39. House Hearings, 1945, p. 3. Testimony of Marvin Jones.
40. Senate Hearings, 1944, p. 14.
41. Senate Hearings, 1944, p. 84.
42. House Hearings, 1945, pp. 109–10.
43. Southworth and Klayman, “The School Lunch Program,” 19.
44. Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Home Economics, Annual Reports of the Department of Agriculture, 1941 (Washington, D.C., 1941), 5. Thanks to Carolyn Goldstein for this reference.
45. Southworth and Klayman, “The School Lunch Program,” 16. Also see Richard Osborn Cummings, The American and His Food, 202. Surplus food also went to parochial schools.
46. See Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), also Cummings, The American and His Food, 201, 216. He points out that dietetics emerged out of nutrition and home economics and became a special organization within the American Home Economics Association specializing in food, nutrition, and institutional management. According to one source, the BHE research on diets and consumption provided FDR with the source of his often quoted observation that “one-third of our nation is ill-fed, ill-housed and ill-clothed.” See Jacqueline L. Dupont, “Reflections: Hazel Katherine Stiebeling (1896–1989),” Nutrition Reviews, October 2002.
47. Gunderson, “The National School Lunch Program,” 9, and Southworth and Klayman, “The School Lunch Program,” 16, 36–38. Also see Cummings, The American and His Food, 202. This figure is probably exaggerated. Baldwin, Poverty and Politics, estimates that in 1939, 82% of the department’s total employees worked outside Washington. This included the Farm Security Administration and the Soil Conservation Service in addition to the Extension Service (239).
48. Press release, October 19, 1943, USDA History Collection, Series 1, Subseries 2, Documentary Files, Section iv, Distribution of Products, Box 1.2/9, and Nutrition Standards and Civilian Food Supply, 1943–46, Office of War Information, Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Library.
49. “Public’s Aid Asked on School Lunches,” NYT, April 17, 1944.
50. House Hearings, 1945, p. 53.
51. Senate Hearings, 1944, p. 150. Also see testimony of Mrs. Grace Gosselin, United Neighborhood Houses of New York; “The need is more obvious today because such large numbers of women are at war work and, therefore, must find another way to provide an adequate and good midday meal for their children” (156).
52. Senate Hearings, 1944, p. 187.
53. Richard Russell to President Roosevelt, July 22, 1942; Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Russell, August 18, 1943, and October 1, 1942; Richard Russell Collection, Series IX B, Box 44, Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens.
54. Groups endorsing the National School Lunch Program included the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, American Association of University Women, League of Women Voters, League of Women Shoppers, National Consumers League, National Parent Teacher Association, National Council of Jewish Women, National Council of Negro Women, the United Auto Workers Union Women’s Auxiliary, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations Women’s Auxiliary.
55. “Has Your Child Half a Hog’s Chance?” Ladies’ Home Journal, October 1944.
56. House Hearings, 1945, p. 53. Also see Senate Hearings 1944, p. 110, for PTA statement.
57. “Public’s Aid Asked on School Lunches,” NYT, April 17, 1944.
58. Congressional Record,79th Cong., 2nd Sess., 92:2, February 19, 1946 p. 1460.
59. Ibid., 1453.
60. See, e.g., Sheingate, The Rise ofthe Agricultural Welfare State, 118–19.
61. Virgil W. Dean, An Opportunity Lost: The Truman Administration and the Farm Policy Debate (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006). Dean says that within eighteen months of the war’s end “the USDA was completely reconstituted” and had regained authority over food programs including school lunches (23).
62. Senate Hearings, 1944, pp. 7 and 25.
CHAPTER 3. NUTRITION STANDARDS AND STANDARD DIETS
1. M. L. Wilson, “Nutritional Science and Agricultural Policy,” Journal of Farm Economics 24:1, no. 1, Proceedings Number (February 1942): 188–205 189.
2. British social planners also adopted the school lunch. In 1944 parliament passed an Education Act that included lunch as “a full part of the school program.” Meals were free to all children. Unlike in the United States, however, British school meals were part of state welfare policy and were not tied to agricultural policy. James Vernon, “The Ethics 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; and Katharine Curry Bartley and Nancy S. Wellman, “School Lunch: A Comparison of Its Development in the United States and England,” School Food Service Research Review 10, no. 1 (1986): 8.
