In 1935, Stiebeling and Roberts took their expertise abroad to participate in the development of international diet and nutrition standards. That year, the two women represented the United States on the League of Nations—sponsored international committee on dietary standards. Drawing on the latest vitamin and mineral discoveries, international nutrition standards became important tools for “rational” planning for food and agriculture policy both during and after the war. The League of Nations recommendations were based on World War I estimates that called for 3000 calories and 70 to 80 grams of protein to maintain the health of soldiers and workers (all, of course, assumed to be men). During the 1930s, vitamins were added to the recommendations and increased emphasis was placed on the consumption of protein and green vegetables.28 Working with other women scientists, Stiebeling elaborated on the dietary allowances, adding thiamin (vitamin B1) and riboflavin (vitamin B2) and asserting the efficacy of their recommendations as the minimum nutritional requirements for “normal people.”29 The recommendations included vitamins A and D, and tables for calories, fat, proteins, calcium, and iron. By the end of the 1930s, under the guidance of the League of Nations, most European governments as well as Canada had established nutrition councils to promote the dietary standards.30
At the start of World War II, nutrition reformers became key figures in United States planning for food policy, both military and civilian. The Community School Lunch Program provided a unique forum for nutrition education. The newly instituted school lunch contracts presented the women with their first opportunity to establish national nutrition standards for children. As the United States government enlisted experts in business, science, and the professions to help with the war effort, social scientists, welfare advocates, and nutrition reformers joined the cadre of professionals in Washington planning circles. In early 1940, the National Research Council created two high-profile civilian boards to implement a national food policy. Lydia Roberts chaired the Food and Nutrition Board (FNB), which was charged with developing national nutrition standards that would govern food policy, regarding primarily army meals but also children’s lunches. The FNB also had to translate the latest scientific research into popular terms. The well-known anthropologist Margaret Mead chaired the complimentary Committee on Food Habits, which had the responsibility of translating nutrition guidelines into a more popular format.
Figure 3.1. School lunch programs were institutionalized during World War II. “Every Child Needs a Good School Lunch” poster, NWDNS–44–PA–735. National Archives.
While the FNB’s central task was to develop nutrition standards for military diets, the board also developed guidelines for civilian meals and school lunches as well. Aiming to “enlist” the nation’s housewives in the “all-out effort for preparedness,” the FNB embarked on a public nutrition education campaign.31 Hazel Stiebeling convened a group of social reformers including Faith Williams, a social worker from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Martha May Eliot, a physician with the Children’s Bureau, and Harriet Eliot, also with the Children’s Bureau, to sift through the latest nutrition research and make recommendations. Soon the committee expanded to include nongovernmental groups with an interest in wartime mobilization, including the Red Cross, the American Home Economics Association, and the American Dietetics Association. Harriet Eliot applauded the group’s ability to work together, saying, “All of us have a major defense job to do—the job of improving our standard of living and of keeping ourselves strong and physically fit.”32
Roberts and the FNB had no easy task in front of them, as the research on human nutritional requirements, while prolific, was often conflicting. Roberts recalled that when her committee was initially charged with developing a set of RDAs, she feared that nutrition science had too many different methodologies and approaches and that the morass of competing priorities among food and nutrition researchers would make it impossible to come up with a unified recommendation. She nonetheless persevered, bringing together a prominent group of nutrition researchers in what she termed a “democratic” effort to identify the appropriate studies and methodology. The task proved even more difficult than Roberts feared because the food industry carefully monitored the committee’s work, making sure that their products and commodities were not slighted. Stiebeling, for example, had to fend off congressional efforts to prevent federal funds from paying the salary of “any person advocating lessened consumption of any wholesome food.” Of course, every agricultural industry representative believed his crop to be entirely wholesome, so when nutritionists counseled, for example, substituting beans or eggs for beef, the cattlemen objected.33 Ultimately, despite industry efforts to shape the process, Roberts and her committee settled on a set of RDAs based on international standards that called for between 2,500 and 4,500 calories for men and 2,100 to 3,000 calories for women. The range depended on how active individuals were during the day. Thus, laborers or domestic servants required more calories per day than clerks or saleswomen. Children’s RDAs increased with age, with teenaged girls requiring between 2,400 and 2,800 calories and boys a full thousand over that.34
As chair of the FNB, Roberts had to reconcile scientific research with political and economic agendas. She also had to contend with a scientific establishment that preferred not to recognize the research contributions of women. Roberts’s committee was scheduled to announce a set of nutrition standards at the National Nutrition Conference for Defense convened by President Roosevelt in May 1941. As Roberts recalled, the committee had a great deal of trouble agreeing on a clear set of RDAs. The night before the conference began, Roberts gathered a small group of women together in her hotel room. “While the men, we felt sure, were out seeing the town,” Roberts recalled, she, along with Helen Mitchell and Hazel Stiebeling, “thrashed out” a set of standards. These were presented to the conference the next day and, along with the newly created “food groups,” quickly became the standard government dietary recommendations.35 By all accounts, the establishment of the RDAs “represented the most authoritative pronouncement on human needs” since the League of Nations addressed the subject during the mid-1930s.36
Within a short time, the RDAs, accompanied by suggested menus and recipes, appeared in newspapers, women’s magazines, radio programs, and posters in school lunchrooms. Particularly with the beginning of food rationing during the war, the RDAs became important elements in the national campaign of nutritional instruction. In 1941, the Bureau of Home Economics released a pamphlet calling on Americans to “do your part in the National Nutrition Program” by eating from each food group every day.37 Lauding the publication’s timely contribution to the defense effort, the New York Times told housewives they would find “the most thorough education in how to feed their families ever provided by any nation in the world.”38 The pamphlet counseled housewives to look at the content of food labels and familiarize themselves with vitamins, minerals, and the various food groups. Although the number of recommended food groups kept changing, the principle became firmly entrenched in the popular imagination. Where, for example, a 1941 poll indicated that most people did not know the difference between a calorie and a vitamin, by the end of the war, vitamins, RDAs, and the idea of “balanced meals” became part of a shared vocabulary.
