School Lunch Politics

 

School Lunch Politics

POLITICS AND SOCIETY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA

Series Editors

W
ILLIAM
C
HAFE
, G
ARY
G
ERSTLE
, L
INDA
G
ORDON
,
AND
J
ULIAN
Z
ELIZER

A list of titles in this series appears at the back of the book

 

School Lunch Politics

THE SURPRISING HISTORY OF AMERICA'S FAVORITE WELFARE PROGRAM

Susan Levine

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD

 

 

 

Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

Second printing, and first paperback printing, 2010
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-14619-5

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

Levine, Susan, 1947–
School lunch politics : the surprising history of Americas favorite welfare program /
Susan Levine.
p. cm. — (Politics and society in twentieth-century America)
Includes bibliographical reference and index.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05088-1 (hbk. : alk. paper)
1. National school lunch program. 2. School children—Food—United States.
3. Children—Nutrition—United States. I. Title.
LB3479.U6L48 2008
371.7'16—dc22     2007028807

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2

Contents

 

 

 

 

List of Illustrations and Tables

Acknowledgments

I
NTRODUCTION
  The Politics of Lunch

C
HAPTER
1   A Diet for Americans

The Search for a Scientific Diet

A Diet for Americans

Nutrition and Malnutrition

School Lunch as Public Policy

C
HAPTER
2   Welfare for Farmers and Children

School Lunches for Hungry Children

Eating the Surplus

The Institutionalization of School Lunch

C
HAPTER
3   Nutrition Standards and Standard Diets

School Lunch Standards

Nutrition in the National Defense

Eating Democracy

C
HAPTER
4   A National School Lunch Program

Agriculture or Education?

The Liberal Compromise

Discrimination and Segregation

C
HAPTER
5   Ideals and Realities in the Lunchroom

Nutrition and Surplus Commodities

Nutrition and the Food Service Industry

The Limits of the Lunchroom

C
HAPTER
6   No Free Lunch

Discovering Hunger in America

Agriculture or Welfare?

Food and the Poverty Line

C
HAPTER
7   A Right to Lunch

The Free Lunch Mandate

The Women's Campaign

School Lunch and Civil Rights

Eligibility Standards and the Right to Lunch

C
HAPTER
8   Let Them Eat Ketchup

Who Pays for Free Lunch?

Combo Meals and Nutrition Standards

Ketchup and Other Vegetables

E
PILOGUE
  Fast Food and Poor Children

Notes

Index

Illustrations and Tables

 

 

 

 

I
LLUSTRATIONS

 

1.1. Ellen Swallow Richards with MIT Chemistry Department faculty

1.2. Children calculating gains in weight

2.1. “Pupils must wash their hands before eating”

2.2. School lunch program, 1939

3.1. Poster, “Every Child Needs a Good School Lunch”

4.1. President Truman signs the National School Lunch Act

5.1. Idealized version of lunchtime in a school cafeteria

5.2. African American children in a school cafeteria

6.1. School lunch menu with a handwritten plea to the president

T
ABLES

 

2.1. Children Participating in the Surplus Marketing Administration School Lunch Program, Public and Parochial Schools, by Region, 1941

5.1. Sources of Funding for School Lunch Program, 1947–68

5.2. Local Sources of Financing for National School Lunch Program, Selected States, 1967

5.3. National School Lunch Program Participation in Select Cities, 1962

7.1. Children Participating in the National School Lunch Program, 1947–85

8.1. Federal Cash Assistance to Children's Nutrition Programs, 1947–85

Acknowledgments

 

 

 

 

This book first took shape when my children refused to eat school lunches. It became more focused when my mother-in-law suggested that I combine my two favorite activities and write something about the history of food. Since then, this project has seen my family through almost a decade of professional and personal change. My children are now grown and have embarked on careers and families of their own. A few years ago, Leon and I uprooted from our North Carolina home of over twenty years to take on the challenges of a major urban public university and Midwestern winters. It gives me great pleasure to be able to thank all the people who helped with these transitions and especially those who provided the intellectual and personal support that allowed me to complete this book.

Research for this project began in 1998 during a year at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. My colleagues in the center's weekly seminar helped me see what shape a history of school lunches could take. Two colleagues in particular guided me into new territory. I'd like to thank Dan Horowitz for his generous intellect and Carolyn Goldstein for introducing me to home economics. It was also during that year that I met Princeton University Press editor Brigitta van Rheinberg, who convinced me to turn the school lunch story into a book. I warned her that the project would not proceed quickly, but she was unfazed. In 2001 a fellowship at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Institute for the Humanities allowed me to finish the research and begin writing the book. My colleagues at the institute gave
chapter 1
its first critical reading. I would especially like to thank Katrin Schultheiss and John D'Emilo for our regular lunch discussions that year.

