This book traces the politics of school lunch from its origins in early twentieth-century science and reform to the marriage of children’s lunches and agricultural surpluses during the 1930s and the establishment of a permanent federally funded National School Lunch Program in 1946 to the transformation of school meals into a major poverty program during the 1970s and 1980s. One set of major players includes nutrition reformers—education, health, and key welfare professionals, mainly women—who struggled mightily to translate nutrition science into public policy. Another set of players includes farm-bloc legislators and Department of Agriculture officials who created the institutional infrastructure for a national school lunch program. These groups, together with political leaders responding to the demands and interests of their constituents as well as to the popular appeal of children’s health, shaped national food and nutrition policies. While the National School Lunch Program, like the American welfare system in general, is administered at the state level, the creation and fundamental outlines of the program—the development of national nutrition standards, eligibility requirements for free and reduced price meals, and the basic supply of donated foods available for lunch menus—emanate from Washington. This book thus views the nature of the school lunch and who pays for it as national policy concerns.
Chapter 1 argues that school lunch programs in the United States originated as part of the modernizing efforts of early twentieth-century social reformers. Using the new science of nutrition, professional women—home economists, teachers, and social workers—attempted to rationalize American eating habits and, in the process, bring new immigrants (and rural migrants) into a mainstream Anglo-American culture. Home economics, a new profession that attracted women who were excluded from scientific and academic careers, used the science of nutrition first to convince low-paid workers that they could “eat better for less,” then to assimilate immigrants into American culture, and, finally, to rationalize American diets more generally. School lunchrooms appeared to be the perfect setting in which to feed poor children but, more importantly, to teach both immigrant and middle-class children the principles of nutrition and healthy eating. In this way, nutrition became part of a basic civics training for future citizens. While most school lunch programs before the 1930s were volunteer efforts on the part of teachers or mother’s clubs, they drew on the expertise of professional home economists for balanced menus and scientifically formulated recipes. By the 1920s, home economists found an institutional home in the USDA’s Bureau of Home Economics, thus linking school meals to agricultural research and, ultimately, to a national network of professionals committed to school lunchrooms both ideologically and occupationally.
Chapter 2 traces the transformation of school lunch programs from local volunteer efforts into state-sponsored operations. During the Great Depression, existing lunchrooms were overwhelmed by the numbers of children coming to school hungry. Teachers and community groups tried to expand school meal offerings by raising donations but ultimately began to look to municipal, county, and state governments for resources. At the same time, a group of agricultural economists in the USDA began to formulate policies to address the severe depression in farm prices. Committed to market-based strategies that ultimately favored commercial farm interests, these policy makers proposed that the federal government monitor supplies by purchasing surplus commodities. School lunchrooms appeared as the perfect outlet for federal commodity donations. With one stroke, the Department of Agriculture could claim to help both farmers and children. By the eve of World War II, schools in every state depended on surplus commodities for their lunchrooms.
As federal involvement in school lunches became increasingly institutionalized, nutritionists and child welfare advocates began to press for standards in nutrition and service. Chapter 3 traces the increasing federal oversight of school lunch programs through the development of operating contracts and meal guidelines. Nutrition standards for the nation’s youth became increasingly significant as the United States prepared to enter World War II. Recalling the large number of young men declared unfit for service in World War I, both military and civilian policy makers began a campaign for “nutrition in the national defense.” The Roosevelt administration enlisted the aid of prominent social scientists, such as Margaret Mead, and internationally known nutritionists, such as Lydia Roberts, to develop strategies that would prepare the civilian population for expected wartime food shortages. These women proposed a universal school lunch program and “Recommended Daily Allowances” (RDAs) that would provide healthy diets for all children. While the idea of a universal child nutrition program never gained much traction, the RDAs formed the basis for all future government-subsidized school meals. As significant as national nutrition guidelines was the development of standard contracts governing the operation of school lunchrooms. Schools receiving federal assistance had to maintain sanitary conditions for food storage, handling, and service. The federal contracts also, for the first time, contained an anti-discrimination clause and required schools to provide lunches for free to children whose families could not afford to pay. While the only enforcement mechanism was to withhold food supplies—and no public official was interested in being accused of depriving children of food—the contracts represented a significant step in the institutionalization of the federal school lunch program.
Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the congressional debate surrounding the establishment of a permanently funded National School Lunch Program in 1946. These chapters argue that the compromises that were necessary in order to mount sufficient congressional support for the bill had serious consequences regarding which children received federally subsidized meals and which schools participated in the program. Like much of the American welfare system, the National School Lunch Program was characterized by weak federal oversight and a high degree of local control. After a brief attempt by child welfare advocates to place school lunches under the auspices of the commissioner of Education, the Department of Agriculture succeeded in holding on to the program. Thus, for the first fifteen years of its existence, the National School Lunch Program served primarily as an outlet for surplus commodities and only secondarily as a nutrition program for children. The congressional debate over the school lunch program raised issues of racial and regional equity, including the first attempt by New York representative Adam Clayton Powell to introduce non-discrimination language in federal legislation, but the Democratic party still relied heavily on its conservative southern wing for legislative success. While southern Democrats happily supported the idea of creating a National School Lunch Program, they vehemently opposed any direct federal role in how that program would be administered. Most particularly, they resisted any effort to establish federal oversight, nutrition standards, or eligibility requirements. The results were predictable when during its first fifteen years, few poor children received free meals and even fewer African American children participated in the program. The lack of federal oversight was particularly problematic when it came to the bill’s requirement that states match the federal contribution. With no directives out of Washington, most states counted children’s fees as their matching contribution. While Department of Agriculture officials gave lip-service to children’s nutrition—developing healthy menus and testing recipes for surplus commodities—during the 1950s the National School Lunch Program reached only about one-third of America’s schoolchildren. What is more, the program utterly failed to provide free meals for poor children who arguably were in most need of federal nutrition assistance.
Despite the National School Lunch Program’s shortcomings, it gained widespread popular support during the 1950s. While few Americans probably knew how the program actually operated, legislators, policy makers, and the public at large touted America’s school lunch program as a symbol of prosperity, equality, and democracy in the Cold War world. Only in the early 1960s, as the nation “discovered” poverty, did the limitations of the National School Lunch Program become embarrassingly
clear. Chapters 6 and 7 trace the political movement to transform the National School Lunch Program from a popular, if misunderstood, agricultural subsidy into a poverty program. Galvanized by civil rights activism, and in the context of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, a group of mainstream national women’s organizations focused attention on the shortcomings of the National School Lunch Program. The women’s report became crucial evidence in both Senate and House debates on race and poverty at the end of the 1960s and ultimately forced the Nixon administration to expand access to free lunches for poor children. Demands for a “right to lunch” insisted on access to free lunches for all poor children and national eligibility standards for free and reduced price meals.
Chapter 8 discusses both the expected and the unintended consequences of turning school lunches into a poverty program. Neither the program’s congressional advocates nor liberal anti-poverty groups were willing to demand sufficient federal funding to allow school districts to serve large numbers of poor children free meals. Nor were the program’s advocates—whether in Washington or in the states—willing to demand substantial local contributions. As a result, federal funds earmarked for free meals actually threatened to bankrupt school lunchrooms across the country. State subsidies rarely were sufficient to pay for the expansions necessary to meet the new federal free lunch mandate. The only course of action for local school lunch administrators appeared to be to raise the fees on full-price meals. As a result, paying children began to drop out of the program and school cafeterias became identified with poor children. There was, in effect, a great failure on the part of liberal antipoverty activists and conservative legislators alike to craft a public child nutrition program that could effectively protect children’s nutrition. By the end of the 1970s, many school lunch advocates saw privatization as the only way to keep lunchrooms afloat. While some nutritionists held out against the commercialization of children’s meals, they had few suggestions for lunchroom operators who saw their deficits rising. The nowfamiliar fast food in school cafeterias appeared to be the only solution for school districts unable to sustain their mandated free-lunch program on public funds. Still, the National School Lunch Program continued to garner a tremendous amount of public support—far more than other programs for the poor. Indeed, when President Reagan tried to cut school lunch budgets by suggesting that ketchup could be counted as a vegetable, the public outcry revealed a depth of loyalty to the program that no one anticipated.
