School lunch administrators, nutritionists, and newspaper columnists loudly protested vending machines in the schools, but when they realized the true nature of the legislation it was all but too late. New York Times columnist Jack Anderson accused the vending machine companies of pulling “a sleeper.” The amendment, he said, would only increase private profits “at the expense of children’s eating habits.” For the first time, Anderson warned, “candy bars, potato chips and soda pop” would be allowed to directly compete with nutritious meals.46 In an effort to repeal the amendment the following year, Gretchen Plagge, director of food services for the Santa Fe schools, accused the vending industry of duping Congress with its “advertising efforts” and said that no one in the professional community, including medical authorities, nutritionists, and PTA members, “sought such a law.” Plagge warned that vending machines would provide students with “countless opportunities for the purchase of foods with little or limited nutritional value.” A vending machine snack, she said, was a poor substitute for a “balanced, well-prepared meal.” In Plagg’s view, Congress had a “moral as well as legal responsibility” to protect children’s health, and it would be unethical for schools to exploit children’s “desire for sweet, high calorie foods.”47 Children, Plagg believed, simply should not be allowed to choose unhealthy foods. The problem, nutritionists feared, was that the “junk food” would compete not only with more healthful food choices but also for children’s lunch money. Columbia University nutritionist Jean Gussow warned that American taxpayers supported the school lunch program in order to provide nutritious food for children—not to supply snacks. The vending industry, however, insisted that any restriction on its access to children was an attempt to “federally control” the market.48
The snack and soft drink industry, in a new move, however, claimed that their products, in fact, contributed to children’s health. Asserting that “there is more to nutrition than vitamins,” industry spokesmen told a congressional panel that “quick energy, assimilation of liquid,” and “en joyment” contributed as much to children’s well-being as vitamins and minerals.49 Nutrition arguments held little sway in the face of shrinking budgets, and within a short time school vending machine contracts were worth millions of dollars.50 Realizing that it would be almost impossible to legislate snack food out of children’s lives, school lunch professionals suggested a compromise. If Congress allowed vending machines in schools, their use should be limited to non-lunch hours so as not to compete with the “non-profit” school lunch program.
Claiming that children had a “right to candy,” food industry spokesmen defended the sale of snacks as a legitimate source of extra revenue for cash-strapped school systems.51 Despite professional and public protest, soft drink “pouring rights contracts” were seductively appealing, particularly for poor schools. In exchange for pouring rights, schools received hundreds of dollars’ worth of athletic equipment and other supplies. In addition to revenue from the machines themselves, schools received sports equipment (shirts with the company logo), educational materials (math posters with the company logos), and other resources. Despite the warnings and protests of professionals, snack foods gained a solid footing in the schools. Indeed, within a few years at least one-quarter of all middle schools and 42 percent of all high schools regularly sold soda and candy, and by the end of the century 43 percent of elementary, 74 percent of middle schools, and 98 percent of senior high schools had contracts with vending machine companies and soft-drink distributors.52 While many of the vending machines were closed during lunch hours, according to one report, one in five high school students could access snack food at any time during the school day.53
COMBO MEALS AND NUTRITION STANDARDS
Once private industry had a foot in the door of the school building, it was only a matter of time before the cafeteria lines opened as well. Foodservice giant Sodexho vice president Tom Callahan predicted that as long as federal reimbursements did not keep up with “food and labor cost” and state contributions continued to be “embarrassingly low,” schools would either have to drop out of the National School Lunch Program or find “creative ways” to meet their costs. The easiest route, he predicted, would be private contacts.54
The free-lunch mandate ultimately altered the menu as much as it altered the demographics of the school lunchroom. While never known for being tasty, school lunches had, in general, been prepared on site and, until the late 1960s expansion, were almost always hot, threecourse meals that included the major food groups. The Department of Agriculture’s nutrition standards mandating that the Type A, fully subsidized lunch provide at least one-third of a child’s nutritional requirements over the course of the week defined the meals that had appeared on children’s lunch trays since the 1950s. Although the Department of Agriculture admitted that only about 37 percent of the children participating in the National School Lunch Program actually ate a Type A meal, this menu served as the model for school lunches across the country.55 Chicken breast with gravy biscuits and honey butter, celery and carrot sticks, a piece of orange, and an oatmeal and raisin cookie with milk could be found, however, only in schools that had kitchens or school districts that could afford to invest in new cafeterias. Faced with providing large numbers of free or reduced price lunches, many schools turned to “bag lunches” or pre-packaged meals delivered by private contractors. Predictably, given more choice in menu options, children chose hamburgers, French fries, or pizza over the three-course balanced meal of meat, vegetable, and potatoes.56