3. United States Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Agriculture and Forestry, Hearings on Bills to Assist the States to Establish and Maintain School-Lunch Programs, May 2–5, 1944, 78th Cong., 2nd Sess. (hereafter Senate Hearings 1944), 62.
4. Ibid., p. 84.
5. George Chatfield to Allen J. Ellender, May 2, 1944, in ibid., p. 86.
6. United States Congress, House Committee on Agriculture, Hearings on the School Lunch Program, 79th Cong., 1st Sess., March 23–May 24,1945 (hereafter House Hearings, 1945), 19. Andresen also had an interesting exchange with Joseph Meegan. When Meegan suggested that one reason families in his neighborhood could not afford to pay for lunch even though both mother and father were working was the large size of families, Andresen commented, “That is a penalty, I suppose, for having big families.” Meegan replied, “Not a penalty sir: it is a blessing” (161).
7. Press release, October 19, 1943, USDA History, Series 1.2/20, Documentary Files, Section iv, Distribution of Products, Box 1.2/9, Nutrition Standards and Civilian Food Supply, 1943–16, Office of War Information, Department of Agriculture, Special Collections, National Agricultural Library.
8. Federal Security Agency, “Proceedings of the National Nutrition Conference for Defense,” May 26–28, 1941 (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1942), 230.
9. Ibid., viii.
10. Ibid., 231–32.
11. Senate Hearings, 1944, p. 60.
12. Federal Security Agency, “Proceedings of the National Nutrition Conference,” 34–37. Also see Hershey’s statement, House Hearings, 1945, p. 48.
13. Senate Hearings, 1944, p. 60.
14. Congressional Record, 79th Cong., 2nd Sess., 92:2, February 19, 1946, p 1465.
15. Ibid., 1454.
16. Susan M. Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 77–78.
17. House Hearings, 1945, p. 53.
18. One might imagine that working mothers would be a central factor in public debates about the school lunch program. This was never the case. Proponents usually mentioned the value of school lunches to women in defense industries in passing or as an added benefit. Their main arguments centered around combatting malnutrition and aiding farmers. Opponents occasionally suggested that lunch was rightfully the responsibility of mothers in the home, but they too focused on other issues, most notably, the pitfalls of creating a new federal program.
19. Senate Hearings, 1945, p. 51.
20. Ibid., 190–92. A UAW survey indicated that 90% of the women in one war plant “signified their desire to remain on their jobs after the war” (192).
21. U.S. Department of Labor, Children’s Bureau, “Nutrition in the National Defense Program,” September 15, 1940, in Martha May Eliot Papers, Box 17, Folder 236, Schlesinger Library. Also, “Suggestions Regarding the Organization of Personnel in the Government to Prepare Outlines of Alternative Plans forNutrition Activities in the National Advisory Defense Commission,” n.d., in Martha May Eliot Papers, Box 17, Folder 237, Schlesinger Library. On “security” and naitonal social policy, see Jennifer Klein,
For All These Rights: Business Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2003).
22. See Memo to Miss Lenroot from Dr. Eliot, June 6, 1940, Martha May Eliot Papers, Box 17, Folder 237. Eliot comments that Louise Stanley, head of the Bureau of Home Economics, “is planning to develop the school lunch program” (4).
23. “Material for Dr. Eliot’s Committee (School Lunch Phase),” n.d., Martha May Eliot Papers, Box 17, Folder 237.
24. Gordon W. Gunderson, “The National School Lunch Program: Background and Development,” Food and Nutrition Service, 63, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1971, p. 8.
25. House Hearings, 1945, p. 180.
26. Lydia J. Roberts, Nutrition Work with Children (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935).
27. See Alfred E. Harper, “Contributions of Women Scientists in the U.S. to the Development of Recommended Dietary Allowances,” Journal of Nutrition (2003): 3698–702. Also Jacqueline L. Dupont, “Reflections: Hazel Katherine Stiebeling (1896–1989),” Nutrition Reviews, October 2003.
