On this pop-up episode Julie Gunlock, director of Independent Women’s Forum’s center for progress and innovation, talks with Laura Fuentes about the topic of schools that are still providing school meals to kids during the Covid shutdowns. This puts school personnel at risk and removes the parent as the main provider of food to kids. During a pandemic, schools should be allowed to fully shut down. For food needs, more money can be provided through increases in already existing food assistance programs. This will help parents purchase needed food for their families while keeping school officials safe and more people home.
Transcript
Beverly Hallberg:
Hey everyone, it’s Beverly Hallberg. Welcome to a special pop-up episode of, She Thinks, your favorite podcast from the Independent Women’s Forum, where we talk with women, and sometimes men, about the policy issues that impact you and the people you care about most. Enjoy.
Julie:
Hey there everyone, I’m Julie Gunlock, the director of the Center for Progress and Innovation at the Independent Women’s Forum. I’ll be hosting this week’s pop-up podcast, and I’m really, really excited to be joined today by Laura Fuentes, who is a good friend of mine. We share a lot in common and particularly the subject that we’re going to be talking about today, which is school lunches, cooking for your kids. The basic responsibilities of parenting and nutrition and how kids learn good habits.
Laura is the founder of MOMables. She helps parents organize and develop simple, healthy meals and meal plans. She also developed something called the Family KickStart Program, which helps parents become more confident in the kitchen. That actually is a huge problem for parents. I think they feel like they need to create these massive meals or something really complicated when children really demand very simple meals. She has this great program called the KickStart Program, I urge everyone to look into it. She also does recipe videos on our YouTube channel. Again, these are not incredibly complicated four-course meals. These are very approachable meals that are healthy, kids love them. She’s also really clever in how she plates things and presents things.
She’s also the author of five cookbooks. I have my well dog-eared and slightly stained copy of her cookbook, The Best Homemade Kids’ Lunches On the Planet. My kids will confirm that they love the meals that I make out of this cookbook. This is the coolest thing, she is a super celebrity. She’s competed and won on one of the food networks’ cooking competitions, we can talk about that. She’s appeared on Today, Good Morning America, many other media outlets.
I should say the most important thing, she is a wife and mother of three kids, or she is a wife and a mother of three kids. She is not mothering her husband. They have a great media company. She and her husband work together and they live outside of New Orleans. Laura, it’s great to have you on.
Laura:
I’m so excited to be back and chat with you over a topic that you and I originally connected about. Actually I think it was because you pointed out the name of my company, MOMables, and you were like, “That’s so clever,” and I’m like, “I just want to empower parents to feed their children better, to know that they are doing a good job.” Like you said in my intro, kids really don’t require that much, and so-
Julie:
They don’t.
Laura:
They don’t. I think we just overcomplicate, and also a lot that is marketing, and media, and everyone has access to a smartphone with smart ads and everything. No matter where you fall in the income scale, you are just bombarded with this message that you should be doing more. It leaves a lot of parents ill-equipped, mostly mentally, and lack of confidence, whether or not they’re doing a good job with their families. I’m really excited to talk to you about an ongoing issue. I feel like, until there’s some policy change, it will be continue to be an ongoing issue in this country about who’s responsible for feeding our children.
Julie:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s really critical. I wrote a USA Today piece, and I’ll get to that in a minute. But I think one thing that’s really important and why I so love what you do is, one thing that I write about quite often is this idea of mommy shaming. There’s so much of it. The minute I say mommy shaming, we know exactly what that is, whether… yeah, you’re crazy. You go through the McDonald’s drive through, and you go to a local park, and then you get a bunch of snarky… you get dirty looks. Or you posted on Facebook… I actually had this happen to me years ago and a woman was like, “Did you actually go to McDonald’s and get them food?”
