At the turn of the twenty-first century, parents, educators, and health professionals began a new campaign to ban vending machines, candy, and soda from schools. Termed the “Junk Food Wars,” by the American School Food Service Association, children’s nutrition once again took center stage in the media as well as in the halls of Congress.47 This time around, a new culprit threatened children’s nutritional choices. The very measures that schools had introduced during the 1980s to solve the lunchroom financial crisis—fast food and vending machines—now loomed as major obstacles to nutrition education and good eating habits. Much of the impetus for local bans came from a report submitted to the House Appropriations Committee in January 2001 entitled, “Foods Sold in Competition with USDA School Meal Programs.” This report revealed the extent to which the nation’s public schools had become dependent on vending machines and private food-service companies to keep their meal programs going. The Oakland school system, for example, brought in an estimated $600,000 each year from vending machine sales and an additional amount from the sale of soda and candy bars in school cafeterias. A vending industry trade report estimated that school sales provided $750 million for school districts around the country.48 While the report praised the lunch program for providing children with more nutrition than they might otherwise receive, it also documented the health risks associated with the so-called competitive foods, that is, candy, sodas, and snacks. Children participating in the program, the report emphasized, are “more likely than non-participants to consume vegetables, milk and milk products, and meat and other protein-rich foods.” Children who participated in the School Breakfast Program had higher intakes of “food energy,” including calcium, phosphorous, and vitamin C.49 At the same time, however, the report warned that competitive foods, which are high in fat, added sugars, and calories, presented diet risks and “may affect the viability of school meal programs.” The National School Lunch Program, the report stressed, was established “as a program for all children.”50
Despite the fact that schools depended on private industry to supply everything from educational posters and athletic equipment to pre-package meals, some parents began a campaign to remove vending machines selling sugar-based snacks from school halls. In February 2003, all sales of soda and candy in Oakland schools was prohibited. The Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education followed, with a ban on the sale of carbonated drinks during school hours beginning in January 2004. The Los Angeles ban was applauded by a new generation of nutrition refomers who had marched to the district’s headquarters “wearing neon green shirts with signs mocking soda advertisements.” School districts around the country followed suit. According to one report, twenty states introduced bills to limit the sale of junk food in schools. As if reinventing the wheel, Jennifer LeBarry, Oakland administrative supervisor, for food services, warned that “just yanking soda isn’t enough. You’ve got to have nutrition education so students and their parents know why drinking a soda with every meal is the wrong choice.” Indeed, in its own defense, National Soft Drink Association spokesman Sean McBride blamed the children for their own poor health, saying it was “really about the couch and not the can.”51
Because only children with money could buy food from the vending machines, the “junk food war” revealed the persistent class divide in school lunchrooms. Although the school lunch program, in theory, was aimed at all children, the “Foods Sold in Competition” report rightly warned that “children may perceive that school meals are primarily for poor children rather than nutrition programs for all children.”52 It was a bit late in the game to begin re-claiming the school lunchroom from the “stigma” of poverty. While some school districts resisted vending machines and fast food, they could only do so if they could come up with local resources to supplement the state and federal education appropriations. The most well-publicized example of school lunch nutritional reform was the famed chef Alice Waters’s natural foods project in the Berkeley, California, schools. During the summer of 2004 Waters initiated a nutrition curriculum designed to teach children the virtues of fresh vegetables and whole grains. Waters had earlier started school garden projects, which she now used to prepare school meals. “We have to go into the public-school system and educate children when they’re very young,” Waters said, echoing long-held goals of home economics and nutritionists.53 The problem was, however, that her project was subsidized by a generous grant of $3.8 million from her own foundation. When school officials and others questioned whether her plan was viable in the long run, she responded, “We have to change the paradigm on how we spend money in this country.”54 While Waters’s model inspired other foundations and wealthy individuals to fund school lunch projects in other parts of the country, the fact was that these efforts depended on special contributions.55 Neither Waters nor other private donors addressed the public policy issues that produced school lunch difficulties in the first place.