Insisting that the RDAs could be satisfied by a wide variety of diets and products, the home economists hoped both to include ethnic and regional food preferences and not to offend any particular farm group. The food groups, as two historians put it, included “the full range of American food and agricultural products.”39 Because the foods in each group were essentially interchangeable as far as nutrition went, Stiebeling assured the public that every community could make its own choices. “Food habits differ from one part of the country to another;” she said, “so, we would not want to specify any more closely than we have in our diet plans.”40 The goal, she insisted, was “to introduce new foods into regional and racial diets.”41 Despite regional variation, however, Stiebeling recom
mended what became known as the “basic seven.” In 1943 the USDA released Stiebeling’s suggestions in what became one of the department’s most widely circulated and often reprinted pamphlets. The “National Wartime Nutritional Guide” (after the war, simply the “National Food Guide”) recommended seven food groups: green and yellow vegetables; oranges, tomatoes, grapefruit; potatoes; milk and milk products; meat, poultry, fish, eggs, and dried peas and beans; bread, flour, and cereals; and butter or margarine. Based largely on Wilbur Atwater’s substitution tables, the USDA guidelines suggested alternative choices in each group—a particularly practical idea given the wartime shortages of many food items.42
The extent to which Americans actually embraced the value of “scientific nutrition” is unclear, of course, Indeed, if the protestations of nutritionists and home economists are any indication, “balanced meals” actually appeared on few American dinner plates. While the Bureau of Home Economics insisted that its dietary recommendations could be met even on limited incomes, many housewives probably found it difficult to prepare “balanced” meals. The BHE’s “sample low-cost dietary” appearing in women’s magazines and newspaper food columns throughout the country, for example, suggested that adults needed to consume a pint of milk, three ounces of meat, two servings of vegetables, two fruits, bread, butter, and sugar at every meal in order to meet the RDAs. Even when the menus were changed to reflect wartime shortages in sugar and flour, expensive and scarce items such as beef, milk, and butter held strong. The suggested meals not only revealed an unrealistic assessment of American family food budgets, but promoted a decidedly bland Anglo-Saxon menu as well. Popular food writer M.F.K. Fisher loudly protested the whole idea of “balanced meals.” Calling the RDA charts “one of the stupidest things in an earnest but stupid school of culinary thought,” she scoffed at the idea that meals should be “balanced” at all. She heaped even more scorn on the suggested monthly menu plans “marked into twenty-six or so squares with a suggested menu for each meal of the week.” Asserting that it was difficult enough to prepare even one “supposedly tempting” dish a day, Fisher declared scientific meal planning to be “hard not only on the wills and wishes of the great American family, but it is pure hell on the pocketbook” as well.43
EATING DEMOCRACY
Food writers and housewives notwithstanding, the food policy recommendations of the FNB had a significant impact on the nation’s school lunchrooms. Most notably, the RDAs were immediately included in the Community School Lunch contracts. All schools participating in the federal program had to certify that they served “balanced meals” that followed the USDA nutrition recommendations.44 School lunch contracts provided three levels of subsidy for children’s meals, depending on the extent to which they satisfied the child’s RDAs over the course of a week. The highest level of subsidy went to the “Type A meal,” which had to provide at least one-third to one-half of a child’s RDAs and include at least one cup of milk. Schools could choose a lower level of subsidy by serving a “Type B” meal, including only one-quarter to one-third of the RDAs plus milk. Finally, the lowest level of subsidy went to schools serving the “Type C” lunch, which consisted simply of a glass of milk.45 Estimating the vitamin, protein, fat, and carbohydrate needs of children over the course of a week, Bureau of Home Economics researchers devised menus and recipes for school lunch operators. Most notably, the lunches contained high levels of fat in order to bump up the calorie content of the meals. Nutritionists and children’s welfare advocates operated under the assumption that children, in particular poor children, required a high-fat, high-calorie diet in order to thrive.46
Better nutrition required cultural change as well as scientific eating. This is where Margaret Mead’s Committee on Food Habits (CFH) took the lead. Gathering together a high-powered group of social scientists, including anthropologist Ruth Benedict and sociologist Lloyd Warner, Margaret Mead led an extensive study of American food habits and the social meaning of food and mealtimes, particularly in times of crisis. The CFH translated the scientific findings of the FNB into terms that policy makers and public officials could use to plan for food distribution and emergencies during the war. Mead had worked extensively during the 1920s and ’30s with leading American anthropologists, including Franz Boaz and Ruth Benedict, who had been developing theories about human cultures. Well known by 1940 for her work in the South Pacific, Mead believed that the study of “faraway” peoples would help Americans un derstand themselves better. During the World War II period, Mead became increasingly interested in the variety of cultures that made up American society itself. Mead drew on social science to develop a theory of rational choice in food habits. She also drew on educational theories, particularly ideas about the transmission of culture through the education of children. Mead remained an important voice in discussions about food and culture, reprising during the 1960s her role as a consultant to public policy.47
