The availability of federally donated food sparked an immediate expansion in the number of schools offering lunchtime meals. Education administrators throughout the country signed on to receive surplus commodities for their lunchrooms. In the first year alone, an estimated 60,000 schools in twenty states received donated food.33 In 1936 the Department of Agriculture boasted that it was feeding almost 350,000 children each day. The number of schools participating in the federal program increased each year, and by 1942, the Department of Agriculture estimated that 78,851 schools and over five million children were involved in the program (see Table 2.1). These figures represented about one-third of the total number of elementary and secondary schools in the country and about one-quarter of all schoolchildren.34
The USDA economists believed that the ability to send surplus commodities to schools exerted a positive effect “throughout the market.” Overall, they claimed, there was a rise in prices and an increase in the quantity of food available to consumers. In 1942 the SMA distributed 4.5 million pounds of food valued at over $21 million.35 The program, agriculture officials concluded, “added increase in farmers’ incomes over and above the value of the net quantity removed from the market.” What was more, school lunches, at least in theory, created new demand for farm goods by “introducing foods to children that they might never have tasted.” Department of Agriculture officials declared that “no other method of surplus disposal brings farmers so large an increase in income per dollar of government subsidy as does the school lunch program.”36 Even critical assessments that questioned the program’s actual impact on farm prices admitted its significance as a social measure. The school lunch program, noted agriculture historian Don Paarlberg, “gave the lobbyist, the congressman, and the secretary of agriculture a chance to improve relations with farm constituents.” The program’s combination of “myth, self-interest, and goodwill was the process by which Johnny got his hamburger, his applesauce, his prunes, and his peanut butter.”37
The problem was, of course, that Johnny as often got surplus apricots or olives as hamburger and applesauce for lunch. Tying school menus to agricultural surplus significantly shaped school menus and the nutritional content of children’s diets. Department of Agriculture officials appealed to Wilbur Atwater’s food substitution theory, to justify an admittedly unbalanced and inconsistent supply of surplus commodities. As one historian put it, “The USDA was trying to create the very problem that commodity distribution was originally supposed to ease—consumers’ ability to afford a nutritionally adequate diet.”38 Bureau of Home Economics school lunch recipes, for example, advised cafeteria operators that eggs could replace meat “as a protein in the lunch” at least a few days a month. School administrators knew, however, that abstract nutrition theory would not work in the lunchroom.39 Stories of “dumping” food in school cafeterias took on the status of urban legends. Sidney B. Hall, a professor of school administration at George Washington University, complained that USDA supervisors sent “loads of onions or grapefruit or whatnot to communities, when, as a matter of fact, the people there did not need those commodities.”40 Similarly, New York City Board of Education member George Chatfield reported that the USDA shipped huge quantities of apples to his city schools. “Do you know where they went?” Chatfield asked. “They came so frequently in the lunch program that they went in the toilets. The kids didn’t eat them.”41 Montgomery County, Maryland, cafeteria supervisor Gertrude Bowie reported that the children in her district used the surplus grapefruit “to play catch with” because they were unfamiliar with the fruit and refused to eat it. Other schools reported receiving so many eggs that they had to serve hard-boiled eggs for days at a time. The result of such a menu, complained one cafeteria manager, “may be that the children will revolt at the very sight of eggs.”42
While schools were happy to receive free food, under the surplus commodity program lunchroom administrators never knew from month to month, or from one year to the next, which foods would be available. Just ten commodities, for example, made up 90 percent of the food sent to schools. While milk and dairy products were generally available, as one report put it, “what foods are provided at any time and how much of them depend on the current purchase programs of the Surplus Marketing Administration, and these programs are planned primarily to meet farmers’ needs,” not the needs of children’s nutrition.43 This made it difficult to plan meals and even more difficult to plan budgets, because cafeteria administrators had no way to know how much extra money they would need to supplement the donated commodities. Schools that participated in the program were required to accept whatever foods were distributed and thus had to craft meals often out of foods most children refused to eat. Indeed, the Bureau of Home Economics, in recognition of this dilemma, produced scores of recipes and menus based on items like almonds and apricots, in an effort to help cafeteria managers use the surplus foods. Even so, a 1940 study of nutrition in school lunches found the meals “might well have been more ample in some nutrients.”44 Uncertain supplies and a reliance on surplus commodities from the start seriously undercut the claim that school lunch programs could provide children with nutritious meals.
THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF SCHOOL LUNCH
While the benefit of school meals either to children’s nutrition or to farm prices may have been questionable, federal food and federal dollars had a powerful impact on schools and communities. By the end of the 1930s, local communities and schools had become very attached to—indeed, dependent on—federal resources, whether from the Department of Agriculture or from relief agencies. Federally funded nutritionists, paid through the maternal and child provisions of the Social Security Act, appeared in almost every state. State nutritionists, administered by the Children’s Bureau, acted as liaisons with local education and welfare agencies and supervised school lunch programs. By the end of the decade, almost every state plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico supplemented federal funds and included school nutritionists in their regular budget appropriations. School lunches, according to one report, had come to be widely viewed as “a corollary of compulsory education.”45
Nurtured by government resources, an extensive network of federal, state, and local officials depended on school lunch programs for their professional identities and careers. Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace oversaw a growing school lunch bureaucracy located in the Bureau of Agricultural Research, the SMA, and the Bureau of Home Economics. Indeed, a new profession known as school food service was quietly emerging, nurtured largely by the expanding role of school lunch programs within the Department of Agriculture. While women had traditionally dominated school lunch programs, school food service attracted increasing numbers of men interested in agricultural economics and business administration. Thus, while the SMA oversaw commodity supplies and prices, women in the Bureau of Home Economics developed recipes, menu plans, and administrative guidelines for school cafeterias.46
The school lunch network stretched beyond Washington. By 1940, every state used federal funds to employ nutritionists and administrators to oversee local school lunch programs. State school lunch administrators worked with civic groups, usually PTAs, teachers, or community welfare organizations, to run the meal programs. According to one estimate, as many as 64,000 federal employees worked outside Washington in school lunch—related positions.47 Beyond the federal and state level, of course, every community and school system that participated in the program developed its own staff and volunteer structure. By the time the United States entered World War II, a nationwide network of professionals identified with school food service and were financially dependent on public resources for their livelihood and the livelihood of their lunchrooms. Local school boards, state education administrators, county commissioners, and town managers as well as parents, welfare workers, and farmers began to see the school lunch program as a natural part of the public school system. At the same time, Department of Agriculture officials increasingly saw school lunch prog
rams as a vital part of their own policy strategy—and their professional careers. As war preparations invigorated the idea of universal health and modern diets, nutritionists came into prominence as professionals who could guide the nation’s health. Secretary of Agriculture Claude R. Wilkard told the American Dietetic Association in 1943, “You nutritionists and dietitians are at last coming into your own.” The war, he said, “drives home the fact that it pays to have people properly fed.”48
In early 1940, the Department of Agriculture organized its network of school lunch advocates into a Coordinating Committee on School Lunches. Headed by New York City School Board chairman, George R. Chatfield, the committee sought not only to maintain federal school lunch subsidies but to expand the public role in children’s nutrition. Declaring that school lunches “are an increasingly important factor in our national life,” this committee saw nutrition as a critical part of children’s welfare and pushed for an extension of the New Deal safety net to cover children’s health and nutrition. The federal government, the group’s mission statement announced, “has a stake in the future of all the children.”49 The Coordinating Committee on School Lunches became a public-private collaboration of groups ranging from nutritionists and child welfare advocates to food industry representatives and farm lobbyists. Including representatives from government agencies and schools as well the PTA, the Red Cross, and the United States Public Health Service, this group became the center of policy discussions about nutrition, children’s health, and federal food policy.50 “Because the country is at war,” the committee announced, “school lunches are now more important than ever. Many children can no longer depend on the home to supply a nourishing noon meal. Many mothers who formerly made a full-time job of taking care of their families are now spending their days in war industries, leaving no one to serve a meal to the children who come home from school at noon.”51 The farm lobby, too, advocated for school lunches as an essential element in the national defense. National Farmers Union spokesman M. F. Dickinson said that “the right of every American school child to at least one square meal a day regardless of the economic status of his parents surely requires no defense in logic or justice at this time when our Nation is fighting for the survival of democracy.”52
Popular support for school lunches emboldened Congress to maintain funding for children’s meals even as agricultural surpluses began to disappear. During the summer of 1942, as Congress considered its wartime budget, there was some threat that school lunch funds would be cut. Georgia senator Richard Russell, whose interests were solidly with the USDA, immediately told President Roosevelt that the school lunch program “is more important than ever before.” Russell reminded the president that “many women are now employed in defense work and do not have time to prepare meals at home.” He chided the President, saying that “at a time when England is enlarging her school lunch program I do not see how we in this country could justify curtailment here.” The president promised Russell he would support “the school lunch plan” and told him, “I share wholeheartedly your sympathy with the needs for our school children.”53
A sign of how effective the school lunch coalition would be came in 1943 when Congress disbanded the New Deal’s central relief efforts, including the WPA. As relief funds dried up, schools faced the elimination of federal support they had come to depend on for their lunchrooms. While schools could still receive surplus food, money would no longer be available to pay for cooking, transportation, or administration. This meant that school districts that had eagerly signed on for federal support during the late 1930s would have to raise state and local funds to keep their meal programs afloat. The fact was, however, that local school districts, whether in the rural South or in northern cities, found lunchroom funds difficult to come by. Most school lunch programs regularly supplemented public and private contributions by charging children a minimal fee for meals. The withdrawal of federal resources meant that local districts would have to take up the slack, and many were unwilling to do so. Some had grown used to federal contributions; others were too poor to raise much more local funds.