I have been fortunate to be able to draw on the critical eye of a number of readers along the way. Eric Arnesen, Susan Porter Benson, Sonya Michel, Judy Smith, and Brigitta van Rheinberg read an early draft of the manuscript. They were all incredibly generous (although not uncritical) with their comments, and I hope they see the result of their efforts. I am very sad that Sue Benson was not able to see the book to its end. She was an important colleague and a good friend and I miss her wit and wisdom. Peter Coclanis pointed me toward some useful sources in agricultural history. Janet Popendieck read
chapter 4
and offered some important correctives. Linda Gordon and an anonymous reader from Princeton University Press read the final manuscript. They provided ideal readers' comments and I thank them for that. Several friends and colleagues helped with small but critical details. Diana McDuffee found an original copy of
Their Daily Bread.
Rebecca Foley and Emily LaBarbera Twarog helped me with the illustrations. Paula Dempsy provided the cover image and a conversation with Bruce Ornstein and Nancy MacLean clarified a last point. Last but by no means least, Leon Fink, was, as always, my sharpest critic and my most enthusiastic cheerleader.

This book is dedicated to the first of the next generation of school lunch participants, Nina Julie Fernandez Fink.

 

School Lunch Politics

INTRODUCTION

 

The Politics of Lunch

If you search the Internet for “school lunch” these days, two types of sites will come up. The vast majority of references lead to cheery government articles about “team nutrition,” brightly decorated menus from school lunchrooms, and manuals about managing cafeteria budgets. Sprinkled here and there among the search results, however, will be another type of article entirely. Celebrity chefs have lately entered school lunchrooms. They have come to prove that school lunches can be healthy. Their aim is to rescue children from greasy food and teach students to prefer zucchini over French fries. The task is daunting. The chefs are forced to use U.S. Department of Agriculture surplus commodities that hardly make for health-food menus. The chefs must also follow federal nutrition guidelines and meal subsidies, which generally allow for a maximum of about $2.40 per lunch for free meals. But these chefs soldier on, we are told, valiantly bucking the system in order to transform school lunches. Somewhere, buried in the articles, we inevitably find that private foundations are underwriting these experiments. In some cases, the food is subsidized, in others the chefs' salaries are covered—usually at rates considerably higher than those of ordinary school lunch employees.
¹

This book, in its own way, explains why celebrity chefs and private foundations alone cannot save the National School Lunch Program. Readers will become acquainted with the history of one of America's most remarkable and popular social programs. But they will also learn how the politics of school lunch created structural barriers that limited which children received nutritious meals and that shaped lunchroom menus. The history of school lunch politics encompasses a combination of ideals and frustrations, reflecting, at base, America's deep ambivalence about social welfare and racial equality. It also reflects the tension in American politics about whether public policy should address individual behavior—in this case, whether food policy should focus on convincing people to eat right—or whether policy should address public structures and institutions—for example, fully funding free lunch programs or establishing a universal child nutrition program.
²
The task faced by celebrity chefs in select school lunchrooms is daunting not simply because fast food is seductive and children are conservative eaters. Un-selfconsciously, the chefs are entering an institution only partly governed by concerns for children's nutrition. Historically, concerns about national agricultural policies and poverty policy have regularly competed with dietary issues in the creation of school lunch programs. School lunch is, surely, rooted in the science of nutrition and ideas about healthy diets, but those ideas have never been sufficient on their own to shape public policy (or to change people's eating behavior, for that matter). School lunch, like other aspects of public policy, has been shaped by the larger forces of politics and power in American history.

Since its founding in 1946, the National School Lunch Program has been the target of critics from the right as well as from the left. It is clear that even after more than half a century of operation, the National School Lunch Program is deeply flawed. School meals are often unattractive, unappetizing, and not entirely nutritious. The menu has always depended more heavily on surplus commodities than on children's nutrition needs. Until the 1970s, the program reached only a small percentage of American children and served very few free lunches. All the while, however, the National School Lunch Program stood as one of the nation's most popular social welfare programs. Politicians as savvy as Ronald Reagan discovered that the American public is intensely committed to the idea of a school lunch program, particularly one that offers free meals to poor children. In fact, the National School Lunch Program, to this day, is the only comprehensive food program aimed at school-aged children.
³
Almost thirty million children in 98,000 schools eat school lunches each day. What is more, in most American cities, the National School Lunch Program is the single most important source of nutrition for children from low-income families. Almost 60 percent of all school children nationwide get free school lunches each day: 80 percent of Chicago's public school children qualify for free school lunches; 79 percent of the children in Atlanta's public schools receive free meals; New York City schools regularly feed almost 72 percent of their children for free; and in the state of Texas, over 70 percent of the children eat free or reduced price school lunches.
⁴
The National School Lunch Program, for all its nutritional flaws, provides a crucial public welfare support for our nation's youth. Without school lunches, many children in this country would go hungry; many more would be undernourished. Indeed, the National School Lunch Program has outlasted almost every other twentieth-century federal welfare initiative and holds a uniquely prominent place in the popular imagination. It suggests the central role food policy plays in shaping American health, welfare, and equality. A history of the National School Lunch Program is thus a crucial mirror into the variety of interests that continually vie for power and authority in American public life.
⁵