We’ve all experienced that. Look, I understand we need to feed our kids nutritious food, but sometimes moms need a break. One of the things that I love about MOMables is that you never lecture people even about the ingredients that they use. I’m not seeing a lot of, “Make sure you’re getting an organic chicken or make sure you’re getting these kinds of…” You never tell women, “Make sure you scrutinize the labels.” I think what you said right there is this idea that women just give up because you have to do so much to be so perfect and spend so much money. You really avoid that, and I’ve always appreciated that.
Laura:
Well, thank you. It really is a continuous problem as we go on because chicken is chicken, or strawberries are strawberries. The notion that, there is research that a lot of parents do not give their children as much fruit as children would benefit from nutritionally because of the fear that if it’s not organic, it’s not good enough. What does that say about us as a society that… it continues to raise this thing of, “Well, I’m just not doing a good enough job.”
Food is a luxury, organic is a luxury that not everybody needs access to or has the money to buy. But fresh food is covered. If you receive food stamps, you can buy nutritious foods with it. If you are on a tight budget, you can feed your family the nutritious foods. You don’t have to buy the all-organic, all-natural, in the pretty packaging from your health food store. You can go to the big box store and get their brand and save money that way. The idea is to make financially smart and nutritious decisions for our families.
Julie:
That’s absolutely right. I’m so glad to hear you say that. I think that needs to be like, if I had a bullhorn and could scream that at every school pickup line and really try to reassure moms, because there is a ton of judgment out there about feeding your kids. As you say, the result is people aren’t doing it. You and I actually, we co-authored an op-ed many years ago. The whole point of it was, look, just this school year, try to make your kids lunches more often. Because if you look at the data, I think it’s a third of the people who… a third of, if you want to say, customers for the school lunch program, are kids who don’t qualify for reduced price and free meals. Which means, we’re talking middle class families are actually utilizing a program that’s designed for kids who need help getting a meal.
Now, that’s unfortunate. I think there’s a lot of work to do to encourage people to not use these programs. These programs are bloated, they’re mismanaged. Part of the reason they’re bloating is, you have perfectly capable people, financially capable people, using programs. I have neighbors, I live in a very nice neighborhood. This is a middle class neighborhood, people can make their kids a simple meal and they don’t. It always shocks me when I see that.
But my latest article in USA Today talks about how the school lunch program has actually become an emergency management program under the shutdown. Laura, I’m sure you’re dealing with the shutdown. I’m sure your kids’ school was shut down. What we’re seeing now is, it was really shocking that in addition to this being a communicable disease problem we were looking… I mean, at least the nation’s policymakers were suddenly like,” Oh my gosh, are these kids going to starve?” Which is a horrible thing when you think about it, that if school is closed, kids starve.
Of course, schools felt compelled to continue the school lunch program despite the schools being closed. To me, that really was shocking, and it puts school officials in danger. We’ve seen reports, I’m sure you’ve seen the reports, of school having to fully close because of,] the cafeteria workers or the people there passing out the lunches becoming infected. I think it really puts school officials in danger. If we have this need, we’ve got to address this and it doesn’t need to be through the schools.
In my USA Today piece I propose, and I’d like to talk to you about it, is that we increase in an emergency and Congress can do this. You increase SNAP, which is the new name for food stamps and other food assistance programs so that parents can cook their children the meal that they prefer. I’m not saying we just abandon these families who need financial help. I’m saying, give it directly to the families instead of this third person arrangement. In my community, kids are getting cheese sandwiches and turkey sandwiches, not hot meals, not meals that really might taste good to them or might even account for their ethnicities or the food traditions of their families. Talk to me a little bit about that, about my proposal, and why you think that’s a good idea. Oh, I assume you think that’s a good idea.
Laura:
I do think it’s a good idea, and I know that’s not why you brought me on the podcast to reassure everyone that your idea is great, because I didn’t know… I read your piece, but I am in full agreement because I will tell you as somebody who lives outside of New Orleans, we were not only hit… during quarantine, we had some of the highest number of cases in the country. We also have very financially poor school districts. We also have a lot of people who do depend on the SNAP program, and the school lunches, and the school lunch program out of school.
