School Lunch Politics
POLITICS AND SOCIETY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA
Series Editors
WILLIAM CHAFE, GARY GERSTLE, LINDA GORDON, AND JULIAN ZELIZER
A list of titles in this series appears at the back of the book
School Lunch Politics
THE SURPRISING HISTORY OF AMERICA’S FAVORITE WELFARE PROGRAM
Susan Levine
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
press.princeton.edu
All Rights Reserved
Second printing, and first paperback printing, 2010
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-14619-5
The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows
Levine, Susan, 1947–
School lunch politics : the surprising history of Americas favorite welfare program /
Susan Levine.
p. cm. — (Politics and society in twentieth-century America)
Includes bibliographical reference and index.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05088-1 (hbk. : alk. paper)
1. National school lunch program. 2. School children—Food—United States.
3. Children—Nutrition—United States. I. Title.
LB3479.U6L48 2008
371.7'16—dc22 2007028807
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Sabon
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Contents
List of Illustrations and Tables
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION The Politics of Lunch
CHAPTER 1 A Diet for Americans
The Search for a Scientific Diet
A Diet for Americans
Nutrition and Malnutrition
School Lunch as Public Policy
CHAPTER 2 Welfare for Farmers and Children
School Lunches for Hungry Children
Eating the Surplus
The Institutionalization of School Lunch
CHAPTER 3 Nutrition Standards and Standard Diets
School Lunch Standards
Nutrition in the National Defense
Eating Democracy
CHAPTER 4 A National School Lunch Program
Agriculture or Education?
The Liberal Compromise
Discrimination and Segregation
CHAPTER 5 Ideals and Realities in the Lunchroom
Nutrition and Surplus Commodities
Nutrition and the Food Service Industry
The Limits of the Lunchroom
CHAPTER 6 No Free Lunch
Discovering Hunger in America
Agriculture or Welfare?
Food and the Poverty Line
CHAPTER 7 A Right to Lunch
The Free Lunch Mandate
The Women’s Campaign
School Lunch and Civil Rights
Eligibility Standards and the Right to Lunch
CHAPTER 8 Let Them Eat Ketchup
Who Pays for Free Lunch?
Combo Meals and Nutrition Standards
Ketchup and Other Vegetables
EPILOGUE Fast Food and Poor Children
Notes
Index
Illustrations and Tables
ILLUSTRATIONS
1.1. Ellen Swallow Richards with MIT Chemistry Department faculty
1.2. Children calculating gains in weight
2.1. “Pupils must wash their hands before eating”
2.2. School lunch program, 1939
3.1. Poster, “Every Child Needs a Good School Lunch”
4.1. President Truman signs the National School Lunch Act
5.1. Idealized version of lunchtime in a school cafeteria
5.2. African American children in a school cafeteria
6.1. School lunch menu with a handwritten plea to the president
TABLES
2.1. Children Participating in the Surplus Marketing Administration School Lunch Program, Public and Parochial Schools, by Region, 1941
5.1. Sources of Funding for School Lunch Program, 1947–68
5.2. Local Sources of Financing for National School Lunch Program, Selected States, 1967
5.3. National School Lunch Program Participation in Select Cities, 1962
7.1. Children Participating in the National School Lunch Program, 1947–85
8.1. Federal Cash Assistance to Children’s Nutrition Programs, 1947–85
Acknowledgments
This book first took shape when my children refused to eat school lunches. It became more focused when my mother-in-law suggested that I combine my two favorite activities and write something about the history of food. Since then, this project has seen my family through almost a decade of professional and personal change. My children are now grown and have embarked on careers and families of their own. A few years ago, Leon and I uprooted from our North Carolina home of over twenty years to take on the challenges of a major urban public university and Midwestern winters. It gives me great pleasure to be able to thank all the people who helped with these transitions and especially those who provided the intellectual and personal support that allowed me to complete this book.
Research for this project began in 1998 during a year at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. My colleagues in the center’s weekly seminar helped me see what shape a history of school lunches could take. Two colleagues in particular guided me into new territory. I’d like to thank Dan Horowitz for his generous intellect and Carolyn Goldstein for introducing me to home economics. It was also during that year that I met Princeton University Press editor Brigitta van Rheinberg, who convinced me to turn the school lunch story into a book. I warned her that the project would not proceed quickly, but she was unfazed. In 2001 a fellowship at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Institute for the Humanities allowed me to finish the research and begin writing the book. My colleagues at the institute gave chapter 1 its first critical reading. I would especially like to thank Katrin Schultheiss and John D’Emilo for our regular lunch discussions that year.
