Jennifer E. Gaddis
Author | Educator | Speaker
Read my latest opinion piece in USA Today,
Cafeteria Workers Need Support During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Are you interested in learning more about how to bring local, sustainable school lunches to your community? Join the Real Food Reads book club and strategize with others as you read The Labor of Lunch together.
NEW BOOK
The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools
Available for order from the University of California Press and Amazon.
Get 30% off list price with code 19V3712 at UC Press.
Available for order from the University of California Press and Amazon.
Get 30% off list price with code 19V3712 at UC Press.
About the Book
There’s a problem with school lunch in America. Big Food companies have largely replaced the nation’s school cooks by supplying cafeterias with cheap, precooked hamburger patties and chicken nuggets chock-full of industrial fillers. Yet it’s no secret that meals cooked from scratch with nutritious, locally sourced ingredients are better for children, workers, and the environment. So why not empower “lunch ladies” to do more than just unbox and reheat factory-made food? And why not organize together to make healthy, ethically sourced, free school lunches a reality for all children?
The Labor of Lunch aims to spark a progressive movement that will transform food in American schools, and with it the lives of thousands of low-paid cafeteria workers and the millions of children they feed. By providing a feminist history of the US National School Lunch Program, Jennifer E. Gaddis recasts the humble school lunch as an important and often overlooked form of public care. Through vivid narration and moral heft, The Labor of Lunch offers a stirring call to action and a blueprint for school lunch reforms capable of delivering a healthier, more equitable, caring, and sustainable future.
There’s a problem with school lunch in America. Big Food companies have largely replaced the nation’s school cooks by supplying cafeterias with cheap, precooked hamburger patties and chicken nuggets chock-full of industrial fillers. Yet it’s no secret that meals cooked from scratch with nutritious, locally sourced ingredients are better for children, workers, and the environment. So why not empower “lunch ladies” to do more than just unbox and reheat factory-made food? And why not organize together to make healthy, ethically sourced, free school lunches a reality for all children?
The Labor of Lunch aims to spark a progressive movement that will transform food in American schools, and with it the lives of thousands of low-paid cafeteria workers and the millions of children they feed. By providing a feminist history of the US National School Lunch Program, Jennifer E. Gaddis recasts the humble school lunch as an important and often overlooked form of public care. Through vivid narration and moral heft, The Labor of Lunch offers a stirring call to action and a blueprint for school lunch reforms capable of delivering a healthier, more equitable, caring, and sustainable future.
Reviews
“What might the history of school lunch teach today’s food justice activists about intersectionality? How did the private sector come to dominate what America’s youth eat? Why are most people readier to think of ‘lunch ladies’ as administrators of slop than as front-line care workers? Jennifer Gaddis’s swift prose and sharp mind keep you turning the pages through generations of women’s movement activism, lunch shaming, chicken nuggets, and a corps sacrificing their own welfare so that ‘their kids’ might eat well. The result is a brilliant history and incisive analysis of the cheap care that hides behind the modern school lunch.”––Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System
“In this pathbreaking book, Gaddis shows that labor—and specifically by lunch ladies—is the missing ingredient in the recipe for success in the National School Lunch Program. A must-read for anyone who cares about children, food, education, labor, or well-being.”––Juliet Schor, Professor of Sociology, Boston College
“This is an important book, one that advances the scholarship of food systems and public policy, and one that will contribute to mobilizing much-needed change in our national school food programs.”––Janet Poppendieck, author of Free for All: Fixing School Food in America
“What might the history of school lunch teach today’s food justice activists about intersectionality? How did the private sector come to dominate what America’s youth eat? Why are most people readier to think of ‘lunch ladies’ as administrators of slop than as front-line care workers? Jennifer Gaddis’s swift prose and sharp mind keep you turning the pages through generations of women’s movement activism, lunch shaming, chicken nuggets, and a corps sacrificing their own welfare so that ‘their kids’ might eat well. The result is a brilliant history and incisive analysis of the cheap care that hides behind the modern school lunch.”––Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System
“In this pathbreaking book, Gaddis shows that labor—and specifically by lunch ladies—is the missing ingredient in the recipe for success in the National School Lunch Program. A must-read for anyone who cares about children, food, education, labor, or well-being.”––Juliet Schor, Professor of Sociology, Boston College
“This is an important book, one that advances the scholarship of food systems and public policy, and one that will contribute to mobilizing much-needed change in our national school food programs.”––Janet Poppendieck, author of Free for All: Fixing School Food in America
Multimedia Resources and Reading Group Guides
Interested in including The Labor of Lunch in your teaching materials? Click here to access a classroom curriculum guide with chapter-by-chapter reading questions and classroom activities suitable for high school and college students.
