Mrs. Q’s Battle Cry for Lunch

How did Sarah’s trans­for­ma­tion take place? It all began one day when she for­got her lunch. She thought it was no big deal; she would pick up a lunch from the school cafe­te­ria. She spent three dol­lars for the only lunch avail­able: a bagel dog, a Jell-O cup, six Tater Tots, and choco­late milk.

That day, she broke her pat­tern and got mad. “That first meal really both­ered me,” Sarah told Organic Connections. “I think it was because I care so much about my stu­dents; they don’t have access to the things that, I feel, a lot of peo­ple take for granted in their lives. People often read about a prob­lem and there’s a distance—like maybe they read about some­thing online and get upset about it and then move on with their day. I did sort of move on with my life after I ate that first lunch, but the prob­lem was that I was faced with the chil­dren who eat those meals every day. I couldn’t just shake it off and move along; it was right there in front of my face. So it was either act or not act. And I felt like I wanted to do something.”

These were not ordi­nary stu­dents, either—which exac­er­bated the prob­lem in Sarah’s mind. “They’re super low-income kids,” Sarah said. “It’s the chil­dren that peo­ple don’t think about or for sure are never rep­re­sented in the media. The sto­ries you hear, the things that hap­pen in their lives—they blow your mind, that it’s hap­pen­ing and nobody cares and things just keep mov­ing along.”

Fed Up With Lunch

The action Sarah decided to take was to eat the lunch served at her school every day for a year, pho­to­graph the meal and post it on a daily blog, which she titled Fed Up With Lunch: The School Lunch Project. Not want­ing to get her­self in trou­ble with the school sys­tem, she came up with the pseu­do­nym Mrs. Q sim­ply because, she says in her book, it rhymed with her name.

The blog became an almost instant sen­sa­tion. Readers from all over the coun­try began laud­ing her, and she even started hear­ing from lead­ers in the fight for school lunch reform, such as Dr. Marion Nestle.

As Sarah went for­ward she began ana­lyz­ing the food, as well as pho­tograph­ing and eat­ing it. She would break down the chicken nuggets and pizza for actual ingre­di­ents. She also exam­ined the USDA food requirements—which her school did meet or exceed—and showed what “foods” were being served to meet these requirements.

Sarah chat­ted with the stu­dents about these lunches too, the results of which were fea­tured in the “Kids Say the Darndest Things” sec­tion of her blog. Several sto­ries of these talks are included in the book. Probably the most fright­en­ing rev­e­la­tions in these conversations—aside from the food itself—was what the kids actu­ally did once the food had been served. They would trade items (as chil­dren will do), and one kid would end up with five cook­ies. Or there’s the child who ate six peanut but­ter and jelly sand­wiches one day because oth­ers didn’t want them; as Sarah fig­ured out, the child actu­ally ingested 1,908 calo­ries, with 972 of those calo­ries com­ing from fat.

Lunch Fame

As the blog grew in pop­u­lar­ity, Sarah was inter­viewed by the media—still under her anony­mous pen name—and her pub­lic­ity widened even more. Probably the high point of this period was the inter­view she did with Good Morning America—in shadow and with her voice elec­tron­i­cally altered. Shortly after­ward she received a phone call from none other than celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, at the time engaged in his own cam­paign for school lunches; they shared mutual sto­ries of what they had each encoun­tered in their respec­tive situations.

By the time she reached the end of the school year, the blog had achieved over a mil­lion hits, and Mrs. Q was famous. She was finally approached about turn­ing her expe­ri­ences into a book—which, she dis­cov­ered, would mean that she would have to dis­close her actual iden­tity. “I didn’t really care to reveal my name,” Sarah recalled. “But when I was approached about writ­ing a book, they told me it would have to be with my real name because a book by an anony­mous author wouldn’t sell. I ended up decid­ing that I would come out, so that’s what I did.”

Click on any image above to see a larger version.

In addi­tion to detail­ing her expe­ri­ences, along with the exten­sive research she con­ducted on school food, the book Fed Up With Lunch also includes all of the pho­tos she took of the meals, and it ends with a hefty “action and resource guide” that gives par­ents plen­ti­ful help to become involved in get­ting this scene changed.

It is this active involve­ment by par­ents that Sarah would like to see. “After I started doing my blog, peo­ple were totally hor­ri­fied by what the kids were eat­ing,” Sarah related. “They were shocked. What ended up hap­pen­ing as a result—which I predicted—was that most peo­ple decided to opt out of school lunch, decid­ing that pack­ing lunches for their kids was bet­ter. The prob­lem with that is that pack­ing is really tedious. It’s a pain, it’s stress­ful, and it’s tak­ing time out of your already short sched­ule in the morn­ing. For me it is def­i­nitely an incen­tive to do some advocacy.”

The response from Chicago Public Schools to Sarah’s book—in which the actual school sys­tem for which she worked was revealed—began with a boil­er­plate response, but then took a turn for the bet­ter. “When the book came out, they issued a state­ment that they ‘meet or exceed the USDA reg­u­la­tions’ on school food,” Sarah said. “However, I recently got an e-mail from the head of nutri­tion ser­vices, and I’m going to be meet­ing with her next week for the first time.”

Into the Future

With her book released, Sarah is busy pro­mot­ing it, while work­ing through her blog and other chan­nels to lend her now famous name to con­tinue con­nect­ing up par­ents and get­ting the mes­sage out. “I really want to become more involved with the non­prof­its that are work­ing to address these issues,” Sarah explained. “I attended an event ear­lier in November called Cooking Up Change here in Chicago. They had a com­pe­ti­tion between high school stu­dents to cre­ate a school lunch meal for the same exact cost that the school sys­tem gets. That was really excit­ing. I have also recently blogged about the Feeding America ini­tia­tive to bat­tle hunger, and a lot of the research that they’ve shared about the preva­lence of child hunger in our coun­try. I’d very much like to bring forth the work of those two non­prof­its and share it with a wider audience.”

The changes that Sarah has expe­ri­enced within her­self through this whole adven­ture have been significant—and have left her poised for future bat­tles. “I am cer­tainly a lot more vocal than before I started,” Sarah con­cluded. “My mom told me, ‘What you did was great, because you stood up for the chil­dren when nobody else over there would.’ I con­sider myself, more than any­thing else, a child advo­cate, because chil­dren have no way of stat­ing an opin­ion about things that hap­pen in their lives. They are just at the mercy of every­body who is abus­ing them. I think that it’s impor­tant for peo­ple to do the right thing; it’s very impor­tant for peo­ple to speak up when they think that something’s wrong, and not just let it go by. That’s sim­ply our oblig­a­tion as adults, who have to look out for chil­dren who really need peo­ple to be there for them.”

Sarah Wu’s book Fed Up With Lunch: How One Anonymous Teacher Revealed the Truth About School Lunches—and How We Can Change Them! is avail­able from the Organic Connections book­store.

Read Mrs. Q’s con­tin­u­ing blog at www.fedupwithlunch.com.