School Lunch Politics (19 page)

N
UTRITION AND
S
URPLUS
C
OMMODITIES

During the 1950s, the National School Lunch Program enjoyed bipartisan support in the halls of Congress. The Democratic party regularly pointed to the program as a key element in its post-war agenda. The party's 1952 election platform, for example, promised to “enlarge the school lunch program which has done so much for millions of American school chil dren … while at the same time benefiting producers.”
¹¹
Richard Russell, who generally opposed any expansion of the federal budget, continued to champion children's meals. He told one skeptical constituent, “I voted against the British loan and have voted to reduce all foreign aid. I may say, however, that I do not propose to vote to reduce the modest amount provided as Federal aid for the school lunch program, for I think this is one of the most worthwhile activities of the government.”
¹²
During the late 1940s, particularly after the Republican congressional victory in 1947, a small group of fiscal conservatives attempted to cut school lunch appropriations. Each time, however, their efforts were defeated. When, for example, President Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, recommended a cut of eight million dollars in the School Lunch Program's $75,000,000 budget, he met a formidable opposition led by Allen Ellender, who succeeded in gathering enough votes on both sides of the aisle to quash the cuts.
¹³
Indeed, Republicans as well as Democrats saw school lunches as part of an expansive post-war agenda. President Eisenhower enlarged the national highway system and increased federal aid for agricultural markets, both domestic and foreign. In 1954, for example, Congress passed the landmark food policy act P.L. 480, authorizing the Department of Agriculture to buy surplus commodities from American farmers and sell (or later donate) them abroad. While Eisenhower generally resisted special assistance for the poor, he actually increased the school lunch budget and started a special school milk program in 1954.
¹⁴
By the mid-1950s, both Republicans and Democrats seemed to accept school lunches as a permanent part of federal budget. Indeed, federal appropriations for the program increased every year throughout the 1950s. Cash and commodity assistance to schools increased during the decade, from $65 million to $94 million.
¹⁵
Reflecting back on the program's early years,
New York Times
reporter Ben Franklin commented that it had “practically no enemies in Congress.”
¹⁶

Figure 5.2. Idealized image of the National School Lunch Program. African American children in a school cafeteria. National Library of Medicine.

The National School Lunch Program's political support stemmed as much from its central place in the Department of Agriculture's domestic agenda as from its claims regarding children's health. When he signed the School Lunch Act, for example, President Truman confidently observed that the program “contributed immeasurably” both to children and to farmers.
¹⁷
During the 1950s, school lunchrooms were, as they had been since the 1930s, prime sites for the “disposal” of surplus agricultural commodities. Agriculture department officials had always viewed school lunches a means to an end—that is, as an insurance policy against the advent of agricultural surpluses. According to one estimate, school lunch and milk programs accounted for half of all federal food relief programs between 1950 and 1962.
¹⁸
The total value of commodities (per child) distributed to all states and territories varied from year to year during the 1950s, ranging from eight to eleven million dollars.
¹⁹
The commodities sent to school lunchrooms included processed foods as well as meat, dairy, vegetables, and fruits. In 1951, for example, the government distributed close to two million pounds of food products, including dried beans, cheese, orange juice, and peanut butter, along with apples, pears, cranberries, beets, cabbage, butter, and honey.
²⁰
The Special Milk Program begun in 1954 distributed another 400 million half-pint milk bottles to schools.
²¹
The total program costs for school lunch and milk programs rose from 367,643 million in 1950 to 1,002,676 million in 1960.
²²
North Dakota senator Quentin Burdick summed it up well, noting, “The entire Nation gains from this program because it helps assure a strong well-fed youth, a larger income for the farmer, a huge market for the food trades, jobs for the lunchroom personnel, employment for related industries, constructive outlets for abundant commodities, a well-nourished student who is more receptive to instruction, and a healthier Nation.”
²³

Although Department of Agriculture officials maintained that the School Lunch Program was meant to “improve the dietary habits of school children,” in truth, the program's bottom line was “to encourage the domestic consumption of nutritious agricultural commodities and other foods.”
²⁴
Lunchrooms were an important outlet for surplus products, including meat, milk, eggs, and cheese. If the Secretary of Agriculture determined that a commodity was in surplus, he was allowed by Congress to purchase that food and then donate it to schools for children's lunches. (After 1954 under P.L. 480 he could also sell or donate those commodities abroad.) Food industry groups—and their congressional representatives—were not shy about claiming their commodities to be “in surplus” if market prices were low. Thus, for example, the Florida citrus industry regularly made “strong representations” to the Secretary of Agriculture to convince him that the state was in a “surplus oranges situation.”
²⁵
In another case, William L. Lanier, president of the Georgia Farm Bureau Federation enlisted Senator Richard Russell's aid in convincing school lunch officials to substitute peanut butter for the butter requirement in the Type A lunch. In this case, however, the Department of Agriculture resisted. Howard P. Davis, deputy administrator of Consumer Food Programs, told Russell that while peanut butter “makes a significant contribution to the protein-rich food requirement of the lunch,” it would not serve as a substitute for butter. No doubt fearing the wrath of the dairy lobby even more than that of peanut growers, Davis assured Russell that “there is a very definite place for both foods in the Type A Lunch.”
²⁶

