How We Feed Our Students

I went to a Catholic school and I, uh, you know, there was a regulation where if you live close enough to school, you can actually walk home and and have your lunch at home. And I lived the block away from school, and so my brothers and I would we would go home for lunch. And also very fortunate that my grandmother lived right next door, so we would go to her house. And my grandmother, um was uh bipolar, and when she was feeling well, she would just go

to town. You know, we would we would come home and they would just be a feastly out and you know, she made an amazing grilled cheese sandwich and I still or tomato soup that she made everything from scratch, and she would roast chicken and always some home bake pie or cake or something. We would walk back to school kind of full and take our time, and it was

just always a great memory. And you know, also not only the great food, but we got to share a lot of time with both grandparents sat during that little lunch break. And then later on I went to public school, and I had a great fortune of having my mother prepare lunch for well not only me, but probably two thousand other students. My mother managed a school cafeteria in Elizabeth, New Jersey. You know, it was always great that that I got to see my mother from time to time.

You know, I'd pop by and you know, see how she was doing. And the downside was that if I ever got in trouble, she knew right away. So but it was it was a little later on, I think I was in my thirties, maybe my father had passed away already, and so my mother she started to complain that that she was, you know, starting to you know,

our feet were hurting her. So I, you know, suggested that maybe she's thinking about retiring, and you know, she said thing that that that was just really profound and and and really stuck with me for for a really long time. In fact, it was much later on when I became an advocate, and especially around school lunch, that I remember this story and and I often repeated it and if I was talking to members of Congress, are

anyone else trying to get my point across? When I asked her, you know, to retire, she said, no, I think I have a few years left. And I'll tell you why. She said, I know a lot of the kids who are coming in and out of my lunch room that this is the only meal they're getting all day. And I have to fight like hell right now to make sure that we have fresh fruits and vegetables and that we're cooking a lot of the food from scratch. And my supervisor constantly pushing me to go to you know,

all pre prepared meals. We can cut payroll, and we can you know, maybe cut down on some waste and stuff like that. And she said, you know, I'm fighting to make sure that these kids have healthy food. So I have a few years left. And you know, again, at the time, I didn't think much about it until I started to become an activist, and I those words, I remember those words. I remember what she said. And and you know, now now we're looking at these cafeteria

workers very differently. I mean, they're on the front lines. They are the essential workers. And in fact, in New York and I'm sure many other cities and states and towns when school, when when the kids went to distance learning, those cafeteria workers still had to go to work. They put themselves in danger because they still had a community to feed. And so I didn't Again, I didn't really

think much about what my mom was doing. And then it was just there was a job, and and but now I realized that it was, you know, so much more. And then more recently, you know, we've seen the stories and the news of these kids who go through the lunch line and they they've run out of money on their cars, and lunch is taken away from them and

they're given a cold cheese sandwich. And you know, I I talked to my mom about that recently, and she said, yeah, that that would happen, and I would just let the kids go through. And she said, you know, sometimes my counts were off, my supervisors would give me a hard time, but she said there was no way that I could take food away, especially when I know these kids are hungry. I couldn't take food away from these kids, and so

I would just let them go. This is also part of the reason why I really truly believed that that school should be free for all. It shouldn't be the three tiered system that we have. And and I thought the best person to have this discussion for for our school lunch episode would be the woman who wrote the book Free for All, and that is doctor Janet Popendick. Janet, how you doing. I'm okay, Tom, How are you well?

You know, considering we're We're okay, We're okay. The hardest thing these days is the distance learning for the kids. That's that's that's UH challenging. I'm an older one that's a college student, but he's getting by. UM. So we're talking with Dr Janet pomit Dick. She is the UH Senior Faculty Fellow at the Urban Food Policy Institute at the City University of New York and also the author

of Sweet Charity, Free for All. In breadlines breadlines knee deep in wheak, it was a slogan during the Great Depression breadlines need deep in We are surely the handiwork of foolish men. We we we do know each other. Um. When my wife Lorie uh in her partner Christie Jacobson um made the film A Place at the Table, Um, you were one of the people that we relied on to sort of explain uh various issues around hunger, especially the school lunch program. And so I think that's where