I have been fortunate to be able to draw on the critical eye of a number of readers along the way. Eric Arnesen, Susan Porter Benson, Sonya Michel, Judy Smith, and Brigitta van Rheinberg read an early draft of the manuscript. They were all incredibly generous (although not uncritical) with their comments, and I hope they see the result of their efforts. I am very sad that Sue Benson was not able to see the book to its end. She was an important colleague and a good friend and I miss her wit and wisdom. Peter Coclanis pointed me toward some useful sources in agricultural history. Janet Popendieck read chapter 4 and offered some important correctives. Linda Gordon and an anonymous reader from Princeton University Press read the final manuscript. They provided ideal readers’ comments and I thank them for that. Several friends and colleagues helped with small but critical details. Diana McDuffee found an original copy of Their Daily Bread. Rebecca Foley and Emily LaBarbera Twarog helped me with the illustrations. Paula Dempsy provided the cover image and a conversation with Bruce Ornstein and Nancy MacLean clarified a last point. Last but by no means least, Leon Fink, was, as always, my sharpest critic and my most enthusiastic cheerleader.
This book is dedicated to the first of the next generation of school lunch participants, Nina Julie Fernandez Fink
.
School Lunch Politics
INTRODUCTION
The Politics of Lunch
If you search the Internet for “school lunch” these days, two types of sites will come up. The vast majority of references lead to cheery government articles about “team nutrition,” brightly decorated menus from school lunchrooms, and manuals about managing cafeteria budgets. Sprinkled here and there among the search results, however, will be another type of article entirely. Celebrity chefs have lately entered school lunchrooms. They have come to prove that school lunches can be healthy. Their aim is to rescue children from greasy food and teach students to prefer zucchini over French fries. The task is daunting. The chefs are forced to use U.S. Department of Agriculture surplus commodities that hardly make for health-food menus. The chefs must also follow federal nutrition guidelines and meal subsidies, which generally allow for a maximum of about $2.40 per lunch for free meals. But these chefs soldier on, we are told, valiantly bucking the system in order to transform school lunches. Somewhere, buried in the articles, we inevitably find that private foundations are underwriting these experiments. In some cases, the food is subsidized, in others the chefs’ salaries are covered—usually at rates considerably higher than those of ordinary school lunch employees.1
This book, in its own way, explains why celebrity chefs and private foundations alone cannot save the National School Lunch Program. Readers will become acquainted with the history of one of America’s most remarkable and popular social programs. But they will also learn how the politics of school lunch created structural barriers that limited which children received nutritious meals and that shaped lunchroom menus. The history of school lunch politics encompasses a combination of ideals and frustrations, reflecting, at base, America’s deep ambivalence about social welfare and racial equality. It also reflects the tension in American politics about whether public policy should address individual behavior—in this case, whether food policy should focus on convincing people to eat right—or whether policy should address public structures and institutions—for example, fully funding free lunch programs or establishing a universal child nutrition program.2 The task faced by celebrity chefs in select school lunchrooms is daunting not simply because fast food is seductive and children are conservative eaters. Un-selfconsciously, the chefs are entering an institution only partly governed by concerns for children’s nutrition. Historically, concerns about national agricultural policies and poverty policy have regularly competed with dietary issues in the creation of school lunch programs. School lunch is, surely, rooted in the science of nutrition and ideas about healthy diets, but those ideas have never been sufficient on their own to shape public policy (or to change people’s eating behavior, for that matter). School lunch, like other aspects of public policy, has been shaped by the larger forces of politics and power in American history.
Since its founding in 1946, the National School Lunch Program has been the target of critics from the right as well as from the left. It is clear that even after more than half a century of operation, the National School Lunch Program is deeply flawed. School meals are often unattractive, unappetizing, and not entirely nutritious. The menu has always depended more heavily on surplus commodities than on children’s nutrition needs. Until the 1970s, the program reached only a small percentage of American children and served very few free lunches. All the while, however, the National School Lunch Program stood as one of the nation’s most popular social welfare programs. Politicians as savvy as Ronald Reagan discovered that the American public is intensely committed to the idea of a school lunch program, particularly one that offers free meals to poor children. In fact, the National School Lunch Program, to this day, is the only comprehensive food program aimed at school-aged children.3 Almost thirty million children in 98,000 schools eat school lunches each day. What is more, in most American cities, the National School Lunch Program is the single most important source of nutrition for children from low-income families. Almost 60 percent of all school children nationwide get free school lunches each day: 80 percent of Chicago’s public school children qualify for free school lunches; 79 percent of the children in Atlanta’s public schools receive free meals; New York City schools regularly feed almost 72 percent of their children for free; and in the state of Texas, over 70 percent of the children eat free or reduced price school lunches.4 The National School Lunch Program, for all its nutritional flaws, provides a crucial public welfare support for our nation’s youth. Without school lunches, many children in this country would go hungry; many more would be undernourished. Indeed, the National School Lunch Program has outlasted almost every other twentieth-century federal welfare initiative and holds a uniquely prominent place in the popular imagination. It suggests the central role food policy plays in shaping American health, welfare, and equality. A history of the National School Lunch Program is thus a crucial mirror into the variety of interests that continually vie for power and authority in American public life.5
