School Lunch Politics (21 page)

T
ABLE
5.3
National School Lunch Program Participation in Select Cities, 1962*

Source:
Hearings, National School Lunch Act, June 19, 1962, Subcommittee on Agriculture and Forestry, United States Senate, 87th Cong., 2nd Sess., 25.

* Includes only elementary schools.

 

 

 

Like other federal welfare benefits, school lunches depended on the will of local politicians to fund the program. The consequences of this decentralized administration were particularly dramatic when it came to providing free lunches for poor children. The fact that the Department of Agriculture allowed states to use children's fees as the matching requirement meant that even if schools wanted to offer free lunches, they had to come up with local contributions to do so. Most states chose simply to ignore the free lunch mandate. The burden of meeting the full cost of the lunch program rested on local communities, many of which had neither the resources nor the inclination to devote substantial amounts of money to feed poor children. Schools could, admittedly, charge more to paying children in order to subsidize free meals. Most districts, however, felt themselves strained even to meet the costs for children who could pay. Local administrators feared that asking children to pay higher prices would cause them to drop out of the program and thus decrease the overall revenue. One state school lunch director called the program's matching formula “not realistic.”
⁵⁶
The predictable result was that few children received free lunches, and, particularly in the South, racial segregation prevailed. The American School Food Service Association's Rodney Ashby admitted: “Despite successes, achievements, accolades, and unbelievably few criticisms, our pride of accomplishment … is not a little dulled when we view what should have been done and what must yet be accomplished.”
⁵⁷

The fact was, during the 1950s, few policy makers, whether in the Department of Agriculture or in liberal civic organizations, were particularly concerned about feeding poor children. The Department of Agriculture largely ignored the School Lunch Act's provisions requiring participating schools to offer free lunches to children who could not afford to pay. In the end, the number free lunches served actually declined during the 1950s. Just after the program began, 17 percent of lunches were served for free. By 1960, fewer than 10 percent of the National School Lunch Program meals were offered for free.
⁵⁸
A 1962 survey estimated that half a million low-income children attended schools that participated in the program but offered no free meals.
⁵⁹
When confronted with the survey results, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman admitted that the findings “jarred any complacency we might have had.”
⁶⁰

The limits of the program were dramatically illustrated in 1955 when the Los Angeles school district quietly dropped out of the program. When the federal cash subsidy for each meal fell to 4 cents that year, the district decided it was “financially impractical” to remain in the program.
⁶¹
No longer contracting for federally subsidized food, the district tried to develop a lunch program based on local resources. According to its own evaluation, however, the nutritional standards for Los Angeles school lunch fell below federal guidelines, providing only one-third of the children's RDAs. Los Angeles school officials then faced the financial conundrum of a school lunch system dependent on children's fees. To serve nutritious meals and at the same time provide free lunches to poor children, the city's lunch administrators realized they would have to either ask for increased local taxes or raise the price of lunch. Believing the former was politically impossible, they announced that the cost of lunch would increase. When the price went up, however, the number of paying children declined and the district ended up losing money in any case. Ultimately, Los Angeles school officials decided to keep the price of lunch low in order to induce children to stay in the lunch line. This meant that they also decided to limit the number of free meals they could offer. Poor children in Los Angeles thus found themselves excluded from the lunch program. While the result was that the city ran a viable lunch program, feeding about one-third of its schoolchildren in 1960, the number of poor children receiving free meals was “microscopically small,” less than 1 percent.
⁶²

Cases like Los Angeles notwithstanding, the National School Lunch Program ended the 1950s as one of the nation's most popular federal programs. No one in the federal government had bothered to tinker with it very much during the fifteen years since its establishment, and most people thought the program worked pretty well. The Department of Agriculture exerted little administrative oversight, largely because of the founders' aversion to federal interference in state affairs. Agriculture officials believed it was up to the states to distribute both cash and commodities as they saw fit. For that reason, the inequities in the system remained largely hidden from public scrutiny. The principle of states' rights guarded local officials from accountability and provided an easy excuse for federal officials to ignore the fact that the program was not meeting its stated goals. The last thing Department of Agriculture officials wanted was to be seen as interfering with local school matters. In principle, as Allen Ellender envisioned it, this would ensure local loyalty to the program. In fact, as the dismal figures on poor children revealed, it reinforced a deep inequality in the American social fabric. That inequality could be masked during the 1950s as relative prosperity combined with a political climate that eschewed critical dissent. By the end of the decade, however, demands for racial equity, along with a growing awareness that many Americans had been left out of the era's economic boom, opened the school lunch program—and other government benefits as well—to new scrutiny.

CHAPTER 6

 

No Free Lunch

For the first fifteen years of its existence the National School Lunch Program enjoyed widespread support but fed relatively few children. Those children who ate school lunches generally paid a small fee and received a “balanced” hot meal that was prepared on-site at least partly from surplus commodities. Teachers, principals, and social workers might designate certain children to receive free lunches, but on the whole, few schools regularly provided free meals. Indeed, the period between 1946 and 1960 marked a remarkably complacent time when it came to questions of poor people in America. While a new movement for civil rights was quietly brewing, it focused more on dismantling the legal structures of Jim Crow—voting rights, public accommodations, and segregated schools—than on economic conditions. After 1960, however, poverty returned to center stage in national policy and reform circles. Although the “discovery” of poverty during the 1960s took many forms, from President Johnson's War on Poverty and the institutionalization of Great Society welfare programs to the vast expansion of volunteer food pantries and community health clinics, Department of Agriculture officials were slow to grasp the significance of these movements for its long-standing food programs, including the National School Lunch Program. Only gradually did it dawn on policy makers, parents, school officials, and activists that poor children were not being served in school lunchrooms.

