School Lunch Politics (14 page)

E
ATING
D
EMOCRACY

Food writers and housewives notwithstanding, the food policy recommendations of the FNB had a significant impact on the nation's school lunchrooms. Most notably, the RDAs were immediately included in the Community School Lunch contracts. All schools participating in the federal program had to certify that they served “balanced meals” that followed the USDA nutrition recommendations.
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School lunch contracts provided three levels of subsidy for children's meals, depending on the extent to which they satisfied the child's RDAs over the course of a week. The highest level of subsidy went to the “Type A meal,” which had to provide at least one-third to one-half of a child's RDAs and include at least one cup of milk. Schools could choose a lower level of subsidy by serving a “Type B” meal, including only one-quarter to one-third of the RDAs plus milk. Finally, the lowest level of subsidy went to schools serving the “Type C” lunch, which consisted simply of a glass of milk.
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Estimating the vitamin, protein, fat, and carbohydrate needs of children over the course of a week, Bureau of Home Economics researchers devised menus and recipes for school lunch operators. Most notably, the lunches contained high levels of fat in order to bump up the calorie content of the meals. Nutritionists and children's welfare advocates operated under the assumption that children, in particular poor children, required a high-fat, high-calorie diet in order to thrive.
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Better nutrition required cultural change as well as scientific eating. This is where Margaret Mead's Committee on Food Habits (CFH) took the lead. Gathering together a high-powered group of social scientists, including anthropologist Ruth Benedict and sociologist Lloyd Warner, Margaret Mead led an extensive study of American food habits and the social meaning of food and mealtimes, particularly in times of crisis. The CFH translated the scientific findings of the FNB into terms that policy makers and public officials could use to plan for food distribution and emergencies during the war. Mead had worked extensively during the 1920s and '30s with leading American anthropologists, including Franz Boaz and Ruth Benedict, who had been developing theories about human cultures. Well known by 1940 for her work in the South Pacific, Mead believed that the study of “faraway” peoples would help Americans un derstand themselves better. During the World War II period, Mead became increasingly interested in the variety of cultures that made up American society itself. Mead drew on social science to develop a theory of rational choice in food habits. She also drew on educational theories, particularly ideas about the transmission of culture through the education of children. Mead remained an important voice in discussions about food and culture, reprising during the 1960s her role as a consultant to public policy.
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The CFH focused particular attention on large-scale feeding centers, such as school lunchrooms and industrial cafeterias. Social arenas like these, the committee believed, would be especially important in fostering common tastes and a unified democratic culture. A food-centered cultural agenda had wide-reaching implications not only for food preferences but for behavior as well. Institutional meal settings, if properly managed, could, for one thing, alleviate any lingering concerns that might attach to feeding children lunch away from home. While a large lunchroom, Mead warned, could easily devolve into chaos, one that was well ordered could recreate the environment of a “family meal, especially in the face of a “breakdown of family ties.” The CFH recommended that food service managers provide amenities such as small tables, designated “family” groups for eating, and a quiet atmosphere. School lunchrooms could also teach important lessons in gender roles as well as nutrition. Some schools adopted Mead's family model by organizing their lunchrooms along the lines of a “well-regulated family group.”
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In Rye, New York, for example, a boy and girl at each table served as “host and hostess” and were responsible for “table courtesies,” including lessons in nutrition, etiquette, and conversation. Food choice and gender roles also pointed toward middle-class behavior norms. At the historically black Peabody Women's College demonstration school cafeteria, for example, teachers designated hosts and hostesses for each lunchroom table. Here, race and class behavior were carefully nurtured as “conversation, table manners, English, art, and food selection” all formed part of the children's educational curriculum.
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Mead's goal was not simply to improve the nation's health and morale, but to do so in a democratic manner that would, as historian Amy Bentley observed, allow for “diversity and personal choice.”
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Taking a cue from the experiences of home economists of previous decades, the CFH went to great pains to transcend the diversity of American cultures and to play down the differences that marked ethnic Americans. Wartime diet recommendations, Mead insisted, must reflect good relations among different regional, national, religious, and racial groups. Hollywood films as well as government-sponsored newsreels and pamphlets reflected the CFH advice, regularly featuring a panoply of ethnic characters. Indeed, as Mead noted, “the systematic exploitation of such cultural differences is part of the enemy tactic in war.”
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American food policy, Mead counseled, needed to appreciate ethnic difference and to build a unified national identity. To do both, however, was a challenge. Most people developed their food preferences in family kitchens and dining rooms. In wartime, however, institutional meal settings, whether in the army, in factories, or in schools, offered the opportunity to transform diverse ethnic food cultures into a national identity. School menus, for example, could go a long way toward overcoming ethnic diversity and encouraging national unity. Every child eating in school and every adult eating in a public cafeteria, Mead insisted, should be comfortable with the food offerings, but cafeteria planners should also take the opportunity to introduce children to nutritious food and new dishes. “Because of the great diversity of food differences in the United States,” Mead observed, “it is more practicable to try to establish feeding patterns which
do not offend
any group.” School lunchrooms and other cafeterias, she suggested, should offer only “food that is fairly innocuous and has low emotional value.” This meant that menu planners should seek the path to consensus by eliminating as much distinctive flavoring as possible. Indeed, the only seasoning Mead recommended was salt. All others she said, would alienate one group or another. The best route, Mead's CFH counseled, was to prepare “low toned foods” such as plain soups; beef, chicken, or meat pies; and plain vegetables. In a dramatic reversal of culinary advice, the CFH recommended staying away from all creamed dishes and warned cooks to avoid buttered vegetables. Despite a new suspicion of white sauce, however, the old idea that spicy foods were unhealthy gained new legitimacy in menu recommendations that stressed broiled fish, potatoes, boiled spaghetti, and eggs.
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While food reformers generally advocated relatively standardized modern diets, Mead reminded them that choice and ethnicity were keys to American democratic culture. Menu choices, whether in the home or in institutional settings, could validate ethnic traditions and reinforce the pluralism that characterized the wartime idealized version of American national identity. “Most foreign born groups,” Mead wrote, commonly rejected “American” food but should be given some choice on their lunch trays. “Choice in food is one sign of being an adult in America,” she noted, and the lack of choice would “reduce the adult to the status of a child with the consequent development of dependency and lowering of morale.” Menu choices also ensured that no group would be offended by the selections offered, whether in army mess halls or school lunchrooms. Indeed, Mead counseled cooks to use menu choices to introduce Americans to new foods, presumably modernized versions of traditional ethnic dishes. In particular, the CFH agenda for wartime food policy stressed introducing children to new foods, nutrition, and healthy eating.