I was able to talk to some people that their children go to public school, and I asked them about this for a different piece I was participating in. What I was surprised is a few things. The lack of organization of, parents would receive… during the public school system here, your phone number is in their system. I think it was on Mondays or Sundays, you would receive a text message with the different food pickup locations. No matter what school you went to, Monday could be picked up in a school that’s 20 minutes away or 30 minutes away. You would pick up food for like, I think it was like two or three days, so you are basically given-
Julie:
Yeah, same here.
Laura:
Okay. Your bag was filled with food. At first, I was like, okay, well, that’s a good idea, because it’s helping families whose children depend on this. We do know that there are many kids in this country that rely on breakfast and lunch. Sometimes if they stay in the afterschool program, they do get that afternoon snack from the school system. My first thought was, it is nice to know that the system has not forgotten about these kids who are now at home and they don’t get meals.
But then my second thought was, wait a minute. If these children are home and their parents are home, why can’t we shift the dollars into probably… if these children are already in the system, the parents are already in the school system, why can’t we shift the money into a daily allowance for real food so that the $10 a day that it may cost, and I just threw this number out there but it could be on average less, you can buy a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store, a pound of pasta, and maybe a bushel bananas, and that can feed a child for like… a small child, with $10, you can see for like three or four days, nutritionally-rich foods that have more nutrition than some of the things that I saw being handed out such as…
If you understand how cafeteria food works, these meals are made in larger facilities in large portions, so they’re not equipped to provide families with single-served, what we think of, I don’t know, I’m going to say the example of the Lean Cuisine tray. It’s not a single-served meal. They’re being given a tray of food, maybe a dozen bread rolls-
Julie:
Yeah. Things that’s largely been cooked somewhere else and it’s warmed up at the school.
Laura:
Totally. They’re not even getting vegetables or anything. They were like, pre-made hamburgers, maybe the pizza. They were given, where we were, there were some like a bag of apples that you got to take home. The worst things are here and there, but the reality is that, there is research that even in school during lunchtime, this is just mass-produced food, the quality is low. There are many kids who literally throw out the entire tray, so there is so much waste.
Julie:
Yes. But also there are things like bags of apples. At our school pickup location, and I’ve read the announcements from my local school. They say they send multiple sandwiches home, okay. I mean, yes, they may send some sundry items like apples, although I haven’t seen evidence of. Let’s say that, what if a mom doesn’t like apples? The point is that, there’s something called a grocery store where people can make choices.
What I find so insulting about this is the idea that you just give poor people what they get, and they don’t have any choice in the matter. That is insulting, it is condescending, it is paternalistic, and it is damaging also to their culture. If we’re going to start appreciating cultures more, then maybe we should appreciate that in my family where there’s… I grew up in the Midwest, so there’s casseroles, there’s a lot of grilled meat. We sometimes get into mixing things up a bit, but there’s a pretty standard, we do spaghetti and meatballs, we do a lot of stuff.
Another child who, maybe his family didn’t grow up in the Midwest, he grew up somewhere else, and his family has different food traditions, whether he came from South America. You were born in Spain. I’m sure that you have a lot of family traditions and cooking traditions that are different from my family. Frankly, my kids would probably rather live with you. But the point is that, it is so wrong to suggest that poor people don’t also deserve choices.
When we look at the research, and I’ve done tremendous amount of research into childhood obesity and child health, there are three factors, only three factors, that help kids stay at a healthy weight. They are, putting your kids to bed at a normal hour. I’m talking eight, nine o’clock, seven o’clock for younger kids or teens stay up a little, I have older kids. Limiting their screen time, these things are all very commonsensical. The last one is eating dinner as a family, three to five times a week. The point being that, feeding your children from you.
