The Milk on Our School Lunch Trays: School Lunch, Milk, and the Female Bodies on Whom We Depend by Samantha Deane and Annie Schultz

Educational policymakers, teachers, administrators, and, often times, parents overlook the educational significance of the lunch hour. For policymakers and administrators, the lunch hour is a necessary break for students to refuel their brains vis a vis putting food into their bodies. For some parents, the lunch hour is the source of countless hours spent putting together brown bag lunches. For teachers, it’s another, yet unstructured, time to supervise children. For children, the lunch hour is where friends are made and lost, where social class becomes apparent, and most importantly where learning with and through the body happens. Many philosophers of education have pointed out the harm in ignoring school lunch as an important “hidden curriculum” in the school day (Rice & Rud, 2018; Weaver-Hightower, 2011). Often their aim is to make the ecological implications of our food consumption apparent, to urge a kind of intentionality toward the food that we eat, and to call our attention to the miseducative social interactions that can arise when teachers are positioned as police of the lunch room. We would like to propose a consideration of the bodies (human and animal) at stake in the arrival of a particularly pervasive lunch item: the milk carton.

This essay began as a conversation about the role of milk in our lives. We are philosophers of education, who study education through gender. Out of necessity and choice, neither of us drink cows’ milk. Although we too are concerned about the ecological implications of the dairy industry and the ethics of animal exploitation, these concerns did not strike us as something a philosopher of education would have much to say about, until we read Greta Gaard’s “Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies.” Gaard points out the racial and colonial history of milk production and consumption globally, the economic implication of women who breastfeed, and the effects of our gendered ideas about nature (Gaard, 2013). And we thought—’Wait … milk is also a part of our education spaces.’ Precisely what is milk doing in educational spaces? Our intuition told us that there is more here than capitalism and special interest of the billion-dollar dairy industry; perhaps there is something gendered at work in the serving and consuming of milk in schools.

Taking an intersectional approach to sexism and speciesism and linking milk-making bodies to ideas about gender, Kemmerer and Adams point out that “dairy cows are often feminized … in our cultural iconography,” because of the nature of the processes: they are milked in order to provide a nutrient to society (Adams, 2011, p. 6). Further bridging the concept of milk making and a gendered political economy, Gaard points out another parallel between the care of women and the exploitation of the dairy cow: that both do a ‘job’ they are uncompensated for, and on which society depends, and the results of their labor are taken for granted (Gaard, 2013, p. 598). Building on the work of ecofeminists like Gaard, Kemmerer, and Adams, in this essay, we propose a thread to understand the connections between American schools, milk, the children that drink it, and the women whose labor nurtures schools, the children within them, and the communities that surround them. We argue that the milk on students’ lunch trays is a stand-in for the embodied labor of women that schools and communities are often built on top of.  After all, milk is the product of female bodies and schools are maintained by mostly female teachers and staff. When we attend to the milk carton on students’ lunch trays, we, therefore, attend to the trivialized and often disappeared work of women.

Building on the work of ecofeminists like Gaard, Kemmerer, and Adams, in this essay, we propose a thread to understand the connections between American schools, milk, the children that drink it, and the women whose labor nurtures schools, the children within them, and the communities that surround them

Why is Milk Apart of the Educational Project?

Milk in American education is ubiquitous, and the milk carton is pervasive in childhood culture. In decades past, the faces of lost children were pasted on the sides of milk cartons and toy makers like Mattel created toys based on the Got Milk marketing campaign (Kardashian, 2014). In recent years, debates about whether school should serve flavored milk as a way to get children to drink the alleged healthful, calcium-rich beverage have accompanied pre and post Obama era policies under which milk is the only beverage to be served to children who receive free and reduced-priced lunch. In schools, we learn that milk “does a body good” (Adelson, 1994). In fact, historian Susan Levine documents the ways in which agricultural food surplus governs what children eat in schools more than concerns about health and the subsequent civics training that emerges in one of the longest-lasting public welfare programs, the school lunch (Levine, 2010). And all of these in-school encounters with milk precede our first educational encounters with milk as infants.

In many ways, the milk that is ubiquitous in childhood and a common component of school lunches is a stand-in for the first milk encountered by the infant from her mother. When an expecting mother prepares to bring a new human into the world she is faced with a choice—breast or bottle. To help her make a decision about whether she ought to use the milk created by her body to nurture and feed her new baby she can consult hundreds of “scientific” and child-rearing manuals urging her to think about what is natural or what suits the constraints of her life. From the moment a child arrives in the world milk and the bodies who produce it are positioned as essential for human development and natural. 