Considering starting a reading group for The Labor of Lunch? Click here to access a community reading guide complete with action steps for organizing together to advance real food and real jobs in American public schools.
If you'd like to book a speaking engagement (virtual or in person) with your classroom or community group, contact the author directly at jgaddis@wisc.edu.
Considering starting a reading group for The Labor of Lunch? Click here to access a community reading guide complete with action steps for organizing together to advance real food and real jobs in American public schools.
If you'd like to book a speaking engagement (virtual or in person) with your classroom or community group, contact the author directly at jgaddis@wisc.edu.
Video Shorts
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Go behind the scenes of The Labor of Lunch with these video shorts featuring interviews from the book.
The 2-4 minute videos are included in discussion questions and classroom activities as part of The Labor of Lunch: Classroom Curriculum Guide. |
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SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Action Research
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Reorganizing School Lunch for a More Just and Sustainable Food System in the US
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Mobilizing to Re-value and Re-skill Foodservice Labor in U.S. School Lunchrooms: A Pathway to Community-level Food Sovereignty?
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Forging Links Between Food Chain Labor Activists and Academics
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Tasting Sustainability: Using Multisensory Activities to Retune Food Preferences
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BIO
Jennifer E. Gaddis is an assistant professor of Civil Society and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She brings a feminist perspective to food politics through her research on the social, political, and economic organization of public school-lunch programs. Her first book, The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools, is a work of activist scholarship that centers the perspectives of school lunch activists and frontline cafeteria workers who are fighting for food justice in communities across the United States.
Her second book-length project draws on fieldwork in China, Japan, and South Korea to examine how civil society activism, corporate interests, and national policy priorities shape the social justice and ecological goals of government-sponsored school lunch programs. By uncovering how, when, and to what extent school lunch programs operate as a site of resistance to the status quo—in terms of advancing food sovereignty, just labor practices, and ecological sustainability—this research will offer insight into just how pervasive the social expectation that school lunch, and care more broadly, should be “cheap,” and what can be done to shift the conversation to a more generative space from which to collectively reimagine the social organization of care through public institutions.
At UW-Madison, Dr. Gaddis is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies, the Center for Cooperatives, the Center for Child and Family Well-being, and the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems. She serves on the advisory boards for the Havens-Wright Center for Social Justice and the School for Workers and as the faculty advisor for Slow Food UW. She also co-leads two community-based research projects that involve graduate students in the Civil Society and Community Research PhD program. The first project, in South Madison, Wisconsin, examines food justice and culinary agency among an inter-generational group of parents, children, and youth. The second project, in Fort Peck, Montana, supports community-led efforts to build food sovereignty both on the reservation and across Turtle Island (North America) through place-based action research and an innovative oral history project designed to assist the emerging trade-based solidarity economy by connecting geographically disparate Indigenous food sovereignty initiatives and making their products more accessible to Native people living on and off reservations.
View her complete Curriculum Vitae here.
Her second book-length project draws on fieldwork in China, Japan, and South Korea to examine how civil society activism, corporate interests, and national policy priorities shape the social justice and ecological goals of government-sponsored school lunch programs. By uncovering how, when, and to what extent school lunch programs operate as a site of resistance to the status quo—in terms of advancing food sovereignty, just labor practices, and ecological sustainability—this research will offer insight into just how pervasive the social expectation that school lunch, and care more broadly, should be “cheap,” and what can be done to shift the conversation to a more generative space from which to collectively reimagine the social organization of care through public institutions.