At the very moment when large numbers of poor children finally gained the right to free school meals, the Department of Agriculture began to modify its recommended nutrition standards. In 1970 the department eliminated the traditional Type A, B, and C meal designations and announced that henceforth it would reimburse only Type A meals. While requiring all schools to serve the nutritional equivalent of a Type A meal appeared on the surface to be an improvement in the regulations, in fact the change allowed for the introduction of fast foods, snacks, and “a la carte” offerings that easily added up to a less than nutritious meal.57 In 1979 the rules were loosened even more when the Department of Agriculture issued new guidelines allowing for the sale of “foods of minimum nutritional value” in school lunchrooms. Designed specifically to sell candy and snacks in the lunch line, the rules stipulated that if the “food” supplied more than 5 percent of the RDA of just one basic nutrient in a 100 calorie serving, the item could be served for lunch. If the nutrition value fell below that already low bar, then sale of the product was restricted to after lunch hours. What was more, the new rules put no restrictions on the amount of salt, sugar, or fat those products could contain. Assistant Secretary of Agriculture for Food and Consumer Affairs Carol Tucker Foreman admitted that “any manufacturer of candy bars, snack foods, cakes or soft drinks could simply fortify his product with the required 5 percent of any one of the eight nutrients and so have the product declared minimally nutritious.” Foreman’s assistant, Jody LevinEpstein, went further, acknowledging that “if a candy bar has only one nut in it, we feel it is above our minimal nutrient standards.” Lunch supervisors, nutritionists, and PTAs across the country loudly protested. “I think it’s almost a total cave-in to the snack-food industry,” wrote Michael Jacobson, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Jean Gussow lambasted the rules, declaring that “they are really banning nothing—not even jelly beans—when you consider how cheap and easy it is to fortify any food with a little vitamin C and so qualify.”58
As soon as federal nutrition standards changed and restrictions on private contracts were eased, school districts invited private food-service corporations into their lunchrooms. In the face of continuing fiscal shortfalls, school lunch administrators felt they had little choice but to turn to private companies that promised efficient service and lower costs. The Department of Agriculture justified opening school cafeterias to private food companies as a way to provide new revenues to ai
ling lunch programs. At the same time, the food industry was entirely eager to enter the school lunch market.59 Commercial interests promised to supply meals at lower costs and more efficiently than the local, state, and federal government “partnership” that had characterized the program since its inception. Large cities, in particular, eagerly contracted with companies that offered city-wide service. Because urban schools often lacked cafeterias, centralized kitchen facilities were a cheaper option than adding lunchrooms to existing schools. Contractors hired truckers, supplies, food, and cooks and delivered pre-packaged meals to each school. The Buffalo, New York, school board for example, signed a contract with Service Systems Corporation, a subsidiary of Del Monte, to provide lunches in their low-income schools. Service Systems delivered 9,000 “packaged school lunches” every day and hot lunches once or twice a week. According to Buffalo School Board officials, this arrangement allowed them to serve lunches for the first time to children in inner city schools. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the district contracted with a central warehouse that offered to supply over a hundred schools that then “bid” for food that was stored in large coolers and freezers. The Tulsa warehouse purchased food in large quantities but took the brand names off the products before sending it to the schools.60 Economies of scale in food delivery, storage, and preparation all appealed to school lunch operators, who saw no new influx of public resources coming their way.
By the 1970s food service, and lunch in particular, had become big business. Lunch, noted one report, “has become the daily institutional meal, and more than half of the nation’s population now eats the noon meal” at work, at school, in a hospital, prison, or in the Army.61 Within a decade the lunch business mounted to $23 million each year. School cafeterias formed a major part of the food-service industry, with annual receipts worth an estimated $4.5 billion by the mid-1970s. As federal restrictions on private contracts eased, one report noted, “more and more companies are zeroing in on this market.”62 By 1975, the National School Lunch Program operated the third largest food service program in the nation, larger than the Army and trailing only McDonald’s and KFC.63
Major national food corporations increased their school-focused operations significantly as Department of Agriculture restrictions were lifted. In 1969, for example, the Automatic Retailers of America reported that it added the school market to its already lucrative college, hospital, business, and airline operations. A company spokesman boasted that ARA served “more people daily than any other organization in the world.”64 The company’s lunch operations included the Montreal Olympics, while its vending machine business supplied cigarettes, music, games, and snacks to Holiday Inns, Gino’s and Denny’s restaurants, and flight kitchens for fifty airlines. Other corporations followed suit. Sysco Corporation, for example, entered the school food-service business in the early 1970s and saw its net worth skyrocket from $115 million to over $23 billion in two decades.65 By the early 1970s, food industry giants such as Morton’s, Glidden-Durkee, and Pronto, a division of Hershey Foods, held school lunch contracts.66 These were highly diversified industries in which schools were only a part of the overall operation. In addition to centralized school cafeterias, the Ogden Corporation, for example, also dealt in transportation, metals, service to theaters and recreational centers, and race tracks. Armour, the venerable meatpacking company with origins in the nineteenth century, entered the school market during the 1970s. The company, then a subsidiary of the Greyhound Corporation, supplied meats, poultry, and dairy products to other food-service businesses as well as to school lunchrooms. Among Armour’s specialties were pre-packaged airline meals. Entrees such as beef stroganoff, stuffed peppers, and “Salisbury steak with Polynesian sauce” catapulted the company into the leading ranks of the new prepared food industry.67