The CFH focused particular attention on large-scale feeding centers, such as school lunchrooms and industrial cafeterias. Social arenas like these, the committee believed, would be especially important in fostering common tastes and a unified democratic culture. A food-centered cultural agenda had wide-reaching implications not only for food preferences but for behavior as well. Institutional meal settings, if properly managed, could, for one thing, alleviate any lingering concerns that might attach to feeding children lunch away from home. While a large lunchroom, Mead warned, could easily devolve into chaos, one that was well ordered could recreate the environment of a “family meal, especially in the face of a “breakdown of family ties.” The CFH recommended that food service managers provide amenities such as small tables, designated “family” groups for eating, and a quiet atmosphere. School lunchrooms could also teach important lessons in gender roles as well as nutrition. Some schools adopted Mead’s family model by organizing their lunchrooms along the lines of a “well-regulated family group.”48 In Rye, New York, for example, a boy and girl at each table served as “host and hostess” and were responsible for “table courtesies,” including lessons in nutrition, etiquette, and conversation. Food choice and gender roles also pointed toward middle-class behavior norms. At the historically black Peabody Women’s College demonstration school cafeteria, for example, teachers designated hosts and hostesses for each lunchroom table. Here, race and class behavior were carefully nurtured as “conversation, table manners, English, art, and food selection” all formed part of the children’s educational curriculum.49
Mead’s goal was not simply to improve the nation’s health and morale, but to do so in a democratic manner that would, as historian Amy Bentley observed, allow for “diversity and personal choice.”50 Taking a cue from the experiences of home economists of previous decades, the CFH went to great pains to transcend the diversity of American cultures and to play down the differences that marked ethnic Americans. Wartime diet recommendations, Mead insisted, must reflect good relations among different regional, national, religious, and racial groups. Hollywood films as well as government-sponsored newsreels and pamphlets reflected the CFH advice, regularly featuring a panoply of ethnic characters. Indeed, as Mead noted, “the systematic exploitation of such cultural differences is part of the enemy tactic in war.”51
American food policy, Mead counseled, needed to appreciate ethnic difference and to build a unified national identity. To do both, however, was a challenge. Most people developed their food preferences in family kitchens and dining rooms. In wartime, however, institutional meal settings, whether in the army, in factories, or in schools, offered the opportunity to transform diverse ethnic food cultures into a national identity. School menus, for example, could go a long way toward overcoming ethnic diversity and encouraging national unity. Every child eating in school and every adult eating in a public cafeteria, Mead insisted, should be comfortable with the food offerings, but cafeteria planners should also take the opportunity to introduce children to nutritious food and new dishes. “Because of the gr
eat diversity of food differences in the United States,” Mead observed, “it is more practicable to try to establish feeding patterns which do not offend any group.” School lunchrooms and other cafeterias, she suggested, should offer only “food that is fairly innocuous and has low emotional value.” This meant that menu planners should seek the path to consensus by eliminating as much distinctive flavoring as possible. Indeed, the only seasoning Mead recommended was salt. All others she said, would alienate one group or another. The best route, Mead’s CFH counseled, was to prepare “low toned foods” such as plain soups; beef, chicken, or meat pies; and plain vegetables. In a dramatic reversal of culinary advice, the CFH recommended staying away from all creamed dishes and warned cooks to avoid buttered vegetables. Despite a new suspicion of white sauce, however, the old idea that spicy foods were unhealthy gained new legitimacy in menu recommendations that stressed broiled fish, potatoes, boiled spaghetti, and eggs.52
While food reformers generally advocated relatively standardized modern diets, Mead reminded them that choice and ethnicity were keys to American democratic culture. Menu choices, whether in the home or in institutional settings, could validate ethnic traditions and reinforce the pluralism that characterized the wartime idealized version of American national identity. “Most foreign born groups,” Mead wrote, commonly rejected “American” food but should be given some choice on their lunch trays. “Choice in food is one sign of being an adult in America,” she noted, and the lack of choice would “reduce the adult to the status of a child with the consequent development of dependency and lowering of morale.” Menu choices also ensured that no group would be offended by the selections offered, whether in army mess halls or school lunchrooms. Indeed, Mead counseled cooks to use menu choices to introduce Americans to new foods, presumably modernized versions of traditional ethnic dishes. In particular, the CFH agenda for wartime food policy stressed introducing children to new foods, nutrition, and healthy eating.
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