Jennifer E. Gaddis

Jennifer Gaddis is associate professor of Civil Society and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the award-winning author of The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools (University of California Press, 2019). She is an expert on school food politics and systems change at district, state, and national scales. Her latest book, Transforming School Food Politics Around the World (MIT Press, 2024), discusses how to successfully challenge and transform public school-food programs to emphasize care, justice, and sustainability, with insights from eight countries across the Global North and South. Gaddis is an advisory board member of the National Farm to School Network and an active public scholar. She has written op-eds on school food politics for popular media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, The Guardian, and Teen Vogue. She and her students regularly partner with school districts, labor unions, and social movement organizations on community-based research and advocacy projects related to food justice in K-12 schools.