Fast food and “convenience” foods transformed the form and the content of American meals, whether at home or at school. The American food industry had changed dramatically since the early days of school lunches. While American agriculture continued to enjoy large tax subsidies, by the 1970s, the traditional family farm all but disappeared. The food industry was no longer characterized by small farmers whose concern was growing and marketing their produce. The industrialization of agriculture in the years after World War II resulted in what one critic described as “a gigantic, highly integrated service system in which the object is not to nourish or even to feed, but to force an ever-increasing consumption of fabricated products.”68 Industrial farming, large-scale food processing plants, and national networks of food-service providers characterized the industry. Frozen food, dehydrated mixes, and preheated or re-heatable entrees found an increasingly important place at the American table. According to one estimate, the spectacular rise in potato consumption in the United States was due “almost entirely to the purchase of French fries at franchised restaurants.”69 Particularly after the introduction of the home-kitchen microwave oven, convenience foods claimed an ever increasing share of the food market.70 These new products were key to the ability of schools, particularly those without existing kitchen facilities, to serve large numbers of free lunches. The use of frozen and dehydrated foods, observed Richard Flambert, a San Francisco food-service consultant and designer, “is certainly the most important thing that has happened recently.” Mashed potatoes, for example, Flambert said, can now be made without the need for peeling or cooking the raw potatoes. Packaged mashed potato mixes could easily be “poured into a kettle without being touched by human hands.” Within five years, he predicted, dehydrated foods would be so common that schools would not even need freezers or refrigerators for food storage. “All that will be required,” he was certain, would be “cold or hot water to prepare our foods.”71 Indeed, by 1978, according to one report, over half of all institutions serving meals relied on pre-prepared convenience foods.72
School lunch administrators played an important role in introducing new foods to American schoolchildren. Regional and ethnic dishes had become nationalized in a school food market that spanned the continent. “Tacos have moved east and fried clams moved west,” noted one reporter.73 National norms for the size and shape of hamburgers, fish sandwiches, and French fries defined American food culture. While the children may have already discovered hamburgers as fast food, during the 1970s, the ethnic food market had not yet captured the national market.74 In 1976, for example, Henrietta Green, district school food service director in Colorado, decided to introduce her children to Jewish food to pay tribute to the Jewish New Year. The suburban Denver district featured bagels, baked chicken, red cabbage, and honey cake for its holiday meal. Unable to prepare the bagels in the traditional manner (boiling them in salt water), Green decided to use biscuit dough with eggs and sugar and then bake the “bagels” in the oven. Unfortunately, the special occasion selected for the Jewish meal was Yom Kippur, which Green belatedly discovered was a fast day. Another problem arose when Green discovered that Jewish dietary laws prohibited serving milk and meat at the same meal. Because the Type A lunch required milk, she had to adjust her offerings. Undeterred, Green said, “I’m sure we’ll make a lot more mistakes … but at least we’re getting an education.” Indeed, Green went on to plan other ethnic offerings, including pretzels (Germany), fish and chips (Scotland), chicken curry (India), and quiche Lorraine (France). “I’m hoping someone will come up with a lunch representative of the American Indian,” she said.75
For school lunch administrators, the new food technology presented a perfect solution to the problem of feeding large numbers of poor children without having to invest in new equipment and facilities. Schoolchildren became a captive market for “pre-plated” pre-packaged, and pre-heated meals. Using the model of airline meals and TV dinners, school districts around the country contracted with central kitchens to prepare and deliver pre-cooked meals. Like airplane passengers, school children were offered a plastic “cold-pac” and an aluminum “hot-pak.” Unlike airline travelers, however, children still received a carton of milk
with their meal.76 Washington, D.C.’s Bruce Elementary school, for example, employed the new food technology to switch from cold sandwiches, “which everyone agreed were tasteless,” to new Styrofoam “traypacks.” The precooked meal trays included a napkin and disposable plastic utensils. While children enjoyed the novelty of the new lunches, the meals they ate were no doubt bland and not much tastier than the cold sandwiches, because the central kitchen maintained a policy of using very few spices in its food preparation.77
The food delivery model that most attracted school lunch operators was the growing fast-food industry. Indeed, fast foods claimed an increasingly large share of the nation’s food budget. According to one estimate, “the palatable, fat-rich hamburger, pizza, fried chicken, and ethnic take-out cuisines rose from 3 to 16 percent of US food outlays between 1963 and 1993.”78 By the early 1970s, school food service increasingly adopted the fast-food model in school cafeterias. While acknowledging the Department of Agriculture nutritional guidelines for children’s meals, most school lunch administrators were under pressure to run their operations on business and management principles. This meant that sales and participation rates took precedence over nutrition. In practice, both the Department of Agriculture and the ASFSA encouraged the business model. School lunch operators claimed that fast food drew paying children into the lunchroom and thus provided key program revenue. Tacos, pizza, and French fries, they believed, would be the only offerings that could bring in enough business to shore up what could only be described as failing enterprises.
School Lunch Politics Page 24
