by Richard Kahn, University of North Dakota
excerpt - Vegans can just as easily encounter micoaggressions and
microinequities in the school as they can in the larger society.5 While
some schools have moved to try to incorporate a consistent vegetarian
(and sometimes vegan) offering on the menu, the overall reality is that
vegans are still treated like second-class citizens in most school
cafeterias. Even when there is food provided for them to eat, the school
experience is structured so as to reduce veganism to a personal “special
dietary requirement” and not a collective political standpoint from
which to mount a transformative critique of society. When exhaustive
ingredient lists are not made openly available, or there is not clear
transparency as to the manner in which the available food has been
cooked, and staff are not properly educated so as to be able to easily
answer questions about the food or its preparation, this constitutes a
form of microaggression by school administrations against vegans (and by
extension — all who eat at the school). It is crucial to remember,
however, that behind these dietary microaggressions lies a
macroaggressive institutional logic, not just the careless or uninformed
aptitudes of individual administrators.
Consider the recent story of Dave Warwak, a 5th through 8th grade
tenured art teacher in the Chicago-area Fox River Grove Middle School,
who had previously exhibited at Northern Illinois University but who was
suspended and then fired by his public school for teaching art from the
animal standpoint.6 In 2006, Warwak became a vegan and decided to
respond to evidence of animal cruelty by students at the school by
developing (and gaining approval for) a collective art lesson in which a
number of students and teachers created and cared for their own
companion animal made out of commercially-available marshmallow “Peeps”
chick-shaped candy. As with school exercises in which students care for
“baby” eggs, people at the school personalized their Peeps, spoke to
them, and treated them as if they were subjects of a life that were
deserving of protection. At the end of the lesson, however, Warwak
surprised everyone by collecting the marshmallow chicks for a diorama
school art exhibit he then created in which the Peeps candies were
represented as locked behind zoo cages, hung on the wall as trophy game
heads, squashed as road kill, boiled and fried in pots and pans, and
enclosed between slices of bread as sandwiches. According to a Sept. 12,
2007 Chicago Tribune editorial, this resulted in a rebuke from the
school’s principal that Warwak was trying to “influence students against
the school lunch program” and he was warned to stick to the curriculum.
In response, Warwak replied that part of teaching art to students is to
get them to think about life and to have them connect their creativity
up to the social issues that they care very deeply about. He then turned
his sights on asking for the removal of the National Dairy Council’s
“Got Milk?” and other promotional posters which adorned the lunch room
walls, and when the school’s cafeteria manager refused to take them
down, Warwak and his students posted their own vegan posters satirizing
the issue. He also began a more public campaign to raise consciousness
about the quality of school lunches being fed at the school, which
resulted in his dismissal.
While one might question Warwak’s collegiality, it also seems clear
upon studying his case that his firing resulted not due to his
pedagogical style, but rather because of his unwillingness to relent
from using the art curriculum to explore his own school as a location in
which to house the animal standpoint. By doing so, he quickly found
himself immersed in a hot bed of political issues related to the
existence of what could be termed the “school cafeteriaindustrial
complex” that lay just below the epistemological surface of the school’s
day-to-day code of normalcy. For instance, we might ask (as he did): Why
were the Dairy Council posters in the school? What was the school’s food
quality? What’s wrong with influencing students against the school lunch
program if there is a sound educational point to be made in doing so?
Not only at Fox River Grove Middle School but also in thousands of
schools across the country, corporate agribusiness has run amok in the
attempt to utilize public education as a place to establish the
naturalization of commercial meat and dairy as lifelong eating habits,
to generate increased sales, to subsidize the food industry against
decreased producer prices, as well as to funnel below-health standards
food not fit for public sale. Warwak was correct to demand the riddance
of the Dairy Council’s posters as they had in fact already been targeted
for removal from approximately 105,000 public schools by the Federal
Trade Commission. In May, 2007, the Commission ruled that the
advertisements’ message on behalf of the dairy industry’s “Milk Your
Diet” campaign — that claimed that the regular consumption of milk
promotes healthy weight loss — was scientifically misleading and false.7
A story on the matter in Alternet captures the corporate duplicity
behind this overt operation to infuse milk propaganda in schools:
The Milk Your Diet campaign (also called BodyByMilk; Think About Your
Drink; Why Milk?; 24oz/24hours; 3-A-Day; and Got Milk? as in — one of
these slogans has got to work!)...shipped truck-size posters of 'stache-wearing
David Beckham, Carrie Underwood and New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez to
45,000 public middle and high schools and 60,000 public elementary
schools last fall and conducted an online auction where students could
use milk UPC codes as currency. ("It's an amazing experience," say the
web promos, which were still up in May. "Did we mention you have a
chance to win an iPod? And a Fender guitar? And cool clothes from Adidas
and Baby Phat? All you have to do is drink milk to get it. Any size. Any
flavor.") The campaign offered $1,000 America's Healthiest Student
Bodies Awards to schools with the "most active" students and saluted
them with what? Got Milk recognitions (Rosenberg, 2007).
Schools across the country have utilized dairy industry materials in
this fashion because it is tacitly demanded by the USDA’s National
School Lunch Program, the primary governmental vehicle through which
food that is in over-supply is promoted and national prices thereby
subsidized. In this case, schools are only reimbursed for their food
expenses by the program unless they promote items like milk, which it
has deemed a nutritional good. It should be pointed out that this is the
same National School Lunch Program that was slammed by a March, 2008
exposé from the Wall Street Journal, which uncovered that: In reports
dating back to 2003, the USDA Office of Inspector General and the
Government Accountability Office cited the USDA's lunch-program
administrators and inspectors for weak food-safety standards, poor
safeguards against bacterial contamination, and choosing lunch-program
vendors with known food-safety violations. Auditors singled out problems
with controls over E. coli and salmonella contamination (Williamson,
2008).
Worse still, the above phrase “known food-safety violations” is
something of a euphemism. For a prime beef vendor for the National
School Lunch Program has been the meat packing company Westland/Hallmark
which, via undercover footage shot by the Humane Society of the United
States, was revealed to be regularly slaughtering “downer” cows (i.e.,
mortally sick animals that have also been linked to Mad Cow and other
fatal diseases in humans) for popular consumption. Though having
repeatedly denied any illegal wrongdoing for years, the ultimate
revelation of Westland/Hallmark’s practices in turn led to the nation’s
largest ever recall of beef (Associated Press, 2008). Unfortunately, it
was suspected that the large majority of the meat from Westland/Hallmark
had already been eaten — much of it by school children. Dave Warwak’s
art program therefore sought to provide a form of epistemological
rupture of the educational status quo in order to call attention to the
role being played by this sort of food in his own school. In so doing,
however, he threatened to parade the fact that the dietary norms
constructed on behalf of those attending public schools (as well as in
the larger society) are generally set in place by an emperor without
clothes.
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