The threat to paying children revealed a fundamental tension within the program and within American social programs generally. The National School Lunch Program’s remarkable popular support rested on the assumption that every child who wanted a nutritious meal could receive one. Indeed, the program was designed as a welfare program for farmers and had traditionally operated as a benefit for middle- and working-class families who could pay a subsidized price for their children’s meals. Senate sponsor Richard Russell, for one, insisted that “the School Lunch Act was passed for all children (not just the needy).”79 Russell’s liberal Senate colleagues similarly asserted the program’s universal intent. New York’s Jacob Javits, for example, declared that the School Lunch Act of 1946 “was never intended to be a poor person’s lunch program.” The purpose, Javits said, was to ensure adequate nutrition for children regardless of whether they were rich or poor. Children’s health, Javits believed, “is an important national asset.”80 Congressional advocates as well as school lunch professionals feared that a singular focus on the needy would spell the end of the program’s “traditional” goal of providing nutrition for all children. Liberal Senator and anti-poverty advocate Carl Perkins warned, “We have to be most careful not to price the middle-class child out of the lunchroom.”81 ASFSA executive director John Perryman similarly worried that if child nutrition programs became part of overall educational or welfare appropriations, it would spell “a total disaster” for the school lunch program.82 Perryman opposed turning the program into welfare. “Our nation’s educational history abounds with evidence that public education … faltered and failed so long as it confined itself to the pauper’s offspring,” he said.83 Holding to the ideal of a universal school lunch program, the ASFSA fought against shifting the program’s focus to welfare.84 The National Education Association also favored a universal system. In 1970, NEA president George Fisher observed, “I don’t distinguish between money for school lunches and money for all other things we need in education Ahotlunch program shouldn’t be a free lunch for the poor. It should be a free lunch for all children.”85 Nonetheless, the trend was set. By the early 1970s, as one historian noted, the school lunch program had moved “from an outlet for farm surpluses to a small convenience for part of the middle class to an important welfare benefit for children of the poor.”86
The fundamental dilemma confronting free lunch advocates was whether the program could exist as a means of ensuring the nutritional health of all children or whether it would become an entitlement program for the poor. Scholars have suggested that one of the underlying tensions marking President Johnson’s War on Poverty as well as American social welfare policies generally has been the fact that some programs, like Social Security, at least in theory offered universal benefits and therefore garnered widespread popular support. Other programs, most notably Aid to Dependent Children and Food Stamps, targeted the poor and therefore gained weaker support among middle-class tax payers. Of course, Social Security was not, in any real sense, a universal benefit—farm workers, domestic servants, and service workers were long excluded. Still, the program remained a bedrock of the nation’s social safety net. Other scholars argue that the key to public support for welfare lies less in the claim to universality but, rather, in the institutional structure of the program. In this case, federal programs fail not because of the group of clients served but, rather, because the American welfare system has relied too heavily on states and entrenched local interests to administer the benefits. In the case of school lunches both interpretations are important. The National School Lunch Program had strong public support exactly because of its universal claims. The push to re-direct the program’s focus to poor children threatened that universal claim. But what threatened the program even more was its administrative weakness and the continued reliance on local officials to shape and distribute the benefits. During the late 1960s, school lunch advocates understood the risks of turning the program into one targeted only to poor children. They understood even more the continued risks of leaving the administration of school lunches in the hands of local officials. Between 1968 and 1970, however, all other considerations paled beside the sense of social crisis that informed local activists as well as federal policy makers.
In the context of growing social unrest, the question of universal school lunch versus a free lunch program for poor children became moot. Neither public officials nor grass-roots activists felt they could afford to push for idealistic goals. Instead, pragmatic politics won the day. Given that few lawmakers were prepared to spend the estimated $15 million or more that it would take to feed all school children, school lunch advocates pushed for an expanded free lunch program targeted at the poor. Most reformers viewed this as a practical, short-term solution to a crisis rather than an ideal long-term federal policy solution to the twin problems of poverty and malnutrition. Their Daily Bread, for example, urged that “the school lunch should be a basic part of free public school education to which every child has a right.”87 The San Diego, Texas, superintendent of schools went further, advocating free meals for all children. “I would not charge a student a dime for a meal,” he said, “I think it is as important as English, and history, and math.”88 When asked whether he would give a millionaire’s child a free lunch, he replied, “Yes sir. I would think that it is important that they eat at the cafeteria.” Just because the family is rich, he reminded the senator, “does not prove that he has the proper food.”89 Yet given the political realities, both the CSLP and the San Diego school board conceded that, in the short run, the most they could hope for would be free lunches for the poor.90 Everyone involved with school lunches understood that pushing for a universal program would, in effect, spell its doom. They agreed instead to targeted funds that, they hoped would ultimately be expanded to cover all children. It was a vain hope.
CHAPTER 8
Let Them Eat Ketchup
Between 1968 and 1972 the National School Lunch Program was transformed from being primarily an agricultural subsidy into one of the nation’s premier poverty programs. This was not entirely what school lunch and children’s welfare reformers had in mind nor was it what the program’s original political sponsors had intended. The 1940s school lunch advocates imagined a program that would offer healthy, lowpriced meals to children and free lunches to those (assumed to be few in number) who could not afford to pay. What happened as a result of mounting pressure to feed the poor, however, was a fundamental shift in school lunch priorities. This shift had significant unintended consequences for the demographics of school lunchrooms and the quality of school meals. Put simply, as the number of free meals soared, the number of paying children precipitously declined. By the middle of the 1970s relatively few children who had any choice ate school lunches. The exodus of paying children from school cafeterias, however, created a huge shortfall in lunchroom budgets. Federal subsidies did not shrink, but they were increasingly earmarked for free lunches. Indeed, it was Richard Nixon who most decisively transformed the National School Lunch Program into a free lunch subsidy.
Just as poor children won a “right to lunch,” the quality of school meals declined and the democratic ideal of the school lunchroom disappeared. As free and reduced price lunches became an ever more important part of federal welfare entitlements, the search for financial stability eroded both the nutritional integrity and the public nature of the National School Lunch Program. Although the federal government finally established eligibility criteria for free and reduced price meals and articulated nutrition standards, the administration of the program and the distribution of federal resources still resided in local hands. Most of the time, public funds—federal, state, or local—for free lunches were woefully insufficient to cover the costs of running large-scale lunchroom operations. Despite a seemingly intense public loyalty to the school lunch program, neither state legislators nor local communities were willing to pick up the budget slack. In an effort to maintain the viability of free meal programs, both sch
ool administrators and liberal reformers began to look to the private food service industry to keep school cafeterias afloat. At the same time, the Department of Agriculture began to modify its nutrition standards for children’s meals, making it easier for the food industry to enter the school lunch market. ASFSA executive director John Perryman ruefully observed that the National School Lunch Program had shifted its focus “from the nutritionally needy to the economically needy.”1 The difference would have seriously disturbed Ellen Richards and the home economists who initiated school lunch programs during the early twentieth century. For them, every child was, in some sense, “nutritionally needy.”
Believing that they had no other choice, however, school lunch administrators across the country began to invite food-service corporations and fast-food franchises to supply the food and in some cases to actually run their meal programs. By the end of the 1970s school cafeterias came more and more to resemble fast-food restaurants. Although nutritionists and health professionals decried the turn to privatization, many free lunch advocates ended up lauding the move. Liberals who generally eschewed big business and criticized corporate values were willing to go along with at least limited privatization if it meant that poor children could eat for free. What emerged in many school districts by the end of the 1970s was a public/private partnership shaped fundamentally by business concerns such as profitability and efficiency. Nutrition, health, and education all became subsumed into a model of consumer choice and market share. While public resources continued to underwrite the National School Lunch Program, few lunchrooms could stay in business without bowing in some way or other to the brand names, fast food, and corporate models of efficiency, productivity, and profit.
WHO PAYS FOR FREE LUNCH?
Richard Nixon took office in the midst of crises both foreign and domestic. While the Vietnam War spiraled out of control during the last months of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, anti-war, civil rights, and anti-poverty movements drew thousands of Americans into street demonstrations, grass-roots coalitions, and community organizations. In one of his first official acts, President Nixon appointed Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer to head a White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health. Mayer, a well-respected nutrition researcher with bipartisan credentials, wanted the conference to highlight “a nutritional rights counterpart to civil voting rights.”2 The White House conference brought together a vast array of players, from anti-hunger activists and community leaders to educators, nutrition and health professionals, food industry representatives, and Department of Agriculture officials.3 Chief among the conference child welfare recommendations was a universal school lunch pro gram “as a basic school service to promote the learning potential of all children.”4 Admitting that this was a long-term ideal, even in a nation as affluent as the United States, the conference recommended instead that the free lunch program be expanded and that the Department of Agriculture improve the nutrition content of school meals generally. “Every child has a right to the nutritional resources he needs,” asserted the conference report. This could only be accomplished, the report concluded, via the public schools, “historically the vehicle through which Americans implement important national and community goals.”5 At the end of the conference, President Nixon promised that his administration would eliminate hunger in America before Thanksgiving 1970.
Jean Mayer proved to be a key figure in shaping the Nixon administration’s food policies. Born in France, Mayer was lauded as a World War II hero before becoming one of the world’s leading nutritionists. Although he did extensive nutrition work on hunger and malnutrition in Africa and India, during the 1960s he began to warn of an obesity crisis at home. Despite his role as Nixon’s spokesman on issues of hunger, Mayer remained a non-partisan figure, gaining the respect of hunger activists as well as legislators of both parties.6 Mayer was not an uncritical recruit for the Nixon administration. In 1968, testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, he took the Department of Agriculture to task for its lack of attention to the problems of poverty and malnutrition. “We cannot,” he said, “continue to have the nutritional policy of this Nation be an indirect consequence of such programs as price support subsidies.”7
While ending hunger before the following Thanksgiving was, perhaps, too lofty a goal, the new president oversaw an unprecedented expansion in food and nutrition programs. Food relief budgets, including school lunches and food stamps, soared from less than $500 million in 1969 to an estimated $8 billion in 1975.8 In May 1970, the Senate extended free meal service, immediately doubling the number of poor children participating in the program. Where the total federal appropriation for school lunches from 1946 to 1969 had been $3.6 billion, in 1970 alone, the Republican administration put in over one billion dollars. By 1972, Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz claimed to be feeding over 8.1 million children a year. Most of these new meals were free or reduced-price lunches. In 1971 the New York Times reported a record 7.1 million children nationwide receiving free or reduced priced lunches at school.9 In 1975, the Republican administration put the free School Breakfast Program on permanent authorization.
During the Nixon administration, food as welfare became an institutional part of the federal budget. By the 1970s, Department of Agriculture spending on domestic food programs “quickly exceeded total spending on farm programs.”10 According to one estimate, food programs increased from 11 percent of the department’s budget in 1970 to 40 percent ten years later. At the same time, spending on surplus commodities declined.11 Department of Agriculture admitted that its “Type A meal” nutrition system could not “be used efficiently in the development of commodity agricultural production nor can it be used effectively in determining annual national and local requirements for food procurement.”12 School lunchrooms no longer operated as a significant outlet for surplus agricultural commodities. Indeed, most federal resources now came to schools through cash reimbursements rather than donated food. Large farm interests continued to receive substantial subsidies, but public and congressional debates focused on free lunches and food stamps.13 Embracing the school lunch program as no other president before him, Richard Nixon declared, “I not only accept the responsibility” for ending hunger and malnutrition, “I claim the responsibility.”14 But Nixon’s sense of responsibility did not, in fact, reach all children. Although his administration increased funding for the National School Lunch Program, the president carefully targeted where the money went. “Government support for food programs,” Nixon insisted, “should concentrate on helping the needy rather than subsidizing rich and poor alike.”15 With congressional support, under Richard Nixon the two major federal food programs, food stamps and school lunches, actually received increased appropriations.16 In fact, however, the president’s carefully targeted policy signaled an important shift in the philosophy and structure of the National School Lunch Program.17
The federal free lunch mandate threw school lunchrooms across the country into ever deepening financial crises. As it turned out, pouring federal money into free and reduced price lunches only exacerbated the local funding problem. Traditionally, states had used children’s fees to make up the difference between federal subsidies and the actual cost of meals. Initially, therefore, when Congress mandated more free meals, schools raised the cost of full price lunches. In 1975, when President Gerald Ford proposed cutbacks in school lunch funding, the ASFSA mounted a vocal opposition, saying, “In a vast majority of schools, the poverty program alone would not support a viable school food service.” The ASFSA estimated that lunch prices were soaring to “eighty cents and higher” and warned that pupil participation “would be forced down dramatically.”18 The result was predictable. As school lunches became associated with the poor, the paying children, long the financial backbone of the school lunch program, began to drop out. Between 1970 and 1973 an estimated one million paying children dropped out of the program.19 During the early 1980s school lunch participation overall continued to d
ecline from 15 to 35 percent, depending on the state. While the total number of children participating in the school lunch program increased from about 22 million in 1970 to 27 million in 1980, most of the new eaters were poor children who received free or reduced price meals (see Table 8.1).20
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