Around 8:30 each morning, students at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, Calif., cross an asphalt playground behind the main school building and begin drifting into a cafeteria and kitchen complex known as the Dining Commons to pick up breakfast for themselves and their classmates. They head for a set of rolling metal shelves holding gray, plastic bins, and carry one back to their classroom, where they dole out the food and fill out a roster indicating which students took the meal.
One morning during my recent "internship" with the school's central kitchen, I was assigned to load the bins. That day, the bins' contents were a sliced loaf of homemade banana bread, kid-size Fuji and Golden Delicious apples (that I sealed in plastic bags), and cartons of plain organic milk.
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