I want to start. Um. Uh. You know, most people who are um uh you know, don't don't sort are aren't steeped in hunger and hunger related issues, and um uh in in some ways to to alleviate hunger, they don't think in terms of school uh, school breakfast, school lunch. Um. You know the lunch room is one of those things when you were a kid, you you kind of it broke up your day. Um. You know you try to

avoid the food fight in most cases. Uh. If you had access to outside, you you spent as little time as possible as you can so you can run outside. But you know, there are thirty million children who use our school lunch program and a good amount of those kids, UM that's the nutrition they get for the for the entire day. So I just want to ask you briefly,

so how did the school lunch program start? Why did it start, and then we'll talk a little bit about about the challenges that we see today in school lunch program So, school lunch programs in the United States date back to the early years of the twentieth century UM, when compulsory education began to be the norm UM in

the United States. UM. Many very poor families UM had relied on the work of their children to help meet the family budget, and when kids were required to be in school, UM, poor families found themselves even less able to meet their food needs. And so schools began providing meals because kids were coming to school hungry. But this was not a federal program in any way a perform This was typically started by a charitable organization or a voluntary group of some sort, and in large cities rapidly

taken over by municipal government. So there was a network of these programs throughout the United States at the time that the Great Depression hit, and again at that point when children were visibly suffering from hunger and malnutrition and families were desperate, school lunch programs expanded in a lot of communities. In New York City, UM, the records show that the teachers gave money to expand the school lunch

program to be able to include more children. The federal government got involved because they had agricultural surpluses and needed a way to dispose of them. UM. In the Great Depression of the nineties. The farm economy had been in trouble since the end of World War One. You know, farmers expanded a bridge and planning during World War One.

They were getting high prices, there was huge demand. At the end of the war, Congress canceled the war credits that had enabled our European allies to purchase American farm products, and the farm market collapsed and it never really recovered. So when the Roosevelt administration came into power, UM, they took steps to try to adjust the farm economy UM to remove surpluses from the market, and then they had

a problem about what to do with them. They were a public relations problem for the government because so many people were hungry, and so they began donating for farm surpluses, purchasing from farmers and donating for relief through the emergency relief agencies, but also through schools and orphanages and other

institutions that served children. So This was when the federal government got involved in UH in school lunch, and when War two came along and some of the Depression era relief programs were cut back UM, the Department of Agriculture lobbied for keeping and expanding UM contributions to the school meal programs because they were very worried that at the end of the war they would have another post war slump in agriculture comparable to what had happened after World

War One. So so essentially this wasn't about nutrition. This was about finding a market for commodities. Well, I think it was about both. For the schools, it was very much about nutrition. The products they got from the federal government enabled them to serve far more nutritious lunches than they otherwise could have done. How's how's the school lunch program? How? How has it changed since then? UH? Over the years?

If you can kind of walk through some of the big changes that you've seen UM in the school launch program, breakfast and lunch program over the years. The first sort of big change, I guess you would say, was the creation of a permanent program in the National School Lunch Act, and that was lunch only until the mid nineteen sixties. UM. Think about the sixties, think about the civil rights movement,

calling attention to poverty in America. UM. After Kennedy's assassination, Johnson, looking for UM a new theme in a sense for his presidency, declared the War on Poverty. And that was a point at which people began paying some attention to what was happening to poor children, and educators argued that school lunch came too late in the day for a lot of kids. The morning hours are crucial for learning UM. And that's when the breakfast program was begun in the

mid sixties as a pilot program. By the early seventies, it was available to all schools and any school could operate a school breakfast program that wanted to. Then some of the energy shifted to state and local advocates who began to press states for legislation requiring schools within the

state to offer the breakfast program. And I know the sequence in New York was first they required it in cities with a population of more than a hundred thousand UM, and gradually we got to school breakfast in almost all the schools. So the school lunch program, it is, the entire program is subsidizes, essentially a three tier program. Can you can you explain? Okay, sure, I can do that.

And you know, if you want to go back a little bit, when the School Lunch Act was passed in ninety there was just sort of a vague requirement that in order to get the federal contributions, schools had to agree that they would feed free of charge any children who were too poor to pay. But there were no standards as to what constituted being too poor to pay. And more importantly, there was no separate federal funding for

those UH meals that were served free to children. The federal government made contributions some money and um commodities from that were purchased on behalf of schools, and then it was left up to the schools to figure out how to cover the cost of the meals that were served free.