School lunch politics for American children has turned out to be more complicated than parents or policy makers ever imagined. For one thing, as nutritionists and parents know all too well, it is difficult, if not impossible, to convince people—whether children or adults—to eat what is good for them, rather than what tastes good. For another, nutrition recommendations seem to change all too frequently. In 1968 one nutritionist wondered, “How do you condition the mind to want broccoli and tuna salad when it is used to greens and ham hocks?”56 Today that same nutritionist might indeed recommend greens over tuna salad, with its fat-laden mayonnaise and mercury-tainted fish. Reformers may understand the science of nutrition, but they have yet to understand the culture of food. But beyond the issue of individual tastes and communal food cultures, school lunch politics in the twentieth century required instituting public policies that would address economic and racial inequalities. In crafting a National School Lunch Program, legislators convinced themselves that they could subsidize agricultural markets and at the same time ensure the nutritional well-being of the nation’s children. It was a goal that was welcomed by teachers, doctors, welfare reformers, and parents alike. Centering a child nutrition program in the schools seemed the perfect way to teach children—and parents as well—how to choose “good” foods over “bad.” While policy makers and legislators alike boasted that the National School Lunch Program was intended to protect the nutritional health of all children, no one was willing to appropriate the funds it would take to actually carry out that goal. The competing agendas that have shaped school lunchrooms over the past half-century reflect larger fissures and tensions within American public policy. Like American welfare programs more generally, school lunchrooms have suffered from conservative distrust of federal programs and reluctance to ask taxpayers to pay for public services and from a liberal reluctance to confront the structural causes of economic and racial inequalities. But the idea of feeding children in school has brought together unexpected alliances and coalitions that have not always fit with the usual political categories of liberal or conservative. When it comes to children, food, and welfare, school lunch politics challenges all players—agriculture, the food-service industry, nutritionists, children’s welfare advocates, and elected officials alike—to serve up balanced meals that include substantive resources along with healthy diets.
Notes
INTRODUCTION. THE POLITICS OF LUNCH
1. See, e.g., Lisa Belkin, “The School Lunch Test,” New York Times Magazine, August 20, 2006, and Burkhard Bilger, “The Lunch-Room Rebellion,” The New Yorker, September 4, 2006. Belkin discusses lunchroom projects sponsored by the Agatston Research Foundation, and Bilger discusses a project funded by the Chez Panisse Foundation.
2. Alice O’Connor explicates this nicely in Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 9.
3. The WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) Program targets pregnant women, infants, and toddlers, and the Food Stamp Program is geared tow
ard adults and families.
4. See Food Research Action Center, “Federal Food Programs”; data on public schools comes from school-system Web sites, including New York Public Schools; Atlanta Public Schools Comprehensive Assessment, January 2004; Texas Poverty, Hunger, and Program Participation; Chicago Public Schools, “Operations Food Services”; and USDA National School Lunch Program: Participation and Lunches Served as of August 24, 2006.
5. James Vernon has recently argued that “the seemingly mundane practicalities of identifying hungry children and feeding them at school were intricately connected to a broader history of the changing meanings of hunger and ideas about the responsibilities of government.” See his, “The Ethnic of Hunger and the Assembly of Society: The Techno-Politics of the School Meal in Modern Britain,” American Historical Review, 110, no. 3 (June 2005): 693–725, 695. In Britain, according to Vernon, school meals were, from the start, associated with the poor. In the United States, as this book argues, school lunches until the 1970s were more closely associated with agriculture than with welfare and had a broader class base both in terms of support and in terms of the children served.
6. Recent examples of food histories centered in the United States are Harvey M. Levenstein’s Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) and Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Carole M. Counihan, ed., Food in the USA: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2002); Donna A. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Hasia Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age ofMigration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). Warren Belasco and Phillip Scranton have edited a volume of essays about food cultures internationally, Food Nation: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies (London: Routledge 2002).
CHAPTER 1. A DIET FOR AMERICANS
1. Rima D. Apple, “Constructing Mothers: Scientific Motherhood in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden, eds., Mothers and Motherhood: Readings in American History (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997), and Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). On scientific housework, see Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon, 1982); Ruth Schwartz Cohen, More Work for Mother: The Ironies ofHousehold Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History ofFeminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981); and Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973).
2. Many works discuss the history of nutrition. See Levenstein, Revolution at the Table; Richard Osborn Cummings, The American and His Food: A History of Food Habits in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941); Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986); Rima Apple, Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996); Maurice Aymard, “Toward the History of Nutrition: Some Methodological Remarks,” in Robert Forster and Orest Ranum, eds., Food and Drink in Hisotry: Selections from the Annales Economies, Societes, Civilisations (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); and E. V. McCollum, Elsa OrentKeiles, and Harry G. Day, The Newer Knowledge of Nutrition (New York: Mac millan, 1947).
