LPE@HLS is pleased to announce that Berk Eker is the recipient of the first “Freedom from Want” writing Award for his paper “Ultra-Processed Foods and the Legal Design of School Meals: Decommodification, Delegation, and Children’s Welfare.”
The paper analyzes how the legal structure for providing school meals in the United States leads to overreliance on industrialized, for-profit companies using ultra-processed foods to the detriment of childhood health and development. It argues that decommodifying school meal production is necessary for the provision of nutritionally adequate meals. In other words, increasing caloric minimums and altering nutritional guidelines will do nothing within the current legal structure of provisioning. Nothing less than fully decommodified, public production of school meals will provide children from low-income families with nutritious food necessary for healthy development. The paper describes the statutory and administrative frameworks that undergird the program and offers a detailed and persuasive analysis of how underfunded schools have little choice, within the current framework, but to rely excessively on companies that specialize in selling food packages emphasizing low-cost and built-in regulatory compliance with formal nutritional guidelines at the expense of providing healthy food. More generally, the paper offers a well-developed cautionary tale about the pitfalls of constructing a program for provisioning basic needs that relies on profit-seeking organizations for delivery, rather than decommodified public production. You can read Eker’s full paper here.
