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The School Food Revolution: Public Food and the Challenge of Sustainable Development: By Kevin Morgan and Roberta Sonnino

The School Food Revolution is an extraordinarily useful book. Kevin Morgan and Roberta Sonnino, faculty members at the School of City and Regional Planning at Cardiff University, have produced a series of insightful case studies of school-food reform in three of the world’s major cities, three small rural areas in the UK, and in a few developing nations, with a focus on Ghana. They have embedded these case studies in a broad, encompassing conceptual framework analyzing the potential of public procurement to promote sustainable development, enhance health, and contribute to the transition toward the “green state.” This book will be essential reading for scholars working on school food and on the broader contextual issues of child health, especially childhood obesity, and for students of the whole issue of scale and (re)localization. Further, it will be of great interest to food system reformers outside the academy. I plan to use it in graduate courses concerned with community food security and I can imagine that others might use it in courses concerned with sustainability and/or food systems policy and planning. For would-be agents of school-food change, especially those steeped in the American reality, the overall impact of reading the book is quite profound. School meals are not inherently doomed to be governed by the low-cost/poor-quality paradigm. School systems can and have substituted a “best value” metric in contrast to the “lowest bid” standard that has prevailed in most US communities, and they have successfully defended a broad and inclusive notion of what counts in determining best value. Consider this summary from the book’s introduction regarding the reformed school-food procurement strategy in East Ayrshire, Scotland: