The debate about which children qualified for free lunches quickly became a microcosm of the growing debate about poverty in America. Certainly, no national standard existed in 1966 that defined who was poor, who was near-poor, and who could afford 30 cents a day for lunch. Civil rights and anti-poverty activists increasingly demanded national standards for eligibility and service, but it was not at all clear what such national standards should be. Any “objective” measure of poverty had always been elusive, and measures of hunger similarly subjective. While nutrition scientists could identify conditions that constituted starvation and had successfully identified diseases caused by nutrient deficiencies, judgments about malnutrition in school children remained largely impressionistic.
FOOD AND THE POVERTY LINE
Establishing a measure for poverty in the 1960s, began, as it had earlier in the century, with estimates about family food budgets. Traditionally, the ability to afford a “decent” standard of living hinged on a healthy or “adequate” diet. The line between self-sufficiency and dependence for many families lay in the price of food. The post-World War II economic boom and the success of trade union negotiations solidified the notion that living standards depended on the price of consumer goods, particularly groceries.67 Even in affluent America, the price of food and the definition of poverty were closely linked. As home economists and others had long argued, the cost of the “market basket” determined the standard of living of most families. It is not surprising, then, that a home economist, working in the Social Security Administration, came up with a formula for measuring the “poverty line.” Mollie Orshansky combined a 1955 Bureau of Home Economics household budget survey showing that families generally spent one-third of their incomes on food with the Department of Agriculture’s recommended nutrition standards, better known as RDAs. Orshansky estimated how much income a family needed to “provide its members RDA on a regular basis.” The formula, as Orshansky later admitted, would provide only the minimum of health and well-being. No family, she said, could live at that level “for any length of time beyond an emergency.”68 Indeed, Orshansky ruefully observed, no one in America would settle for mere subsistence “as the just due for himself or his neighbor, and even the poorest may claim more than bread.”69 Critics such as Michael Harrington dismissed any effort to create a standard poverty line. Such an attempt, he said, merely set “a minimum measure for life at the bottom.”70 Senator George McGovern echoed Harrington’s hesitation, pointing out that the problem of defining standards lay in deciding whether adequacy should be based on a minimum, optimum, or intermediate level of need. Nonetheless, Orshansky’s formula provided a quick and convenient way for government officials, trying to shape new welfare programs, to determine who would be eligible for benefits. In 1965 the federal government, through the War on Poverty’s Office of Economic Opportunity, officially adopted Orshansky’s formula as the basis for eligibility for its programs.71 Other agencies quickly followed suit.72
Despite obvious drawbacks, the federal “poverty line” soon became the standard measure of eligibility for welfare benefits, including school lunches. The problem was that poverty remained a relative condition, and no national “poverty line” could realistically describe conditions in every part of the country. Indeed, because any objective measure of poverty was illusory, the “poverty line” quickly became the lowest possible standard of living. Further, because income and cost of living varied considerably from region to region, the actual “line” below which families were deemed to be “poor” varied as well. State guidelines for determining which families qualified for food stamps or which children should eat free or reduced price school meals were thus wildly inconsistent.73 While the federal poverty line determined minimum eligibility for benefits such as food stamps, states as well as local districts could set their own criteria for local welfare payments as well as for free lunches.
An “objective” measure of poverty did not eliminate the stigma of being poor in America. Throughout the country, children receiving free lunches were routinely treated differently from paying students. Local officials, often the same individuals who had been carrying out discriminatory policies all along, were being asked to alter long-held practices. Some rose to the occasion, others did not. A Palm Beach County, Florida, welfare worker complained that “children receiving free lunches are too frequently reminded that they are not paying and are made to feel guilty if they do not eat all of the food.”74 As one report on the National School Lunch Program observed, “where teachers who collect school money are overworked, where the principal regards the School Lunch Program as an unnecessary burden, where the community in general is hostile to welfare recipients in any form, those [federal guidelines] are ignored and those instructions are violated with monotonous regularity.”75 While local administrators promised that poor children would not be singled out in the lunchroom, parents and children knew better. The Chicago Board of Education, for example, announced that welfare recipients would “have to identify themselves” if they wanted their children to receive free lunches.76 In Detroit, families had to list their weekly budget expenditures in their applications for free meals.77 In Washington, D.C., poor children went through the cafeteria line “like anyone else,” but when they got to the food counter, it was another story. The paying students paid 42 cents and received a hot lunch with “a few extra items,” including a salad; poor children received a different meal entirely. School lunch administrator Jacobs admitted that “as much as we try, there is no point in my trying to kid anybody there. … I don’t believe there is a school in the fifty states where everyone doesn’t know who is needy.”78 Testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, Margaret Mead reprised her role as an expert on American foodways, noting, “It is very foolish to talk about integration and democracy in our schools” and then establish a separate lunch system for poor children. Americans, she said, “are willing to face the fact that everybody does not have a Cadillac … but on food, which is the necessary basis of life, the fact that someone cannot provide it for his children is very stigmatizing.”79 The stigma associated with free lunch programs would not disappear, ASFSA executive director John Perryman predicted, until “food for thought and food for stomach are made available equally to one and all.”80
When it came to poverty policy, anti-hunger activists, like other 1960s liberal reformers, could not decide whether they were dealing with economic inequality or cultural disability. In the case of food policy, the line between cultural practice and economic decisions was even more problematic. Reformers and policy makers had long questioned the food choices of poor and working-class people. Since at least the late nineteenth century, nutrition scientists insisted that rational food choices would alleviate the worst effects of low wages and economic deprivation. In the 1960s, the notion that cultural attitudes were responsible for economic status gained new credence as “the poor” increasingly became a distinct, and racially marked, class. Attempts to alter the “culture of poverty” appealed to a generation of liberal policy makers who resisted the idea that American inequality might stem from deep-seated racial discrimination and institutional bias. Democratic advisers to President Kennedy, notably, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, insisted that in affluent America, poverty and malnutrition were products of cultural deprivation as much as material want. In the past, Moynihan observed, “the poor were poor, no more than that.” In the modern period, however, Moynihan argued, poverty had became a decidedly cultural (often racial) liability. Adopting anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s notion that cultural attitudes (like “bad” food habits) associated with poverty could be transmitted from one generation to the next, Moynihan and others promoted the notion that a “culture of poverty” had developed that influenced urban racial ghettoes as well as rural America. Poverty, Moynihan argued, caused “structural changes in personality and behavior.”81 In this view, malnutrition in particular had to do not with scarcity of resources—everyone agreed tha
t the country produced an abundance of food—but rather with poor choices and lack of education. Moynihan’s Harvard colleague and leading nutritionist Jean Mayer went so far as to suggest that the term “malnutrition” should precisely “refer to the consumption of the wrong sort of food,” rather than to the more general notion of insufficient nutrition.82 Columbia nutritionist William H. Sebrell similarly asserted that in the United States, malnutrition was largely due to “ignorance of the importance of certain foods.” Food choices, Sebrell insisted, were as much the result of “cultural patterns” as scarcity or low wages.83 In a world of consumer abundance and economic growth, hunger and malnutrition boiled down (so to speak) to cultural choices. The poor, it seemed, simply needed more—or at any rate better—education. It was an argument that food reformers had been making for almost half a century.
Poverty and hunger gradually emerged as focal points for social activists of the 1960s. While the “culture of poverty” thesis suggested a need for things like education and job training, civil rights activists expanded their agenda to include access to government services as well as respect from public officials and others charged with delivering benefits to poor people, particularly poor blacks. Calls for welfare rights, food stamps, and free school lunches took on increasing importance, particularly after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that, at least formally, ensured voting rights and equal opportunity in employment and education. In the highly charged and increasingly polarized atmosphere of the 1960s, anti-poverty and anti-hunger movements appealed to liberal sensibilities. Tackling these issues seemed to call less for a radical restructuring of American society than for a more equitable distribution of existing resources and opportunities. The anti-poverty and anti-hunger groups came together during the mid-1960s largely in an effort to shift public resources toward the poor and to demand that poor people, most of whom were assumed to be black, be treated fairly by public officials. The civil rights movement ultimately forced the federal government, albeit reluctantly, to assert na tional standards in matters ranging from voting and employment rights to housing and education and to set eligibility standards for government benefits. National standards, however, proved more difficult when it came to education and children’s welfare, traditionally the purview of the individual states. This was not simply a problem of countering racial discrimination in the South. Indeed, states in other regions turned out to be as reluctant as Old Dixie to provide resources for poor people.84
Deeply ingrained notions of family self-reliance and personal independence complicated efforts to expand the free lunch program. In many communities there was the conviction that parents should pay at least minimal fees for lunch and resentment against those who could not. That resentment was only intensified as poverty became associated with race. Indeed, in many communities, liberal attempts to expand government benefits to the poor, whether black or white, were met with substantial resistance. Warning President Johnson that the costs of free lunches would bankrupt her lunchroom, Helen A. Davis, school lunch director in Todd County, Kentucky, observed, “It is unfair to the students and parents of this nation who strive to help themselves to withdraw aid to the school lunch and milk programs that will help all students in order to help only those who have learned to be parasites on the economy of the nation.”85 Vella Bellinger, a housewife from Berwyn, Nebraska, similarly believed that programs for the poor would discriminate against the middle class. “How can we stress using our ability to provide for oneself and then practice deprivation because one has succeeded in acquiring a modest means of self support?” she asked the president.86
