We Are How We Eat: An Argument for the Social Value of Slow School Lunch

This chapter examines the lunch practices at Bishop Seabury Academy, a private school in Lawrence, Kansas. At Bishop Seabury, all students and staff sit together in mixed age, randomly assigned, biweekly rotations three days each week throughout the year. This purposeful arrangement serves as a backdrop against which I develop a critique of school lunch in its more typical—and taken for granted—form as simply a necessary pause to refuel the body. Drawing conceptually from the “slow” movement for the serious reconsideration of lunch, I compare Seabury and other efforts that promote the social value of lunchtime. My analysis illustrates how such initiatives challenge enduring “fast food” orientations to what and how we eat in school.