The American Heart Association, the Academy of Pediatrics, they all recommend cooking for your kids. This isn’t just some, “Oh, big government’s bad,” kind of ranting from some loony libertarian. This is the evidence from the medical community that studies child welfare and child health saying, “Look, cooking is good for kids.” We have policies, I’m not saying this is some evil scheme, well-meaning policies that actually discourage families from doing this. Then when it extends into these emergency management school lunch programs…
We’re talking about people being in lockdown and, for better or worse, people are home. At that point at the very least, institute some sort of emergency funding into these programs that they are already getting, into this funding that they’re already getting, so that they have more choices. I think what’s unfortunate is, during the COVID shutdown was the ideal time to give people more choices and the ability to feed their families. You didn’t even see it then. You saw the exact same relying on the school to distribute food. It’s ridiculous.
Laura:
What’s interesting is that the reality is that these parents, no matter where you fall on the financial scale, everyone has to go to the grocery store. Even if you rely on the school lunch program for breakfast and snacks for your child, because you fall into a lower income, you are still going to the grocery store for milk, and for bread, and for rice, or whatever it is that you [crosstalk 00:18:23] these choices. Like you said, this would have been a perfect opportunity to shift those dollars from this program into these families’ pockets so that they would have maybe an extra $30 a week to… people are like, “Oh, only $30?” But you can get a lot of food for $30 to feed a single child. We’re only supporting the child. It’s not just the money, but-
Julie:
It doesn’t have to be a direct match. Look, we’ve seen money.
Laura:
Right. People always say, “Oh, it’s going to…” But if you directly match the amount, then you eliminate the argument of, it’s going to cost more. When you eliminate that argument, what we’re really talking about is eliminating the responsibility of taking care of a child that you brought into this world from a parent. Therefore, you are letting somebody else make the decision about what’s best for your child. All things aside, parents can do this.
Julie:
It is so paternalistic also to suggest it’s hard. I mean, I remember in the joint op-ed we wrote, we were like, “Okay, are you actually going to insult someone by saying it’s hard to slap a piece of turkey in between two pieces of bread and hand a kid an apple?” These are not hard things. That’s why I love you as a guest because you don’t just talk about this stuff, you help parents do this. I mean, you actually are helping parents do exactly this. I want to take a few minutes to pivot a little bit away from policy, but it’s still very germane to the conversation we’re having.
Tell us a little bit about these kids. Tell us about the philosophy of MOMables, why you think this is so important and why also… I think it tends to be, even these other mommy bloggers and other food people, they so easily slip into telling people they have to have fancy ingredients. They’re telling them they have to do a 27-step program to make a casserole. Tell us why you have kept your philosophy so good for parents in making simple, easy to understand preparation, and organizing, and prep for kids?
Laura:
Well, thank you. One thing I want to say is that, I wouldn’t still be standing for the last 10 years if my messaging wasn’t, at the end of the day, relatable and empowering to parents. Because I feel, like you just said, putting some turkey and cheese between two slices of bread and an apple or banana, or whatever is that your child may eat, or maybe some veggies instead, does not make you less of a parent than someone that makes a beautifully prepared, photo-worthy lunch for a child. The idea is the effort of having the responsibility of a parent of, “I’m making your food.” We need to model to our children what’s expected out of life. If we want them to make a choice of eating a sandwich at the age of 18 in college and eat healthy versus junk food every day, then it all starts at home.
What I’m saying is to focus on the things that you can do. If all you can do, because you’ve been trying to hold it together during quarantine by juggling your kids and working from home, and maybe you’re a single parent or your spouse is working odd hours too during this stressful time. If all you can do is boil spaghetti, throw some spaghetti sauce on top and maybe brown some meat or a rotisserie chicken, that’s great. That is great. It’s more affordable and less expensive than ordering something to be delivered to your door. It’s unfathomable to me the, “Oh, it’s not fancy enough, and it doesn’t look like the photos I see on the internet or what I see on television,” as opposed to, what is wrong with the meat and potatoes or a rotisserie chicken and some rice on the side?