The Coordinating Committee on School Lunches immediately launched a nationwide effort to “save the school lunch program.” Chatfield galvanized an all-star lineup of professionals, liberals, civic and religions organizations, and Department of Agriculture representatives, particularly from the Bureau of Home Economics, to build public support for a national school lunch program and to lobby Congress to continue funding children’s meals.54 Drawing on themes of wartime unity and national defense, the well-known journalist Dorothy Thompson went on air telling American housewives to urge their schools to sign on to the federal lunch program. This, she argued, would be a far better post-war plan “than a soldier monument to honor the young men who won’t come back.”55 If the federal lunch subsidy disappeared, Thompson warned, the public costs in malnutrition and poor health would be very high.56 Declaring that school lunches “are an increasingly important factor in our national life,” Chatfield’s committee advocated for a federal child nutrition program. The federal government, the group’s mission statement announced, “has a stake in the future of all the children.”57 In a well-organized and highly orchestrated campaign, the Coordinating Committee urged school administrators, local officials, nutritionists, teachers, and parents from every state to cable their congressional representatives. One congressman commented that he had never seen a measure that had such support “from people from one end of this country to the other, regardless of race, creed, or color.” Another said, “In my twenty years in Congress, I have never seen such an intensive campaign.”58 Senators and congressmen reported receiving thousands of letters from teachers, city officials, civic clubs, social workers, ministers, and schoolchildren themselves.59
The school lunch coalition proved remarkably effective. Unwilling to appear unsympathetic to children’s health, particularly as the nation was mobilizing for war, Congress quickly voted to continue appropriations for school lunches. Indeed, by an overwhelming margin, Congress actually increased the appropriation, voting $50 million per year for three years. There was considerable tension, however, about the administration of these funds, because in 1943 President Roosevelt shifted responsibility for most food programs into the new War Food Administration (WFA).60 While the Department of Agriculture continued to purchase surplus commodities and distribute them to schools, the WFA took over direct administration of school lunchrooms under a new “Community School Lunch Program.” For the duration of the war the WFA would oversee a dramatic expansion of school lunch programs throughout the country. At the end of the war, however, the USDA would reclaim authority over children’s meals.61 By that time, the Community School Lunch Program would be operating in an estimated 60,000 schools and providing subsidized meals for eight million children. Another million children would be participating in the Agriculture Department’s “penny milk” program.62
When the United States entered World War II, food policy was shaped by a coalition of interests centered in the Department of Agriculture, including home economists and agricultural economists as well as farm lobbyists and food industry representatives but extending outward to child welfare advocates, school teachers and administrators, physicians, parents, women’s organizations, and civic groups. School lunch programs, while administered out of the Department of Agriculture, were still claimed by home economists and nutritionists as their special purview. Like New Deal reformers generally, food reformers believed the war would open important opportunities to extend public welfare programs and expand public awareness about scientific diets, nutrition, and health. While food reformers may have had reservations about the extent to which school lunch programs were being shaped by agriculture policy and surplus food supplies, they nonetheless welcomed both the expansion of federal resources and the opportunity to legitimize healthy eating.
CHAPTER 3
Nutrition Standards and Standard Diets
As the United Sta
tes mobilized for war, nutrition reformers and school lunch advocates seized new opportunities to promote their agendas. Whether on the battlefield or on the homefront, however, decisions about food policy were informed by the twin interests of nutrition and agriculture. The country was, M. L. Wilson observed, “at the beginning of an epoch where it becomes the duty of society, as a matter of public health and welfare, to see to it that all its members get a diet that squares with scientific standards.”1 That duty rapidly transformed into a matter of national defense. Federal food policy during World War II addressed military requirements as well as home-front supplies. As the government became more heavily involved in food production and distribution, school lunch programs expanded around the country. A key element in state oversight was the development of standardized administrative procedures as well as national nutrition standards and dietary recommendations. While these standards promised equity in the distribution of federal resources, in practice, federal officials exerted only weak oversight over local program administration. Few in Washington had the political will to seriously challenge the deep-set racial and regional inequities that divided American society.
World War II presented food reformers with an unprecedented opportunity to influence American eating habits and introduce nutrition science to new audiences. Like professionals in other fields, nutritionists eagerly enlisted in domestic defense campaigns and civilian advisory committees. Two problems initially confronted wartime food experts. First, they needed to consolidate recent nutrition research and translate it into terms that would assist the army in formulating mass feeding plans for soldiers both at home and abroad. Second, they had to translate nutrition science into popular terms and foster new eating habits in the civilian population. Wartime planners saw institutions like the school lunch program as an opportunity to expand the public education and welfare functions of government not only during the war but into the post-war era as well.2
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