3. A considerable literature exists on women, reform, and welfare in the Progressive Era. See, e.g., Gwendolyn Mink, The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917–1942 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995); Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare: 1890–1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994); and Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Also Sonya Michel, “The Limits of Maternalism: Policies Toward American Wage-Earning Mothers during the Progressive Era,” in Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers ofa New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993); Linda Gordon, ed., Women the State, and Welfare (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Molly Ladd-Taylor, MotherWork: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); and Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
4. David Smith and Malcolm Nicholson, “Nutrition, Education, Ignorance, and Income: A Twentieth Century Debate,” in Hamke Kamminga and Andrew Cunningham, eds., The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 1840–1940 (Amster dam: Editions Rodope B.V., 1995), 310. A good selection on the symbolic meaning of food can be found in Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, eds, Food and Culture: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1979), particularly the essays by Mead, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Douglas, Soler, Harris, and Anderson.
5. On food and housewives, see Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
6. Charles E. Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 187.
7. In 1888 Atwater became the first head of the Agriculture Department’s Office of Experiment Stations, which later became the Agricultural Extension Service. In this capacity he was one of the first American chemists to identify vitamin A. A number of studies discuss Atwater’s work: Shapiro, Perfection Salad; Levenstein, Revolution at the Table; Cummings, The American and His Food; Rima Apple, “Science Gendered: Nutrition in the United States, 1840–1940,” in Kamminga and Cunningham, Science and Culture of Nutrition; and K. Y. Guggenheim, Basic Issues of the History of Nutrition (Jerusalem: Akademia University Press, 1990). The discovery of vitamins allowed nutrition scientists to move beyond protein, carbohydrates, and fats to the isolation of particular foods as essential to health. See Apple, Vitamania, and Rosenberg, No Other Gods, esp. ch. 12.
8. Mikulas Teich, “Science and Food during the Great War: Britain and Germany,” in Kamminga and Cunningham, Science and Culture of Nutrition, 223. On Atwater and the food/fuel theory, see Rosenberg, No Other Gods. Also see Dietrich Milles, “Working Capacity and Calorie Consumption: The History of Rational Physical Economy,” and Hamke Kamminga, “Nutrition for the People, or, the Fate of Jacob Moleschott’s Contest for a Humanist Science,” both in Kamminga and Cunningham, Science and Culture of Nutrition; and Anson Rabinbach, “The European Science of Work: The Economy of the Body at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” in Steven Laurence Kaplan and Cynthia J. Koepp, eds., Work in France: Representations, Meanings, Organization, and Practice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986).
9. See Rosenberg, No Other God, 140, and 186–87.
10. On the history of vitamins and the “new nutrition,” see Apple, Vitamania; Levenstein, Revolution at the Table; and E. V. McCollum, The Newer Knowledge of Nutrition: The Use of Food for the Preservation of Vitality and Health (New York: Macmillan, 1918).
11. Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 70. Shapiro notes that his recommendations were much higher than present-day theories. Also see Nick Fiddes, Meat: A Natural Symbol (London: Routledge, 1991), and Michelle Stacey, Consumed: Why Americans Love, Hate, and Fear Food (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994).
12. Guggenheim, Basic Issues, 85.
13. Kamminga, “Nutrition for the People,” 39. Also see Madeleine Mayhew, “The 1930s Nutrition Controversy,” Journal of Contemporary History 23 (1988): 445–64. Also see Ross, Love and Toil, and Catherine Giessler and Derek F. Oddy, Food, Diet and Economic Change Past and Present (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993), esp., E. Margaret Crawford, “The Irish Workhouse Diet, 1840�
��90,” and Michael Nelson, “Social-Class Trends in British Diet 1860–1980.” Also John Walton, Fish and Chips and the British Working Class, 1870–1940 (London: Leicester University Press, 1992).
14. Harold Francis Williamson, Edward Atkinson: The Biography ofan American Liberal, 1827–1905 (Boston: Old Corner Book Store, 1934), 231. Also see Edward Atkinson, Addresses upon the Labor Question (Boston: Franklin Press and Rand, Avery & Company, 1886) (thanks to Karen Sawislak for this reference).
15. Quoted in Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, 56. For a good discussion of working-class response to scientific discoveries—in this case, germs and sanitation—see Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs, esp. ch. 9.
16. Williamson, Edward Atkinson, 234.
17. United States Bureau of Census, Historical Statistics of the United States from Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1, Earnings, Hours, and Working Conditions (Washington, D.C., 1976).
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