School lunch politics suggests that fixing lunch is more complicated than convincing children to eat right. Today’s critiques of school meals have a long history in which children’s welfare advocates have vied with the nation’s food and agricultural interests for control over school menus. Still, the politics of school meals makes it clear that detaching the National School Lunch Program from those other interests would leave a lot of children hungry. The celebrity chefs now working in school lunchrooms are finding, as generations of nutritionists and food reformers before them did, that there is more to a national school lunch program than a nutritious menu. To truly fix lunch, they will need to build a political coalition committed to an agenda that links child nutrition to agriculture, food policy, and social welfare. Such a coalition, however, will need to fix lunch for all children, not just those lucky enough to attend schools with private benefactors. Fixing lunch will require a public commitment to health, welfare, and opportunity for all children.
CHAPTER 1
A Diet for Americans
School lunches owe their origin to the science of nutrition and the efforts of early twentieth-century social reformers to improve American diets and thereby mold American culture as well. Chemists, home economists, and child welfare advocates together engaged in a lengthy struggle to convince Americans that rational, scientific eating habits not only would improve individual health but would raise living standards and strengthen democratic institutions as well. It may have been a leap to go from the kitchen table to the ballot box, but scientists and social reformers alike believed the connection was direct and essential. Efforts to modernize diets, however, went beyond the usual Progressive Era attempts to Americanize immigrants, contain class or racial discontent, or shape a welfare state. Dietary reform addressed native-born white Americans who could afford to eat steak as much as it addressed workers on tight budgets or immigrants who preferred olive oil and sausage to white sauce and aspic. Indeed, the science of nutrition transformed eating into an act that went beyond pleasure and the satisfaction of hunger pains. Eating and cooking, particularly with regard to children, became, in the era of science, activities with implications far beyond the kitchen.
From the end of the nineteenth century until the Great Depression of the 1930s, nutrition scientists, home economists, and social reformers engaged in a long battle to transform American eating habits. They were only partially successful. Their efforts, however, provide a window onto some of the central issues confronting the nation’s political and social development in those years. Food reform before the New Deal suggests, first, the central role science played in shaping American attitudes about class, race, and ethnicity. Food reform also speaks to ideas about the causes and cures for poverty and inequality, particularly in a democratic society. Food reform finally, reveals the gendered dimension within American reform in the early twentieth century. Food reform and nutrition science provided women an important avenue through which they could contribute to scientific knowledge and also influence public policy.
Food reformers, however, do not fit into neat categories. While dietary prescriptions appear to be, for example, the epitome of social control and cultural imposition, nutritious diets could, in fact, significantly improve the health of children as well as adults. Hunger and malnutrition threatened poor families most directly, but, as nutrition scientists discovered, even people who were not hungry could suffer from nutritional deficiencies. Herein lay a central tension marking food reform and efforts to establish school lunch programs. Efforts to popularize nutrition science were aimed not only at poor people, immigrants, and other groups outside the “mainstream” of white, middle class America. Indeed, food reformers continually battled to modernize the eating habits of the middle-class just as they struggled to Americanize immigrant or African American food preferences. Thus, the central policy question attached to nutrition, particularly when it came to children’s meals, was whether to target all children or to concentrate on only those most obviously suffering from hunger and malnutrition.
One of the central arenas in which food reformers sought to influence American eating habits was children’s meals, most notably, school lunches. Originally the purview of charity workers and mother’s clubs, school lunches in the nineteenth century had little to do with nutrition science. They were, basically, benevolent activities designed to provide free meals to the poor. With the discovery of nutrition science during the late nineteenth century, however, school lunches entered the realm of public policy. Although food reformers were largely unsuccessful either in convincing native-born Americans to “eat right” or in convincing immigrants to forsake their traditional fare, they were much more successful in building a network of lasting institutions in school lunchrooms and a powerful base of operation within the United States Department of Agriculture. As the federal agency most concerned with the nation’s food supply, the USDA provided a natural home for nutrition research. Indeed, discoveries about the relation of food to human health originated in research about livestock and agricultural products. While the federal government did not become directly involved in school lunch programs until the 1930s, USDA nutritionists and home economists early on began to translate nutrition research into popular recipes and menus. Food reformers, whether within the USDA or in other arenas, however, never resolved the fundamental policy tension that underlay their work: should nutrition education and food programs target people who were economically needy, that is, people who literally did not have enough to eat, or should they target the
nutritionally needy, people who might have plenty to eat but who did not understand a balanced diet? School lunch programs neatly combined the two goals.
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