At UW-Madison, Dr. Gaddis is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies, the Center for Cooperatives, the Center for Child and Family Well-being, and the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems. She serves on the advisory boards for the Havens-Wright Center for Social Justice and the School for Workers and as the faculty advisor for Slow Food UW. She also co-leads two community-based research projects that involve graduate students in the Civil Society and Community Research PhD program. The first project, in South Madison, Wisconsin, examines food justice and culinary agency among an inter-generational group of parents, children, and youth. The second project, in Fort Peck, Montana, supports community-led efforts to build food sovereignty both on the reservation and across Turtle Island (North America) through place-based action research and an innovative oral history project designed to assist the emerging trade-based solidarity economy by connecting geographically disparate Indigenous food sovereignty initiatives and making their products more accessible to Native people living on and off reservations.
View her complete Curriculum Vitae here.
NEWS | EVENTS | PRESS
Teaching
Dr. Gaddis teaches courses in the Community and Nonprofit Leadership undergraduate major and the Civil Society and Community Research PhD program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her teaching has been recognized by multiple school- and campus-level awards for excellence and inclusivity.
Dr. Gaddis trains students of all levels and backgrounds to address complex issues through community collaborations, interdisciplinary analyses, and scholarly activism. Whenever possible, she embeds opportunities for students to work on applied projects into her courses. In Spring 2020, for example, students in CSCS 375 Human Ecology of Food and Sustainability collaborated with Hunger Task Force to analyze policy language and demographic data from nearly 400 Wisconsin school districts in order to support the Milwaukee-based nonprofit’s campaign to end lunch shaming.
Dr. Gaddis trains students of all levels and backgrounds to address complex issues through community collaborations, interdisciplinary analyses, and scholarly activism. Whenever possible, she embeds opportunities for students to work on applied projects into her courses. In Spring 2020, for example, students in CSCS 375 Human Ecology of Food and Sustainability collaborated with Hunger Task Force to analyze policy language and demographic data from nearly 400 Wisconsin school districts in order to support the Milwaukee-based nonprofit’s campaign to end lunch shaming.
Field trip visit to Just Coffee.
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Courses Taught -Community and Social Change -Evaluation and Planning -Human Ecology of Food and Sustainability -Community Innovations Lecture Topics -Critical food studies -School lunch politics -History of school lunch -Feminist food politics -Public sociology/emancipatory social science -Care work/reproductive labor -Community organizing -Participatory action research -Food justice/food sovereignty -Food chain workers Teaching Materials The Labor of Lunch: Classroom Curriculum Guide The Labor of Lunch: Community Reading Guide Student Work Food Chain Chronicles: Stories of the People Behind our Food |
FIELDWORK
What does research look like on a day-to-day basis? From farms to classrooms to massive cooking pots,
glimpse into Dr. Gaddis' past work in the US and recent fieldwork on international school lunch programs in
Japan and China. Next on the agenda: South Korea.
glimpse into Dr. Gaddis' past work in the US and recent fieldwork on international school lunch programs in
Japan and China. Next on the agenda: South Korea.
PROJECTS
Oral HistoriesCollecting Stories of Food Chain Workers and Community Activists
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Food SovereigntyPartnering with Native Communities in Wisconsin and Montana
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Community ResearchCollaborating with Slow Food UW and the Odyssey Project in Madison, WI
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CONTACT
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To receive updates, news and event information, sign up for my monthly newsletter.
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To book an interview, talk, or appearance, and all other inquiries, please contact: jgaddis@wisc.edu
Follow Dr. Gaddis on Twitter @JenniferEGaddis to join the conversation about all things school lunch, care work, and feminist food politics. |
© Jennifer Elaine Gaddis, 2020. All rights reserved.