Children's welfare advocates continued to doubt whether schools could put together nutritious meals from the limited—and inconsistent—choice of foods available as surplus commodities.
McCall's Magazine,
for example, warned, “They're playing politics with our children's health.”
²⁷
Schools could expect a regular supply of staples such as dry milk, lard, flour, rice, and cornmeal, but they never knew what other foods might appear. One year, for example, the Department of Agriculture distributed six million dollars' worth of beef but the next year offered only half that amount.
²⁸
Similarly, the department distributed six million dollars' worth of eggs one year, but because the market price went up, eggs were not on the surplus list the following year. Department of Agriculture contracts required schools to accept whatever foods were offered on surplus. This led to loud complaints from school officials and lunchroom supervisors, who were often at a loss as to how to concoct healthy meals from the food they received. As one Maryland principal observed, split peas and ripe olives had “no takers” in his state.
²⁹

N
UTRITION
AND THE
F
OOD
S
ERVICE
I
NDUSTRY

The shape of school meals and cafeteria operations reflected the declining influence of nutritionists and home economists in the Department of Agriculture. During the 1950s, school lunches became big business, and, as such, administration and finance became increasingly important parts of cafeteria operations. Nothing symbolized the priority of agricultural and business interests in the National School Lunch Program more than the fact that the program was administered out of the Consumer Marketing Service (CMS). This division was, as its title indicated, concerned with the marketing and distribution of agricultural products. It was staffed largely by men trained in economics and accounting who had little, if any, interest in or knowledge of nutrition. Indeed, placing the school lunch program in the CMS not only illustrated the ascendancy of economists and administrators, but also revealed the diminished influence of home economists and the declining interest in nutrition within the Department of Agriculture. After World War II, women's employment in the federal government generally declined along with the stature of agencies such as the Children's Bureau, the Women's Bureau—and the Bureau of Home Economics—that had been bastions of female influence in social and welfare policy.
³⁰
In 1953 the Bureau of Home Economics was abolished and its functions transferred to the Agricultural Research Service. Similarly, the Farm Security Administration, which had traditionally been a center for nutrition education, was dramatically cut back, and the Agricultural Extension Division, long a significant employer of women and an important center for nutrition research and education, shifted most of its energy to technical support for industrialized agriculture. According to one estimate, by the end of the 1950s, nutrition research constituted only 4 percent of the Agriculture Department's budget.
³¹
Anthropologist Margaret Mead, who had worked closely with Bureau of Home Economics nutritionists during the war, noted that, in the past, the Department of Agriculture had been “the motive power for better food and better nutrition practices.” By the 1960s, she said, interest at the USDA in the nutritional health of Americans had “withered away.”
³²

The decline in interest in nutrition at the federal level had serious consequences for women in home economics. As federal funds for nutrition research dried up, university home economics departments, traditionally supported by the Agricultural Extension Service, began to close their doors or merge into schools of nursing, public health, or human development. Home economists turned to product testing and consumer training and left nutrition research to the chemists. Like other women's professions, home economics began a gradual decline during the 1950s that accelerated into a dramatic crisis during the 1960s. Where, for example, women made up 80 percent of social workers in 1930, they constituted only 65 percent in 1940 and continued to be steadily displaced by men throughout the postwar years. Similarly, men made gains among high school teachers in the post-war years, displacing women from their traditional posts.
³³
Although this trend would speed up dramatically during the 1960s as women's educational and professional options expanded, the decline in home economics was well under way by the mid-1950s. High schools continued to offer home economics to girls and shop to boys, but by the end of the decade these gender distinctions began to collapse. Home economists who remained in the schools, furthermore, focused less on nutrition education and more on consumer education and family development. In many high schools, nutrition education (and home economics generally) disappeared from the curriculum, often replaced by physical education programs. While school nurses and social workers still regularly weighed and measured children, few medical researchers, or anyone else for that matter, did much with the data. Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer observed that no one really knew how many children in the United States suffered from hunger or malnutrition “because not enough attention has been focused” on these problems.
³⁴
No one, it seemed, was monitoring the nation's nutrition.
³⁵

Despite the declining interest in nutrition research and education, the National School Lunch Program proved to be a boon to the food-service industry. During the 1950s, the profession created by women—home economics—turned into an industry called food service, and what had been a female-dominated occupation gradually shifted to male leadership. Fostered largely by Department of Agriculture contracts and National School Lunch Program guidelines, the new food-service profession expanded dramatically. Federally subsidized school cafeterias had to be operated and supervised by administrators trained in Department of Agriculture fiscal guidelines and administrative procedures as much as in nutrition. Home economists who did not undergo new professional training lost their school lunch positions to a new generation of food-service supervisors—often men—who were as interested in business and administration as in menu planning and nutrition. As school food service became “a career option,” rather than a part of the home economics teacher's purview (or the responsibility of PTA volunteers), it became increasingly attractive to men interested in management. As the American School Food Service Association's first president, Thelma Flanagan, observed, the cafeteria manager was not “just a cook” anymore.”
³⁶