Children, however, needed to learn to make the right choices. “Children will accept many foods which adults are less likely to accept,” Mead noted; thus, hot school lunches became important sites of cultural as well as nutritional lessons. Mary C. Kelly, describing her experience with the Hartford, Connecticut, school lunch program, recalled, “I was surprised to discover that many of the students were wholly unfamiliar with fresh vegetables, fruits, salads, and puddings. … It seemed as if it were largely a question of becoming acquainted with certain foods.”
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John Washam, director of Chicago's school lunchrooms, observed, “We do not allow a child to exercise freedom of choice as to what he shall study and how he shall study it.” Before school lunch programs began, Washam said, “the child had no guidance in the selection of food at all.”
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Nutritional guidance combined with a variety of healthy food choices had long been the goal of home economists and school lunch operators. During the war this goal was legitimized and operationalized in the Community School Lunch Program.

Ethnic appreciation went only so far, however. At base, public meal programs and a national food policy aimed to build a unified civic identity. Children, in other words, had to learn to “eat democracy.” The
CIO News
(the official journal of the Congress of Industrial Organizations), for example, enthusiastically promoted the National School Lunch Program with the headline, “Kids Eat Democracy.”
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In particular, professionals and policy makers alike wanted school lunches during World War II, as in earlier eras, to Americanize immigrant children. Home economist Mary Kelly believed the lessons at lunch should also include “development of citizenship responsibilities” not only in food preferences, but also “in regard to neatness, appearance, and order in the dining rooms.”
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Bringing children together in school lunchrooms, Mead's committee insisted, would reinforce a commitment to American culture and strengthen children's identity as citizens.
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Joseph Meegan, director of Chicago's Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, regularly served lunch to the children of stock-yard workers. Through the council's efforts, both public and parochial schools in the neighborhood started their own lunch programs. Claiming great success in improving children's health, Meegan became an outspoken advocate for federal school lunches. The collective eating experience brought the neighborhood's myriad of ethnic groups together. “Polish, Lithuanian, Mexican—yes, and Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish” children, Meegan said, all ate different dishes at home. The Poles “ate Polish sausage and Kiebasa
[sic],
the Lithuanians ate … Kugli,” but in the lunch program, Meegan boasted, where they all sat down together, “they actually ate democracy.”
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Eating democracy required more than nutrition theory and cultural transformation. It also required an administrative structure and central ized standards for lunchroom operations. Mead's committee stressed the significance of creating well-regulated institutional settings from which to incorporate diverse people into the national polity. Indeed, the war presented public administrators with remarkable opportunities to put theories of efficiency, productivity, and central planning into practice. In addition, wartime idealism infused public works with an added dose of ideological mission. Most notably, as the nation fought abroad against totalitarianism and racial discrimination, public institutions—and politics—at home began to reflect new demands for equal access.

The Community School Lunch Program reflected wartime idealism and a new push for administrative regulation and standards. Lunch Program sponsors, usually school boards, were required to sign formal contracts with federal officials.
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Programs could claim reimbursements for the purchase of “any agricultural commodity that can be used to meet the lunch requirements,” and schools also had to accept a certain amount of surplus food.
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While surplus food and federal relief funds had been flowing to school lunch programs for almost a decade, the Community Lunch contracts signaled a new level of federal involvement in children's nutrition as well as in school operations. The federal government now entered the school building—an arena that had heretofore been the exclusive purview of the states. While the contracts were written and administered by state officials—and differed from state to state—Congress required the Department of Agriculture to monitor state compliance and to report regularly on the state of the program.

Wartime standardization of school lunch menus and standards of service reflected both the optimism of policy makers during the 1940s and the competing claims on public programs. Scientists as well as social reformers believed the war—and the post-war period—signaled the opportunity for an expansion of social programs and rational social planning. Food and nutrition planners, in particular, viewed the institutionalization of school lunch programs as a major sign of progress in their campaign to convince Americans to adopt more healthy eating habits. Agricultural planners similarly saw school lunchrooms as key to expanding the market for farm products after the war. In authorizing school lunch funds, furthermore, Congress signaled at least rhetorical commitment both to children's health generally and to the welfare of poor children in particular. While the actual practice of school lunch program may have belied these lofty goals, the very existence of a federal program, at the very least, put the state in the business of overseeing children's health and welfare. The challenge came during the post-war years when Congress, the Department of Agriculture, and child nutrition advocates had to work out what a national school lunch program would really look like.