And so you ended up with the situation in which schools in middle class communities, those schools that were built for the baby booms when we became school age, were built with cafeterias and kitchens and had enough paying children to cover the meals for children who were too poor to pay. But schools in very poor communities in the

first place. Many of them were old inner city schools that had been built without kitchens and cafeterias, and others were in rural areas and small towns where nearly everyone was poor and there weren't enough paying children who could pay enough to cover the cost of the meals for

children who were too poor to pay. So in the mid nine sixties National Women's Coalition did a study UM called Their Daily Bread of who was actually benefiting from the school lunch program, and they found that only a very small percentage of the nation's poor children where actually had access to the program, It was primarily benefiting children from the middle class UM. So this was the point at which there began to be pressure for the federal government to pick up the tab on the free meals.

And in nineteen seventies seventy one it was a whole rend what nineteen pieces of legislation that addressed school meals. But within those were legislation to guarantee reimbursement to the schools for the meals served free UM if they were served to children who qualified UM and nash a standards for who qualified. So this is where you began to

get a three tier. As you said, system of free lunches for children with incomes below a hundred and thirty percent of the poverty level and reduced price lunches which were very cheap. UM four children between a hundred and pent of the poverty line, and at that point it was a hundred and nine of the poverty line. Later that got pushed down at the outside of the Reagan

administration two hundred and eight. But a group that we might think of as near poor um qualified for the reduced price and then all other children paid a full price that was determined by their local school system. There wasn't a national price. So in your book Free for All, you you you uh make an argument for why school launch should be free. Uh stigmas part of that, part of that, But what what other arguments you lay out in the book for making free school lunch avault to

all thirty million children who use school lunch rooms. Well, first of all, we have about thirty million children have been eating the school lunch, but we have fifty five million children in school um, so part of the question is okay, so what's happening to the other million children? And we know that a lot of them are getting by on a a package of chips and a soft drink that they bring from home or pick up at the corner store. That they're eating unhealthy foods in lieu

of a balanced, nutritious meal. UM. We know that a lot of kids just forego lunch altogether, especially in um situations where lunch may be scheduled towards the end of the day or at the last period of the day. They just get out early. UM. So, so that's one reason to make it free for all, is so that it can begin to reach the kids who have UM

not been participating. Secondly, the issue of stigma that I mentioned, even for the kids who who needed the meal and wanted it and decided to to eat it, even if they were cheesed, that's no way to eat lunch. Lunch in a school should be something that brings us together. Um. Did you ever go to summer camp? Um? I did not go to summer camp, but I uh, I did eat lunch in the cafeteria most days if I wasn't

eating it in my coach's office. UM. But I also would go to lunch room for another reason, and that that would be to say hello to my mother who managed a school cafeteria. Lunch program. Well, the reason I asked you about lunch at summer camp is because if for those was who did have the pleasure of summer camp UM as children, meal time was something that everybody looked forward to, it was a great kind of unifier.

And school meals could be that way to school meals can be appointing the day when when people look forward to seeing their friends and sharing a meal. But that's not going to happen if people have been kind of classified as you know, poor enough to eat free, reduced price and full price. So that's a second kind of reason for UM that I argue for universal free school meals. Third is that I think it's our responsibility. The children are in our care during those hours, we should feed them.

I guess, I guess the other I guess the other argument one can make is is and this is not for just feeding them, but for feeding them healthier foods and mandating healthier foods. We saw under the Obama administration the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act change some of those standards in the school lunch program. And even though the bill passed and it increased uh you know, took sugar out of the school lunch program, and increased the amount of whole weeks in the school lunch program, got rid

of vending machines. Uh. You know, in some cases, school cafeterias are just an extension of uh fast food operations. UM. And yet the whole time, UM, the president and and and and Michelle Obama, they were under assault from the right uh um sort of essentially saying we don't need a nanny state, we don't need we don't need adults to tell children how to eat, which I thought was kind of strange, because I tell my children what they should eat. Um. If I didn't tell them what they eat,

they eat candy all day and junk food. And in fact, if I didn't tell them to take a shower at night, they probably go, you know, weeks without showering either. So you know, I think we are the adults in the room, and we do have an obligation to our our children to too. Yeah, you know, have standards and and and make sure that they are getting the proper nourishment and especially for uh, for kids who aren't getting that proper

