I’ve been so remiss in updating this blog, due largely to Facebook. But I want to share a review I recently wrote for the Land Stewardship Project’s newsletter. It’s about the documentary film “Two Angry Moms,” a look at U.S. school lunches.

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Last fall, I attended the first evening of a two-day school food conference: a gathering of food service directors and other “stakeholders,” convened by a Minnesota-based nutrition foundation. Among my souvenirs from the evening was a fact sheet on Solae Chicken Shreds: “A tasty, whole-muscle-like product featuring a blend of chicken and SUPRO® MAX structured vegetable protein product.” If that doesn’t whet your appetite, I don’t know what will.

The workshop’s attendees included about 20 school food service professionals, several nutrition researchers, an award-winning organic restaurateur, two interested parents (I came with a friend, another freelance writer) — and 10 or 12 representatives of corporate agribusiness, energetically hawking their employers’ latest feats of engineering. Clearly, industrial ag is concerned as ever about the health and well-being of America’s schoolchildren.

The impetus for the conference was a preliminary set of recommendations from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) for updating nutrition standards in school meals; one of the IOM’s recommendations was that at least half — or 51 percent — of grains in school lunches be from “whole grain-rich foods.” At the conference I picked up a Superkids Wholegrain Sampling Program directory, touting a host of ConAgra products — from pretzels to cookie dough to macaroni noodles — now containing exactly 51 percent whole grain.

My family is fortunate in that my husband and I are able to buy nutritious, sustainably produced food — and have the time to pack healthy home lunches for our kids. But, of course, they’d rather eat the sugary breakfast cereals, chocolate milk and nachos that many of their classmates get at school. In any case, it strikes me as unjust that millions of American kids simply don’t have access to wholesome meals. So it was with great interest that this angry mom watched Amy Kalafa and Susan Rubin’s new documentary, Two Angry Moms, a film examining “big food profits vs. children’s health.” Noting that the obesity epidemic is just one symptom of declining children’s health in the U.S., Kalafa sets to explain “what parents need to know and do to get better food in schools.”

The film opens with the image of potato strips being dunked in a deep fryer, and a barrage of alarming statistics on childhood obesity, Type II diabetes, allergies, heart disease, decreasing life expectancy and more. After addressing head-on the myth that school lunch reformers are dour, humorless “food police,” determined to take cupcakes out of children’s birthdays (Rubin is even shown savoring a cupcake — a real cupcake, made with butter and sugar and flour — outside a bakery), the filmmakers quickly move to the root of the problem.

As author, researcher and New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle points out, the USDA, whose primary purpose is to “promote American agriculture,” has a fundamental conflict of interest in its secondary charge to feed America’s schoolchildren healthful, wholesome, balanced meals. After all, “American agriculture” is dominated by large agribusiness firms that are in business to maximize profits, and that means selling as much product as possible, regardless of its nutritional value. Chips, snack cakes, hot dogs and soft drinks: That’s what kids want to eat, big food companies tell us; we’re just meeting consumer demand. School lunch directors, constrained both by tight budgets and picky customers with deeply ingrained habits, feel pressure to offer lucrative, packaged “a la carte” items — “competitive food” that will reliably sell.

In short, this is what you call an uphill battle. But it is winnable — and worth fighting. The filmmakers exhort parents to organize, to band together; to learn about the challenges school administrators, board members, and food service directors are up against; and to take charge of writing meaningful, community-authored wellness policies that firmly articulate the school district’s needs. Widespread parent support and community buy-in are essential, they emphasize.

There are allies out there—school-food pioneers, models for improvement—and the film introduces us to some of them: Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters and rebel lunch lady Ann Cooper, who revolutionized the Berkeley United School District’s lunch program; food service director Rodney Taylor of Riverside, Cal., who brought local farmers’ bounty to urban public school salad bars; school lunch chef Tony Geraci of New Hampshire, whose own battle with diabetes prompted him to create a “prevention model” that includes healthy, kid-designed meals for students in his district. Their experiences show that American children will in fact eat wholesome, nutrient-rich meals — especially if they’re involved in growing, cooking, preparing and composting the food.

The film is informative and encouraging, but pretty coastal-centric. Real and important progress is being made here in the Midwest, too. Farm-to-school programs are connecting a growing number of school districts with food from local farms (and providing new and exciting opportunities for nutrition education). The Saint Paul, Minn., district, for instance, has attracted national attention for its farm-to-school effort; in the first six weeks of the academic year, the district purchased 110,000 pounds of locally grown produce for school lunches. The Farm to School Minnesota Toolkit for Food Service (www.mn-farmtoschool.umn.edu), which is based on materials developed in the Willmar, Minn., school district, provides guidelines for getting healthy, local foods into cafeterias.

These are not easy changes to implement; such efforts need vocal, sustained public support. “This is politics, and it’s the ugliest kind of politics, being fought over our kids’ health,” Nestle says. “If there aren’t angry moms pushing [reform], it’s not going to happen.”