Zachary Maxwell, “Yuck! A 4th Grader’s Short Documentary about School Lunch” (2012)
Here comes wisdom from the mouths of babes … in this case, 9-year-old Zachary Maxwell who at the time of filming was attending a public elementary school in New York City. Every day, he’d look forward to school lunch based on the day’s menu which read like a menu that might be offered by one of NY’s finest 3-starred restaurants … only to be disappointed by the over-wrapped, bland and tasteless factory offerings dumped onto his tray. Irritated by the huge gap between what was advertised and what was the reality, Maxwell began a guerrilla film project in which he surreptitiously filmed or photographed about 75 school lunches served to him over several months, at least until he became careless and the Lunch Monitor caught him waving his phone camera in the air. Out of these pictures and videos, Maxwell created a well-structured investigative documentary project which highlights the hypocrisy behind the school lunch programs being run in New York City.
The documentary is very slick and Maxwell received a lot of adult help in editing the film and creating special effects and animation for the project. He ropes in his young brother Lucas for several scenes including a number of scenes in which they conduct an experiment (not very scientific) to see whether the school cafeteria’s fried potato chips last as long as a sponge cake or fresh vegetables. Maxwell appears in nearly every shot where he plays both investigative sleuth and narrator.
Maxwell concludes from the results of his project that the school lunch program’s hype about its lunches being varied, delicious and nutritious is just hot air and the actual lunches themselves – and viewers can see for themselves – are monotonous and consist of highly processed foods with dubious levels of nutrients (to say nothing of what they contain in additives and preservatives) and little if any of the fresh fruits and vegetables they are advertised as having. Along the way he and his fellow students get an early lesson in the power of propaganda to lead impressionable minds astray. He and Lucas decide that the best school lunches are ones they make themselves and carry to school in brown bags.
The film is at once funny and very entertaining, and very revealing about what children at Maxwell’s school have to put up with when private corporations and governments collude to pursue maximum profits by dumping junk … er, in serving school lunch meals to primary schoolchildren. Maxwell’s school may or may not be typical of schools in New York state in supplying such bland and useless lunches. One would hope such films like Maxwell’s should serve as a wake-up call to education department bureaucrats in that state and across the rest of the United States to start supplying more nutritious school meals to primary and secondary school students … but as long as the country hews to an ideology that privileges self-interest, greed and competition over co-operation, and believes that pursuing profit at the expense of the health of young Americans trumps everything else, Maxwell and his friends will have to be satisfied with eating more plastic processed pulp.
The documentary can be seen at this link.