nourishment at home. UM. So absolutely, And it's also a matter of I I believe very strongly in the idea of food education a much broader concept than just nutrition education, because we have a lot of food miseducation that goes on in our economy all the time, the advertisement of

of foods to children. So we are as a society up against a lot of disinformation and misinformation and misleading presentations, and we need our schools to be able to to teach children not only what the nutrients are and what they do for you and why you need them, but to enjoy um a variety of healthy foods, and school meal programs are one way to do that. And you can't really integrate school food with the curriculum unless it's

available to everybody. And so that's another reason that I think we really need to move to a universal model. We're making making progress in New York. We are a little by little. Um. It's funny. I was at a panel discussion recently and there was a converse Um Collers from from New York, who um uh started going on and on about how bad school lunch was in New York, and I kind of stopped him. I said, actually making some pretty good progress here. It's not as bad as

you think it is. Um and um, But yeah, New York is making some progress, but there's still um uh you know, right, there's definitely a ways to go. But we hear the news stories all you know, all the time of kids who uh their money is run out of their account and they get a cheese sandwich. Then

they get taken that a line and then they're really ostracized. Um. And then and I wanted to ask you about this because the reaction to that is there almost seems to be a charl response where there are are various charities, are are are people who are looking to do good, who who think that they should just fund those accounts for kids and and and then again we have h a a charity uh response to an issue that we

shouldn't have in the first place. Um. And I know this is something else that you you often write about as well, is whether or not we should deal with some of the these issues around hunger, um, you know, through charteral response or a governmental response. Well, we could get to that in a moment. But the the issue you raise of the so called school lunch shaming, it's really a fascinating one because in that case, the stigma is attached not to the kids who get the free

lunch because their accounts don't run out. It's kids in the reduced price lunch category and the full price lunch category. And you know those standards of a hundred and thirty percent of the poverty line, and it's the top for reduced prices of the poverty line. We're established back when the poverty line was a little more realistic, a little closer to reality. The poverty line gets adjusted every year for the cost of living, but it doesn't ever get

adjusted for changes in the way we live. So if you think that was actually based on a study that was done in the mid nineteen fifties that found out that families spent about a third of their income on food. So the idea was, if by allocating a third of your income you couldn't um by a minimally adequate diet, then you were officially poor. And now families on the whole spend less than ten percent of their income on food. So the whole way we spend our income has shifted.

Think about all the things that we need to spend money on now that didn't exist in the mid nineteen fifties. Those aren't luxuries, those are necessities. Right now, if you want to be a participant in the economy if you want to be able to get a job or you

need those things. So we have a situation in which a lot of the kids who are not financially eligible for UM for free or reduced price meals if they live, especially if they live in high cost of living areas where rents and mortgages are high, they don't always have

the money for ME for the meals. So another reason to go with a universal approach is to make sure those kids get included, but also to get out of this situation where they're being, as you say, pulled out of line and given a cheese sandwich or otherwise shamed UM because their council brand. Yeah, that's that's the first time I've heard that, because I think the average person, even I mean I spent little time thinking about these things.

UM always sort of uh went to these are the poorest of the people who are not UM funding their accounts. But that's that's not the case because of the poorest of the students are already getting free lunch. So UM, that's something I didn't thought of. So we've we've enlarged the pool of people who get to feel shame associated with school lunch now and they're not just the kids seating for free. But anyway, it's a it really is

a counterproductive, educationally, completely unsand situation. One of the things you always hear from school principles is how much they value parent engagement, how important it is for parents to attend parent teacher conferences and come to events at the school. If your account is in the red and you know you're going to show up at school and be asked to pay up, you know you're not coming to parent teacher conferences or exhibit night or what have you. It's

it deters parents from engagement with the school. So let's talk a little bit about the charity model and dealing with hunger. I know, and sweet charity. This is something that that you wrote about. I TH's a book that's on my bookshelf. Um uh, why is the charity model inadequate to deal with with issues of hunger and elnutrition in America? Well, you know, there's both a kind of moral philosophical argument and um reality and do the math argument.

When when we think of food charities, most of us think of food banks and food pantries and soup kitchens, and certainly Now food banks are are greatly in the news.

