosher export market), but it suggests, without saying it, that the real reason behind the growing market is trendy eaters’ increasingly desperate search for the “next big thing” in healthful eating and an easy, catch-all term to simplify their choices, like “organic — even if it’s not necessarily all that healthy. (Oh yeah, you’re eating slow foods? I’ve gone kosher!).

Because what shouldn’t happen is for us to overreact, in typical fashion, and decide that salt is the new sugar, which was the new trans fat, which was the new cholesterol, which was the new Black Death. (Bring out cher dead!) Salt is good, people. Salt does magical things to food, and is even good for us. We just have to know how to use it.

First, there’s the fact that diets too low in sodium are dangerous themselves; we need salt to keep our fluid balances in check. Have you heard of “over-hydration,” when marathon runners, say, collapse from drinking too much water? It’s because their constant sweat depletes their salt levels.

Then, frankly more important, there’s the flavor issue. In culinary school, there were two ways I could lose points before even touching any food: if I didn’t have a dish of salt near me, and if I didn’t have a pile of clean spoons, so I could taste, at every turn, if I’d seasoned my food enough. My chefs were maniacal about salt being one of the essential keys to deliciousness. Salt tastes good on its own, but its special power lies in the fact that, smartly used, it actually highlights the natural flavors of food. It turns your dinner from black-and-white to HD.

The key is to maximize the impact of the salt you do use. According to the Culinary Institute of America’s “Techniques of Healthy Cooking” textbook (which, hilariously, we all called THC in school), “Salt is far more effective when it is added in small doses throughout the cooking process rather than just at the end [or at the table]. When added early, foods are in contact with the salt longer, which allows for deeper penetration and better flavor extraction.”

So season in small doses, sprinkling a little on whenever a new ingredient goes in the pan, and taste it to see if you’ve added just enough to make the flavors pop. You don’t need more than that. Out of curiosity, I actually measured the amount of salt I used cooking dinner last night. The result: about a teaspoon for three people — right on target. (The recommended intake is about a teaspoon per person per day.) Also keep in mind that we taste salt more readily in cool or cold foods, so you can season even more lightly if the food is going to be served cold.

Salt also does magical things beyond flavor: According to Harold McGee’s “On Food and Cooking,” salt in boiling water for vegetables helps to soften them quicker, letting you cook them for a shorter period of time and preserving their nutrients; add enough salt — 2 tablespoons per quart — and you create an equilibrium so that the vegetables’ nutrients won’t leach to the water. (Two tablespoons might seem like a lot of sodium, but remember that most of it stays in the cooking water, not your food.) It tightens up the proteins in bread, giving it better rise; it helps vegetables ferment and pickle; it causes meat to soften and absorb moisture before cooking, making it tender and juicy.

 ”OK, OK,” you say. “So salt is pixie dust. But we’re still eating too much of it, so I’m going to throw out my salt dish.”

Well, if you actually have hypertension, fine. But for the rest of us, note that in the New York Times piece on Bloomberg’s sodium crusade, New York City’s health commissioner says, “Eighty percent of the salt we eat is in the food already when you buy it”.

Eighty percent! Eighty percent of our sodium intake comes from manufactured, processed food. Much of which is hidden sodium, inherent to the processing, but not to real food: sodium benzoate (preservative), sodium caseinate (thickener), sodium nitrate (meat cure), sodium phosphate (emulsifier), MSG.

I hate to throw you under the bus, dear Kraft — you make unparalleled grilled cheese, and I’ll admit that there’s no better slice for cheeseburgers — but let’s be honest here. A slice of Kraft American cheese, at 21 grams, has 340 mg of sodium, or about 14 percent the recommended daily allowance. A similar quantity of real cheddar cheese has about 131 mg of sodium, or 5.25 percent the RDA, well less than half the sodium. (I’ve adjusted the serving sizes from the links to show apples to apples, er, cheese to pasteurized processed cheese food product.)

Where does all that extra sodium come from? Well, McGee explains how processed cheese “began as a kind of resolidified, long-keeping fondue made from the trimmings of genuine cheeses that were unsaleable due to partial defects and damage … Today, manufacturers use a mixture of sodium citrate, sodium phosphates, and sodium polyphosphates” as the “melting salts,” which combine and homogenize all those trimmings into one recognizable, eminently meltable mass. Yay science!

I hate to get all Michael Pollan on you, but at the end of the day, the sodium question is still about eating real food, and eating in moderation. These single-boogeyman approaches to being healthy are insane. We constantly compartmentalize and forget the bigger picture: that our bodies are complex machines that need all kinds of nutrient combinations, and, short of cyanide and low-fat mayonnaise, most anything we can eat has a place in the mix. So eat your delicious dinner. Just make sure you know who made it.