Given the concern about raising new humans to become healthy and strong subjects, which is the rationale behind milk drinking, it should be no surprise then that philosophers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau have weighed in on the breastfeeding mother. Rousseau is a key figure in American political and educational thought. He influenced Swiss educator Johann Pestalozzi who went on to characterize the “object lesson,” Friedrich Froebel architect of the kindergarten, as well as the founders of the American republican project. In 1762, Rousseau begins his educational treatise, Emile, a letter addressed to a mother concerning the proper education of boys, with the mother’s duty to breastfeed her children (Rousseau, 1979, p. 45). Rousseau is interested in articulating an educational project that will fulfill the promise of his social contract. That he begins with the breast-feeding mother tells us that the care work of women is fundamental to the educational project in western liberal democracies, which draw on similar political traditions. Without women, whose care is rendered “natural,” no education can take place.  Once the ideal educational subject, a young boy named Emile for Rousseau, has been adequately nourished by the breast and is big and strong enough, his journey toward becoming a subject and then citizen begins. Using a modern vocabulary, one might say that Emile’s education revolves around the development of self-esteem in preparation for his life as a citizen. Rousseau’s goal is to educate a man who cannot be bated or swayed by public opinion. These are fine goals, indeed.   

Yet Rousseau’s characterization of the necessary, yet largely unacknowledged female body pervades western educational thought. The initial gestation and breast-feeding, the work of attending to children’s bodies, happens at home and can be swiftly forgotten when the child arrives at the public space of the school. To be sure feminist philosophers of education, such as Jane Roland Martin, have pointed out the link between Rousseau’s sexist political and educational commitments. However, few have attended to the fact that the trivialization of women’s bodies, and therefore the “jobs” identified as feminine, still sits at the core of our educational and political imagery.

Free Riding and Attending to our Lunch

Milk has been both naturalized and gendered. Milk is the product of female bodies. Breastfeeding is cast as natural as are women who follow the biological imperative to have and raise children on their breastmilk. Similarly, the cow and her milk are recognized as natural products that extend and sustain human life when the breast is no longer an option. Thus, Gaard points out, the cow and her milk are taken for granted because the cow is gendered (Gaard, 2013). As we see it, paying attention to the milk in our schools and homes challenges us to recall how and why some bodies are cast as natural and what this has to do with their subsequent trivialization in the public.

Philosophers of education have written about the moral, ethical, racial, gendered dimensions of the hidden curriculum of what we eat, who we eat with, and the significance afforded this moment of the school day (Rice & Rud, 2018) . Adding to this body of literature, we add the observation that female bodies were positioned by a seminal philosopher of education, Rousseau, as necessary food for the stuff of society. These ideas have followed us into our modern educational systems such that any hopes for gender equality in our educational structures must attend to the pervasive trivialization of female bodies in the food we consume during that hour of the school day we most often ignore.

How do we get from breast milk to packaged cow milk on a student’s lunch tray? In this essay we have hinted at one path: a recognition of that which is constructed as natural is a part of a desire for control. In other words, because the dairy cow is seen as female, her labor to produce milk is registered as natural. When we, humans, understand something as natural it becomes quite difficult to make sense of alternative visions of ontological ordering. As Levine (2010) points out the school lunch program teaches children about social programs, poverty, and living with different others—it is an education in civics and hierarchical community making. If our educational visions intend to bring about more equitable, just, humane, and egalitarian relations, then we must stop “milking” the care of women and female others for all its worth and start thinking about how to teach children about the all too human construction of nature and gender.

Samantha Deane is a Visiting Clinical Assistant Professor in the Cultural and Educational Studies Department at Loyola University Chicago. Prior to joining the CEPS faculty, she served at an educational nonprofit in positions that focused on post-secondary out-of-school-time programming for underrepresented teenagers in Chicago. The broad focus of her research is the realization of social justice through the advancement of democratic societies, and her primary project focuses on the relationship of gun violence to enactments of democratic education. Dr. Deane’s dissertation is titled Liberal Democratic Civic Education and Rampage School Gun Violence: Why We Need An Alternative Theory of Democracy to Guide Contemporary Civic Education.

Annie is a third-year doctoral student in the Cultural and Educational Policy Studies program at Loyola University Chicago, specializing in philosophy of education.

Work Cited

Adams, C. J. (2011). Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice (1st edition; L. A. Kemmerer, Ed.). Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press.

Adelson, A. (1994, June 14). The Media Business: Advertising; A new campaign focused on the utility of milk does the product a lot of good. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/14/business/media-business-advertising-new-campaign-focused-utility-milk-does-product-lot.html

Crittenden, A. (2010). The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued (10th Anniversary edition). New York: Picador.

Gaard, G. (2013). Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies. American Quarterly, 65(3), 595–618.

Kardashian, K. (2014, February 28). The End of Got Milk? Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-end-of-got-milk

Laird, S. (2018). School Lunch Matters: Encountering the New Jim Crow and the Anthropocene. Educational Studies, 54(1), 17–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2017.1407937

Levine, S. (2010). School Lunch Politics. Retrieved from https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691146195/school-lunch-politics

Rice, S., & Rud, A. G. (Eds.). (2018). Educational Dimensions of School Lunch: Critical Perspectives. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72517-8

Rousseau, J.-J. (1979). Emile: Or On Education (A. Bloom, Trans.). New York: Basic Books.

Valenze, D. (2012). Milk: A Local and Global History. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Weaver-Hightower, M. B. (2011). Why Education Researchers Should Take School Food Seriously. Educational Researcher, 40(1), 15–21. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X10397043