But at the height of the Great Recession, UM advocacy organization called Bread for the World did some calculations and calculated that if we think of assisted meals meals that are served at soup kitchens or that are prepared from groceries that are donated through a food pantry, out of four meals that are assisted by the federal government through the SNAP program or through school meals or the WICK program, one in four assisted meals was assisted by private charity

and the other twenty three were provided through federal programs. As the reliance on federal programs declined after the recession resolved, that went down to about one in twelve. We we provide about twelve times as much assistance through the federal programs as we do through the private charity. Private charity makes a difference. UM. If you're in need and you turn to a food pantry, you in our system, you definitely needed to be there, but they have had a

disproportionate share of the public consciousness. UM. If we want to make sure that people eat, we need to increase the SNAP benefit. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program formerly known as Food stamps. UM. We need to reduce the barriers to accessing SNAP that have been created, particularly the wounds

over the last several decades. UM. We need to get over the idea that work requirements UM are the best way to enable people to to UM start careers and work, because work requirements in a program like SNAP don't work. Very many people who work cannot document in a way that's acceptable to a welfare office that they are working twenty hours a week. But we have a a fascination with the charitable approach. It's kind of romantic, and particularly

when it's tied to food that might otherwise go to waste. UM. I have been very struck by the accounts in the press of milk being poured out in the fields UM, vegetables being plowed under or left unharvested, and the outcry saying we need to get this food to the food banks, and certainly infrastructure to do that. Yeah. No, I mean we're not set up. Federal government has food purchasing infrastructure UM, and they can expand it, and they have expanded it UM.

But the current Secretary of Agriculture seems to be hung up on the idea of these prepacked boxes what's now being called the Farmed a Family program, But it's very much the harvest box that he proposed a couple of years ago. Um, and it's not it's not an adequate response. One of the ways in which SNAP is so much better than a prepacked boxes that people can reflect the needs and preferences of their own families. Well that and

there's also a system by which you can engage. Um. You know what, what's the likelihood of the problem right now with with milking thrown out and and eggs being broken, is just the market to disappear if you sell into uh, you know, a market that that supplies restaurants and hotel and in college campuses, you've lost that market. And the and the packers can't really turn on a dime and start and start, you know, repackaging products for uh, for supermarkets.

Uh right, and right right going through there, there's two kind of food systems in this country. One is one goes through supermarkets to feed households and the other one goes into institutional feeding and and the two really don't work together very well. And and so um, yeah, yeah, I've read some of the things that you've been writing about this and and I've been talking about this as well and so but but the Snap program again, if

you just fund the Snap program, make it easier. I mean, one thing I just it makes me crazy is when you see all these lines of people lining up for food pantry, people who never thought a million years that they would need this kind of help. Um, they should have people in those lines signing them up for Snap. Uh, there should be outreach there. Um. Most of these people don't even know there's a Snap program. And I know how it works and what that does. Again, there's a system,

but we have feeding people. It's a supermarket. You you you have food, and people go there with money, and the system works really really well if you have money. And so right now people just need money. Um, are are are are Snap? And so we know the system actually works. But in terms of getting food that is has to be repacked into the marketplace, that that's a little more difficult.

And I'm concerned that the companies that were rewarded some of these contracts actually get the food from the farm to a distribution, you know, into into alternative distributions. A lot of these companies have absolutely no experience at all doing this, and there's a catering company or party planning company that got a thirty six million dollar contract. And this is what I think happens when you rely on UH private sector and charity to take care of some

of the society's UH problems. When something big like this happens, the government is just not prepared to to step in. There there is no plan, right. You know. The other thing that strikes me there isn't in the farm bill a farm to school program UM where communities UH as certain percentage of the fool that food that's in the

school lunch programs should come from local farmers. But it always seems to me if there's something missing in between, because most school lunch programs that the cooks aren't cooking and processing food anymore, they're just reheating food. UM. In fact, a lot of school lunch programs, a lot of school cafeterias, they no longer have cooking equipment, they have reheating equipment. UM.

