The Labor of Lunch tells a feminist history of school food and offers a stirring call to action.
This book is a work of action-oriented scholarship, written 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. Dr. Gaddis uses ethnographic, archival, and participatory research methods to help readers understand the power and potential of public school-lunch programs and the complex political, economic, and environmental systems that shape them.
The Labor of Lunch (University of California Press, 2019) received the National Women’s Studies Association's 2020 Whaley Prize for the best book on the topic of women and labor from an intersectional perspective and the 2020 Food Issues and Matters award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. It has been widely used in university courses, along with interactive instructor resources provided on this site. The book is available from the University of California Press (30% off with code 19V3712), Amazon, and your local bookstore.
This book is a work of action-oriented scholarship, written 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. Dr. Gaddis uses ethnographic, archival, and participatory research methods to help readers understand the power and potential of public school-lunch programs and the complex political, economic, and environmental systems that shape them.
The Labor of Lunch (University of California Press, 2019) received the National Women’s Studies Association's 2020 Whaley Prize for the best book on the topic of women and labor from an intersectional perspective and the 2020 Food Issues and Matters award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. It has been widely used in university courses, along with interactive instructor resources provided on this site. The book is available from the University of California Press (30% off with code 19V3712), Amazon, and your local bookstore.
What people are saying about The Labor of Lunch....
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The book is more than just an ethnography of school lunches; it is a reminder that we need to revisit our food systems and consider how this policy area is still very much classed, gendered, and racialized... This book reignites the importance of food activism and recognizes historical roots while seeking and creating theories of change. — Contemporary Sociology |
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, author of The Overworked American |