28. Harper, “Contributions of Women Scientists.”
29. Ibid., 3699. Stiebeling’s papers on “A Dietary Goal for Agriculture” (1937) and “Better Nutrition as a National Goal” (1939) were particularly influential. See Dupont, “Reflections.”
30. See Bette Caan and Sheldon Mayrgen, “What Is the Future of the Recommended Dietary Allowances?”; Alfred E. Harper, “Recommended Dietary Allowances: Are They What We Think They Are?”; and Ross Hume Hall, “The RDAs and Public Policy,” all in Joan Dye Gussow and Paul R. Thomas, The Nutrition Debate: Sorting Out Some Answers (Palo Alto, Calif.: Bull Publishing, 1986).
31. See Richard Osborn Cummings, The American and His Food: A History of Food Habits in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941); and Lydia Roberts, “Beginnings of the Recommended Dietary Allowances,” in Adelia M. Beeuwkes, E. Neige Todhunter, and Emma Seifrit Weigley, eds., Essays on History ofNutrition and Dietitics (Chicago: American Dietetics Association, 1967).
32. Rebecca L. Spang, “The Cultural Habits of a Food Committee,” Food and Foodways 2 (1988): 359–91, 396.
33. Cummings, The American and His Food, 204–5. He recounts the objections of meat packers to nutritionists’ advice to eat less meat in warm weather. He also notes that the millers’ association resisted efforts to promote whole grains instead of white flour. Also see Dupont, “Reflections,” 3.
34. U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Principles of Nutrition and Nutritive Value of Food,” Miscellaneous Publication no. 546, Washington, D.C. (1944), 67. The RDAs also recommended 85–100 grams of protein for teenaged boys and 75–80 for girls “regardless of the degree of activity.” The protein RDAs for men were 100 and for women 60, but for pregnant women 85 and for lactating women 100 (12).
35. Roberts, “Beginnings,” 107. Also see Harold G. Halcrow, Food Policy for America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), 519. Hazel Steibeling is largely credited with guiding the discussion, but there is, apparently, no written record of her contribution. See Harper, “Contributions”; Dupont, “Reflections” and Susan Welsh, “A Brief History of Food Guides in the United States,” Nutrition Today, December 1992.
36. Cummings, The American and His Food, 233. Also see Michael Worboys, “The Discovery of Colonial Malnutrition between the Wars,” in David Arnold, Imperial Medicine and Indigeneous Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).
37. Marion Nestle and Donna V. Porter, “Evolution of Federal Dietary Guidance Policy: From Food Adequacy to Chronic Disease Prevention,” Caduceus (Summer 1990): 47.
38. “Experts Map Plan of Diet Education for Our Defense,” New York Times, January 22, 1941.
39. Nestle and Porter, “Evolution,” 43.
40. Senate Hearings, 1944, p. 91.
41. Office of War Information, Department of Agriculture, Press Release, April 1, 1943, USDA History Collection, 1.2/20, Types of Diets 1942–46, IV A 2a(2), Special Collections, National Agricultural Library.
42. Roberts maintained that the RDAs were meant to be “goals,” not absolute amounts of nutrients required by each individual. They were meant to be estimates of what was needed for good health, not minimums. The fact that the RDAs were taken as requirements rather than goals reflects the problem with popularizing scientific research. The subtleties are lost. See ch. 7 on Mollie Orshansky.
43. M.F.K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988), 4–6; and Susan Ware, ed., Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, Completing the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 41–13.
44. For the shift to the WFA, see “Child Nutrition Programs: Issues for the 101st Congress,” School Food Service Research Review 13, no. 1 (1989): 28. On the Type A, B, and C meals, see Gunderson, “The National School Lunch Program.”
45. House Hearings, 1945, p. 216. In all cases, the only milk subsidized was whole milk.
46. See Rima Apple, Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), and L. S. Sims, The Politics of Fat: Food and Nutrition Policy in America (Amonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998).
47. On Mead, see Dolores Janiewski and Lois W. Banner, Reading Benedict/Reading Mead: Feminism, Race, and Imperial Vision (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Phyllis Gosskurth, Margaret Mead (London: Penguin Press, 1988); and Mary Catherine Bateson, With a Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson (New York: W. Morrow, 1984).