In many communities people believed that requiring poor children to work for their meals was a good thing. Ohio’s eligibility guidelines declared, “It is good character-building education to have the child perform some work in return for his lunch.”87 C. L. Mooney, president of the Lockney, Texas, Independent School District, similarly observed, “In our district we have had a long-standing policy that no free lunches will be served unless the student is willing to work for his meal.” The chore, he said, was usually “token,” but the knowledge that they “earned their meat by the sweat of the brow” built pride in the students.88 A principal in Tucson, Arizona, on the other hand, decided that no one deserved a free lunch. “Everyone should pay something,” he believed, “for the family’s self-respect.” Besides, he added, “the cost of a free lunch program in a school as poor as this would be prohibitive.”89 He did, however, let some children eat for free “on a short term basis,” if, for example, a parent was temporarily out of work. In return for their lunch, these children might be asked to help out in the school kitchen.90
For the better part of the century, nutritionists and children’s advocates had insisted that the public had an interest in healthy children—not just healthy poor children. Indeed, the widespread popularity of the National School Lunch Program rested on the assumption that the government had a role to play in ensuring the health of the next generation. Turning the school lunch program into a free lunch program for the poor, however, risked weakening that popular support. Genevieve Olkiewicz, director of food services for the Montebello, California, Unified School District, worried, “In our recent enthusiasm to help the needy we seem to be forgetting the vast majority of Americans.”91 School lunch advocates of course applauded the effort to feed poor children. But at the same time, they did not want to see the lunch program serve only the poor. ASFSA executive director John Perryman cautioned against re-orienting the lunch program. If the schools were forced to serve only poor children, Perryman warned, the idea of “better nutrition for all children” would be left behind.92 National Educational Association legislative representative Mary Condon Gereau similarly insisted that while her organization “heartily” favored providing all needy children with lunch and milk, those children should not be fed “at the expense of the other children in the schools.”93
The debate about free school lunches for poor children revealed a fundamental ambivalence about food, family responsibility, and social policy. Since its inception, the school lunch program had operated in theory (if not in practice) as a universal subsidy. Like school supplies, books, and, indeed, public education itself, many Americans had come to see school lunches almost as a democratic necessity. New York representative James Scheuer argued that “if it is logical to say to a child who can afford it that he can pay for the soup, why is it not proper to say to that child…you are going to use so many dollars worth of paper, crayons, and chalk We think you should pay for that.”94 Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Howard Davis admitted that, in principle, there was no difference. But school lunches, Davis suggested, were not the same as school books. Parents, he observed, “would normally pay for [lunch] if the children went home … or if they had lunch at the corner drugstore.”95 Families should, Davis believed, “pay part or all of the cost of these lunches” whenever possible.96 For many Americans, food and meals remained, at base, a family responsibility.97 C. L Mooney, president of the Lockney, Texas, Independent School District, for example, told the president that federal assistance providing breakfast and lunch in school raised a moral question. The school’s main responsibility, Mooney insisted, was to teach. “May I ask,” he wondered, “when the parent’s responsibility is going to begin?”98 Liberal as well as conservative policy makers worried that universal child nutrition programs might “sound like the replacement of the American home.” Senator Eugene McCarthy, a staunch liberal, agreed that food was most appropriately provided in the home. Still, McCarthy insisted, it was time for Americans to develop a more comprehensive child nutrition program. Even McCarthy, however, to propose a universal free lunch program.99 By the mid-1960s, a sense of social crisis overwhelmed any lingering thoughts about a universal lunch program for all children. Indeed, the National School Lunch Program was becoming, for all intents and purposes, a poverty program.
CHAPTER 7
A Right to Lunch
Once the 1966 Chil
d Nutrition Act promised every poor child in America a free school lunch, a nationwide grass-roots movement quickly emerged, demanding fundamental changes in the National School Lunch Program. During the late 1960s, the widespread activism sparked by the civil rights and anti-war movements spawned a new militancy among northern blacks and students. But civil rights, peace, and hunger also motivated a wide swath of mainstream liberal activism as well. National women’s organizations, long involved in education, welfare, peace, and equal rights, emerged as leaders in the anti-hunger movement formulating what ultimately became the blueprint for school lunch reform. For liberal groups, in particular, the anti-poverty movement and related calls for free school lunches, free food stamps, and welfare rights pointed to concrete social programs that promised to address both racial and social inequalities. In many ways, hunger was an easier issue to address than the seemingly intractable inequities of race in American life. Tackling food policy called less for a radical restructuring of American society than for a more equitable distribution of existing resources and opportunities.
Civil rights activism, combined with a resurgence of liberal anti-poverty reform, dramatically altered the political context in which the National School Lunch Program had operated for the first two decades of its existence. In the process, school lunchrooms became sites of intense battles over who was poor and where public responsibility for poverty rested. For the first time since the Depression the nation’s food policies took center stage both in defining and in combating poverty. Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty ultimately forced a reorientation of the nation’s food policy, turning school lunches and food stamps—essential elements in agricultural policy since the New Deal—into the centerpieces of domestic social welfare. Grass-roots pressure forced the Department of Agriculture, albeit reluctantly, to respond to the nutrition and food needs of the poor. Where historically the central purpose of the department’s food aid programs, whether domestic or foreign, had been the disposal of surplus farm produce and the maintenance of commodity prices, during the 1960s food and nutrition became, as one commentator noted, “leading tools in fighting poverty.”1
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