There’s plenty of nights, and I do this for a living, that my family eats a rotisserie chicken and some rice and some steamed broccoli. That is the simplest of simplest things. I show them on the internet, or their parents, to say, “Hey, you have permission to make the simplest of foods.” Yet at the same time it’s not about what food you feed your family, but it’s about the fact that you are making that effort-
Julie:
Showing it.
Laura:
You’re showing your children, “It’s not that complicated.” Exactly. That is a philosophy that I’ve been preaching of the responsibility of feeding a family is to the family. Until we continue to push that messaging and people actually believe it, then policy is never going to change because people are supporting the government taking care of people, I suppose, to people taking care of people.
Julie:
One other thing, and I want to stress this as well. I love your videos and at the end of this I want everyone to hear how to find you. I really urge people to watch your videos. I really learned by watching people, often I…. I mean, I love recipes, I read cookbooks cover to cover, but I love videos, and Laura has really good ones. One thing that we haven’t talked about and just to briefly touch on is, in your videos your kids appear sometimes, and they’re so cute, and they help maybe with a little bit of the cooking or they’ll be commenting.
I think one thing that the school lunch advocates never talk about is, when I cook for my kids, my kids are usually in the kitchen with me, or they’re running around, they can see what I’m doing, and they’re curious. My kids now each know how to fry an egg over-easy, they know how to make simple scrambled eggs and omelet. They know how to do simple things here and there with food, and they can each make a simple dinner for themselves. I think that’s so critical.
I actually reviewed a book by Julie Lythcott-Haims called, How to Raise an Adult. That’s what we’re really doing here. We forget that we are actually raising future adults who are going to have to take care of themselves. She was a dean of students at a university and she noticed this downward trend in the social abilities and all abilities of these kids coming into the college. That, coupled with tremendous depression and anxiety, and other mental health disorders. She realized that kids would come on to the campus, they didn’t know how to change, they didn’t know how to do their laundry, they didn’t know how to cook simple meals.
They were suddenly untethered from their parents with no preparation. Part of cooking with your kids or cooking around your kids, or just cooking in general while your kids are, I don’t know, watching TV, it doesn’t matter, is they see that this is something you need to do. It’s a task you need to learn to do, it is a tool that will help you function in the world. That’s another important thing is that, by learning this and learning to make simple meals, ultimately you’ll be teaching your children just by doing it.
Laura:
Yes. I mean, I tell my girlfriends. I say, “If your son who’s eight can play Minecraft and read what’s happening in the game, they can read a simple recipe from MOMables.” The reason is because I rewrite recipes to the simplest version possible, and the simplest steps. Because I do have a lot of parents in my community who, they subscribe to my meal plan and then they let their kids cook one night of the week. That’s another reason why I include one video a week. Every meal plan has at least one video, and that is often…
I get a lot of emails from parents saying, “Hey, thank you. Your video recipe of the week is the one that’s helping my child…” They may be eight, nine, 10, “… how to cook.” Because they’ll watch your video. Kids love YouTube, so they’ll click on the recipe video, they’ll watch it, they’ll pause it, they chop whatever it is, and then they continue on. We don’t need to teach our kids just textbooks skills, but life skills. Food is something that we need. You don’t need to drive a car if you live in New York City, but you do need to eat. This idea is to help your kids to basics.
Julie:
As all of us have probably learned over the last couple of weeks, or rather months, my God, takeout food can be expensive. My husband and I, we limit it to a once a week because we’re feeding three kids, and they’re all boys and they’re growing, and then we want to get stuff too. It’s really also critical just from a household financial standpoint. I will tell you, Laura, I should videotape at some point, I do let my kids cook, and I let them cook with me, and I let them cook their own stuff. But if I am going to eat anything that they eat, I wish you could see the scrutiny with which I have over their handwashing beforehand. As the mother of three boys, I see where those hands go, and I’m really not… basically, if I could boil their hands before they touch the… I know that’s not allowed, but there is-
Laura:
Yeah, from chicken. You go to teach them the basics, don’t touch raw meat and then go cook everybody else’s food. But what you’re saying is very important, it’s helping your kids become adults. Isn’t that, at the end of the day, what we want for our kids in a society? For people to think for themselves, and that is taught at home. Even what we really originally started talking about, which is letting the school system decide what are the sandwiches and things that people took home. You eliminated that decision making from a parent and a child, of what’s best for their household. Therefore, it is a never-ending cycle. That is why you work really hard in the policy side, and I work hard on the home front, to equip these parents with the confidence to know that, something as basic as a rotisserie chicken, or ground meat, or ground turkey, can be nutritious. Then the know how is how you fix the system.