And so that pieces that pieces missing. And it seems to me, if we really want to UM, you know, create a program where where local farmers can can find a market in their in their local schools, there has to be a place where that food could be processed, especially since so much of that food is grown in the summer when school is really not in session, And so if there were regional processing facilities that can take that food minimally processed, that meaning blanch peas and blanch

carrots and and freeze them um, then we actually would have a true farm to school to school program. Do you have any any thoughts on that at all? Well, I think that there are very good reasons for schools to have the capacity to cook. So if I were doing a green New Deal infrastructure investment to create new jobs to replace some of the jobs that will be permanently gone after the pandemic because of changes in the way we live, I think building school kitchens and cafeterias

might be um a part of my infrastructure project. There could certainly be regional processing facilities UM like you just described, and they would be better, I think, than the current system of relying heavily on you know, orders through distributors that can be getting the stuff from anywhere in the nation and in some cases outside it. UM. But you lose the educational value of the farm to school connection, which has been very much part of the farm to

school projects. Where farmers come into the classroom to speak and kids go on field trips to the farm. Um. And it was intended as not just a way to create local markets for farmers, although that's a big motivator, but also a way to help with the food education project that I was talking about earlier. Because we are so divorced from our food supply most of us, we

literally don't know where our food comes from. And in a future where we had a more ecologically resilient food system, I think we would have much shorter supply chains and UM the capacity to value farms and farming and the contribution of farming two UM to local communities. I think that is part of what farm to school programs were hoping to teach. Do you think we'll see a time when when school is free for all and we have

healthier food? Uh? This food that goes even beyond what was in the Hungry Healthy Kids Food Act, When we're seeing the cafeteria is being used not only to feed our children uh nutritious food, but also used as a classroom. Do do you actually think that can happen? And um, do you think that possibly because this this current pandemic has really exposed the weaknesses in so many systems. Do you think there's an opportunity UM that one day we'll see that. So the quick answer is yes, can or could?

I'm not ready to say will or shall um? And do you describe a cafeteria in the east end of Long Island where the kids run the the cafeteria. I

visited one UM in Devonport, California. UM Fixing the school lunch Preparing the lunch was a class that kids signed up four and it was a very small school, a hundred kids and there were about twenty five graders and they were divided into five teams of four for the five days of the week, and each team planned a meal and prepared it and served it, and the fourth graders UM set the tables and picked flowers in the school garden and decorated them and was absolutely wonderful. UM system.

The Ross School in Long Island was one that I visited before I before I started to write Free for All, and it had a profound effect on me. I left thinking, Okay, this is a private school, but this is what I want for all our children. And you know, John Dewey was promoting this at the turn of the twentieth century, in the early twentieth century having kids tent gardens and prepare food and and fix the school meals. So it's

absolutely possible. Um. It's an issue of our priorities, UM, and our vision and the power of the food corporations who currently benefit. I mean, we have the system we do now in part because of the organizations, the corporations that have benefitted from it. UM. So I don't think we'll get to a new vision without without a struggle. UM. I'd like to read you something that someone sent me, UM, and you'll you'll see the relevance in in a moment.

This is an undutted roy from an upcoming book called The Pandemic is a portal. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway

between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas are dead rivers and smoky skies behind us, or we can walk through lightly with little luggage, ready to imagine another world and ready to fight for it. I was very moved when someone sent me that, because I think the pandemic is such a challenge to all of us, and we're all coping with how to maintain our own functioning and

mental health and the situation of our loved ones. And we have this sense that the world will be very different once this is behind us. But what are we doing now to try to make it the world that we want it to be? And I think school food is a a profoundly important arena in which to be imagining, you know, how we want things to be. On the other side of that portal, well, I think there are plenty of people like you who are providing the vision

for what a better world can look like. And hopefully now we may have a more receptive government and population to uh and you know, hopefully the ground is a little more fertile on it was two months ago. Um, so I guess we'll leave it there. Um. I'm talking to Dr Janet Popendick. She is a senior faculty fellow at the Urban Food Policy Institue at the City University of New York and author of Sweet charity Free for All. Thank you for for for for joining us, and uh

hopefully we'll we'll we'll find a better way. So thank you, thanks bye bye again, a very special thanks to Dr Janet Popendick and always a shout out to a place at the table. A Citizen Chef is a production of I Heart Media. Christopher Howcyotis is our executive producer, Jesselyn Shields is our researcher, and Gabrielle Collins is our producer. Don't forget to rate us and we'll we'll see you next time. Thank you,