Poverty had never, of course, disappeared from American communities. Despite the aura of affluence that characterized the 1950s, large numbers of Americans remained outside the middle-class consumer economy. While blue-collar union wages afforded many working-class families a comfortable living, the benefits were largely confined to white workers in urban, industrial enclaves. Outside the manufacturing sector, rural poverty, combined with large swaths of urban “ghetto” areas, gave lie to the notion that all Americans had achieved middle-class status. Indeed, the post-war economic expansion of the 1950s effectively hid lingering pockets of poverty—rural as well as urban—from public view. By the end of the decade, however, a decline in the manufacturing sector threatened the economic security even many blue-collar families thought they had achieved after World War II. At the same time, a resurgent civil rights movement revealed the underlying racial inequalities in America that en compassed economic status as well as political rights. With the “discovery” of poverty during the early 1960s, federal benefits like the National School Lunch Program appeared increasingly limited, if not downright discriminatory. The program promised, in principle, to feed the nation's children and to provide free meals for those who could not afford to pay. By the end of the 1950s, it was clear that neither goal was being met.

As the election of 1960 approached, Americans seemed to believe that they had conquered the problems of poverty and hunger. Images of undernourished draftees and Depression Era bread lines had long since receded. The nation had plenty of food—so much that tons of commodities were regularly shipped abroad to feed the hungry in the “underdeveloped” world. Indeed, under P.L. 480 the Department of Agriculture set up school lunch programs abroad to bring the bounty of American farms to the world's hungry children.
¹
In the midst of abundance, however, nutritionists rather quietly began to warn Americans against “overeating,” and doctors began to report an increasing incidence of obesity. American culture focused on diet fads and weight loss—symptoms of too much to eat rather than too little. Margaret Mead observed that “every cocktail party, every school picnic, every coffee-break, the whole articulate verbal section of the American people were trying not to eat something.”
²
Hunger and malnutrition seemed a very distant threat to those Americans who, by 1960, enjoyed an unprecedented bounty of consumer goods including an ever-growing assortment of processed, frozen, and prepared foods.
³
Poverty, hunger, and malnutrition appeared to be conditions endemic to foreign countries and remote parts of Africa, Asia, or Latin America, certainly not conditions found in the American heartland.
⁴

D
ISCOVERING
H
UNGER
IN
A
MERICA

Federal food policy during the 1950s was not predicated on domestic poverty or the fact that there might be hungry children in America. Indeed, the nation's main center for food policy, the Department of Agriculture, spent the decade focused on agricultural productivity, commodity markets, and foreign aid. While the USDA regularly distributed milk and surplus foods to the nation's schools, its primary mission was to support farm incomes and provide technical support to the increasingly industrialized agricultural sector. Similarly, when Congress authorized the Department of Agriculture to send commodities abroad under P.L. 480, its intent was as much to maintain American agricultural prices as to feed hungry people in the “Third World.” Just as the Department of Agriculture had used American schools as outlets for surplus food during the 1930s, agriculture officials used farm commodities “to encourage economic develop ment abroad.”
⁵
By the time John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, food had become a staple in Cold War diplomatic strategy. Shipments of wheat, corn, and other commodities served as symbols of American democracy and prosperity, shoring up regimes threatened by internal revolutionary movements and external Soviet support. Ultimately, as president, Kennedy codified the use of food as a diplomatic weapon by appointing Senator George McGovern to head the “Food for Peace” program targeted at “developing” nations.
⁶
Agricultural prosperity and an abundance of food appeared to confirm the success and superiority of American institutions in the Cold War world. Kennedy's Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman boasted that “if we were as far ahead of the Russians in the space race as we are in agriculture, we would by now be running a shuttle service to the moon.”
⁷

So confident were Americans in their abundant food supply that nutritionists and home economists rarely studied domestic food habits and cultures any more. Reporting to Lyndon Johnson on malnutrition among children in the United States, presidential aide, Richard W. Reuter noted, “Our office has been able to find little evidence of study of the nutritional adequacies of U.S. families since New Deal days.” He added, “Apparently, little is known of the actual diets of children in our own poverty areas.”
⁸
Unlike earlier generations of food reformers who had been fascinated by the food cultures of immigrants, ethnics, and African Americans, midcentury nutritionists explored eating habits and food-related conditions like rickets and malnutrition only in foreign settings. “We know more about the nutrition of Indians in India than we do about our own people,” admitted one malnutrition specialist.
⁹
When nutritionists, doctors, social workers, or teachers discussed hunger in American at all, they did so through the lens of foreign field research and experience abroad. Indeed, many of the 1960s anti-poverty activists came to domestic concerns after serving in the Peace Corps abroad. Returning home, this generation was shocked to “discover” poverty in their own communities.