Julie:
Well, we also need to remember that there has never been a time in the history of the world where it is easier to prepare simple meals, and yet there has never been a time where the public is told how hard it is than today. It is absolutely ridiculous, and I appreciate that you are trying to fix those scattered messages because it’s not true. It’s very easy to do and parents should do this.
I want to take a moment just to read really quickly from your book, which, again, I think is the, Best Homemade Kids’ Lunches on the Planet. It says, “Making lunches for your kids, your kids will love, with more than 200 deliciousy nutritious meal ideas.” But I want to say, look, I’ve seen a lot. I have a lot of kids, not a lot, but I have a few kids cookbooks, but none are better than Laura’s. She has things in here… Let me tell you, when you tell your kids that they’re getting the Ninja Turtle grilled cheese, or the grilled leprechaun, [inaudible 00:30:45] would be favorite, the skinny Elvis, the elephant sandwich. Oh my gosh, one of our favorites is the spaghetti cupcakes, lastly… there are some more, I can’t read them all. I mean, that is fun for kids.
But I also want to say in the back of the book, what I love, is that there’s actually meal planning tips 101. She actually has simple meal plan actually with page numbers, and also with some suggestions, “This will be good with this lunch or that lunch.” It’s tremendously helpful. Again, there’s just so much in this book. I really recommend it. Laura, why don’t you tell people of all the places they can find you.
Laura:
The best place to find me is online. You can either Google my name, Laura Fuentes or MOMables, like MOM-ables. No matter where you find me, I would be thrilled at the opportunity to teach you or your kids to follow along on video or by recipes to develop these simple skills. You know what’s funny, Julie, that you mentioned about my book is that, that was my first cookbook. What’s great is that even, I think seven years later, my philosophy still hasn’t changed. I think what’s really important is when you focus on the basics of the basic human needs and the basic goals for people, which is, like our kids, to become adults, they can take care of themselves. You’re always on the right path. My cookbook that you have in your hand, which is at the favorite, it’s a great seller year after year, it’s still relevant, because it’s not ‘a trend’. It is because it’s what’s good for normal families that want the best for their kids. I think we all set out to be parents wanting the best for our kids.
Anywhere you want to find me online, I will be thrilled to help you cook along with me, or learn a new recipe, learn how to eliminate processed foods and sugars. Just really depends of what your meal goals are, I’m there for you.
Julie:
Well, Laura is also on Twitter. Give them your, @momables. Is that, @momables? And then @fuentes?
Laura:
@momables, @lauraffuentes, Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Julie:
Great. She posts daily recipes there. Sometimes I’m feeling particularly uninspired and then I’ll look at her feed and I’ll find something fun to make. Laura, look, I really appreciate you coming on here. It’s so often when I interview someone, there’s a lot of policy talk and not always a lot of practical talk. This gave people both, not just a snapshot of the policy and really what we’re working against, a culture where it’s acceptable not to feed your kids, not to prepare food for your kids, and how the federal government, state governments, are really perpetuating that and encouraging that. That is a massive problem, particularly when the evidence shows that kids stay healthy when their parents are involved in their nutritional development.
But I also appreciate that you are actually helping people with advice on how to actually do it. That is a real rare treat to talk to someone who understands the policy and is actually working to solve the problem. I’m really thrilled that you came on with us today, and I hope you’ll come back.
Laura:
I do too. Thank you so much for having me on.
Julie:
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