School lunch politics have been marked by a shifting and not always predictable set of alliances over the course of the twentieth century. At first glance, the program’s trajectory appears to be the typical story of American liberalism, thwarted by southern Democrats who held social welfare hostage to racial segregation and states’ rights. Indeed, initiated by liberal reformers in the early part of the century, school lunch programs became institutionalized only when southern Democrats agreed to support federal appropriations in exchange for agricultural subsidies and under the condition that there would be limited federal oversight and unlimited local control. The result was a system that perpetuated the nation’s deep racial, regional, and class inequalities. But the fact that school lunches involve both children and food, two subjects fraught with powerful cultural and symbolic significance, renders the story more complicated and the players’ motives less transparent. It was conservative southern Democrats who, at the end of the New Deal, proposed a permanently funded federal school lunch program. Indeed, the 1946 bill creating a National School Lunch Program was named after Georgia senator Richard Russell, a staunch segregationist and opponent of civil rights. While Russell’s first priority was to protect a program he believed would benefit American agriculture, he was also motivated by a lasting concern about poverty in his region and a deep post-war anxiety about national defense, which linked healthy children to the future of American prosperity and strength. Despite his defense of states’ rights, Russell nonetheless crafted one of the most enduring and popular federal welfare programs of the twentieth century. Children’s welfare confounded predictable political lines again during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when powerful images of hungry children propelled Republican president Richard Nixon to announce that he would, within a year’s time, provide every poor child a free school lunch. Nixon vastly increased funds for free meals and, ultimately, turned the National School Lunch Program into the nation’s premier poverty program. Once the school lunch program became a poverty program, however, the political alliances again proved surprising. To protect the program’s ability to serve poor children in the face of an effective decrease in funds (the new federal monies only paid for free food, not for equipment, labor, or operating expenses), liberal senators like George McGovern, along with anti-poverty activists, found themselves—over the protests of nutritionists who had long opposed commercializing children’s meals—advocating privatization. Hoping that fast-food corporations and giant food service companies would be able to bring down the cost of lunchroom operations, these reformers saw privatization as a way to allow lunchrooms to continue to serve both free and paying children. Thus, by the time Ronald Reagan suggested that ketchup be considered a vegetable on the school lunch tray, private commercial interests already had two feet in the door of the school cafeteria.
School lunch politics suggest that children’s meals have always served up more than nutrition. Indeed, the National School Lunch Program, from the start, linked children’s nutrition to the pr
iorities of agricultural and commercial food interests, both of which carried more weight in the halls of Congress than did advocates for children’s health. Most particularly, school lunches have been tied to the agenda of one of the federal government’s most powerful agencies, the Department of Agriculture, and, more recently, to the corporate food and food-service industries as well. Nutrition in each of these arenas takes a back seat to markets and prices. During its early years, the National School Lunch Program provided substantial welfare for commercial farmers as an outlet for surplus commodities, but actually fed a relatively small number of schoolchildren and provided few free meals to those who were poor. Since the 1960s school lunches have been a vital part of the American welfare system, characterized by means testing, insufficient appropriations, weak enforcement, and often blatant racial discrimination.
But even as a welfare program, children’s nutrition took a back seat to other interests. Most notably, in order to enable school lunchrooms to serve more free meals, the Department of Agriculture eased the restrictions banning commercial operations from school cafeterias. As poor children entered school lunchrooms in large numbers, so did processed meals and fast-food companies. Political compromises, first with agricultural interests and then with the food industry, have no doubt ensured the existence and expansion of a National School Lunch Program and today ensure the availability of free meals for poor children. What those compromises do not ensure is that those meals will provide a healthy cushion for children’s growth and development. Ultimately, the answers to the questions of which foods children should eat, which children deserve a free lunch, and who should pay for school meals have bedeviled even the most well intended of policy makers.
If school lunch politics hinge on priorities other than children’s health, school lunchrooms nonetheless reveal fundamental American attitudes about food and nutrition. As anthropologists have long observed, hierarchies of power and culture are embedded within the decisions about which foods are deemed suitable to eat, which foods constitute a meal, and which people are appropriate eating companions.6 Nowhere, perhaps, is the link between food and culture more relevant than in school meals where scientific ideas about nutrition continually vie with individual food choices and the enormous variety in American ethnic food traditions. The very idea of crafting a National School Lunch Program with nutrition requirements and standard menus suggests an optimistic faith in science, education, and reason. But when it comes to nutrition, scientific advice continually changes and Americans tend to ignore expert proscriptions about what to eat. When the National School Lunch program began, for example, nutritionists recommended that children needed a high-calorie diet based on whole milk, cream-based sauces, rich puddings, and butter on every slice of bread. Rooted in the belief that poor, malnourished children were “underweight” and basically needed more calories in order to grow and thrive, the prescription for a high-calorie diet made sense. Today, experts warn about an epidemic of obesity among poor children and excoriate school menus for their high calorie and high fat content. But the current obesity debate reveals more than new nutrition insight. Neither underweight children in the past nor obese children today became that way solely as a result of individual eating habits, lack of nutrition education, or bad food choices. Rather, nutrition is tied directly to social and economic circumstance—for example, family income and access to fresh foods—as much as to individual behavior. How nutrition science is translated into children’s health, therefore, has always rested on a larger context than food habits and individual choice.
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