48. Margaret Mead, “The Relationship between Food Habits and Problems of Wartime Emergency Feeding,” May 1942, typescript, Martha May Eliot Papers, Box 17, Folder 236.”
49. Druzilla C. Kent, “Nutrition Education in the School Program,” School Life 26 (1941); 14. Reprint by Federal Security Agency. Also see United States Department of Agriculture, “School Lunches in Country and City,” Farmers’ Bulletin No. 1899, 1942, p. 21.
50. Amy Bentley, Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 25.
51. Mead, “The Relationship between Food Habits.”
52. Ibid. Emphasis in the original.
53. “The School Lunch—A Symposium,” JHE, November 1937, p. 613.
54. House Hearings, 1945, p. 68.
55. CIO News, June 11, 1945.
56. “The School Lunch—A Symposium,” 614.
57. Mead, “The Relationship between Food Habits.”
58. House Hearings, 1945, p. 139.
59. Public as well as private and parochial schools were eligible. Local nonprofit organizations could also sponsor lunch programs.
60. “The War Food Administration will help your community start a School Lunch Program,” leaflet/ad reprinted in Ladies Home Journal, October 1944.
CHAPTER 4. A NATIONAL SCHOOL LUNCH PROGRAM
1. “Has Your Child Half a Hog’s Chance?” Ladies Home Journal, October 1944.
2. P.L. 396 passed June 4, 1946. Gordon W. Gunderson, “The National School Lunch Program: Background and Development,” Food and Nutrition Service, 63, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1971, pp. 14–15.
3. “Truman Approves School Lunch Bill,” New York Times (hereafter, NYT) June 5, 1946.
4. Richard E. Neustadt, “Extending the Horizons of Democratic Liberalism,” in J. Joseph Huthmacher, The Truman Years: The Reconstruction of Postwar America (Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden Press, 1972), 81.
5. Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 168.
6. Barton J. Bernstein, “The Limitations of the Liberal Vision,” in ibid., 108–9.
7. Martha May Eliot, speech, October 1940, Martha May Eliot Papers, Box 17, Folder 236, Schlessinger Library.
8. “Material for Dr. Eliot’s Committee, “School Lunch Phase,” n.d. (1940) Martha May Eliot Papers, Box 17, Folder 237.
9. Faith Williams to H. L
. Wilson, December 18, 1940, Martha May Eliot Papers, Box 17, Folder 237.
10. Federal Security Agency, “Proceedings of the National Nutrition Conference for Defense,” May 26–28, 1941 (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1942), 98.
11. H. M. Southworth and M. I. Klayman, “The School Lunch Program and Agricultural Surplus Disposal” (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Agricultural Economics, USDA, 1941), iii.
12. See Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
13. United States Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Agriculture and Forestry, Hearings on Bills to Assist the States to Establish and Maintain School-Lunch Programs, May 2–5, 1944, 78th Cong. 2nd Sess. (hereafter Senate Hearings 1944), 52.
14. Ibid., 93.
15. United States Congress, House Committee on Agriculture, Hearings on the School Lunch Program, 79th Cong., 1st Sess., March 23–May 24, 1945 (hereafter, House Hearings, 1945), 88.
16. Senate Hearings, 1944, p. 49.
17. Pete Alcock, Howard Glennerster, Ann Oakley, and Adrian Sinfield, eds., Welfare and Wellbeing: Richard Titmuss’s Contribution to Social Policy (Bristol: Policy Press, 2001), 83–84; and James Vernon, “The Ethnics 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.
18. Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 236; and Walter W. Wilcox, The Farmer in the Second World War (Ames: Iowa State College Press, 1947), 364–67. The largest growth was 1933–39, when the number of employees went from 21,023 to 59,113.
19. Congressional Record: 79th Cong., 2d Sess., 92:2, February 19, 1946March 28, 1946 (hereafter Congressional Record), February 26, 1946, p. 1610.
20. Senate Hearings, 1944, p. 36.
21. Ibid., 23. Also see Harvey Levenstein, Paradox ofPlenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (Berkley: University of California Press, 2003), esp. 78.
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