School Lunch Politics (24 page)

Because neither Congress nor the Department of Agriculture wanted to alter the unspoken rules of local prerogative, the distribution of federal welfare benefits was notoriously inconsistent. In some school districts only children whose parents were on welfare qualified for free lunches, but in other areas welfare recipients had to pay for their children's lunches. The Washington, D.C., school district, for example, assumed that welfare payments covered food costs and insisted that “parents who received welfare could afford to pay for lunch.”
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The income qualification for free lunches varied widely across the country. In some districts, families earning $2,000 a year qualified for free meals, while in other states the income cut-off was $3,000.
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In South Carolina, children from families earning under $225 per month could get free meals, while in New Mexico the figure was $110; in Arkansas, children could not eat for free unless their parents' monthly income was less than $85. Florida's free lunch criteria were fairly loose and included children from families receiving county assistance, families on “limited” income, children eligible for ESEA subsidies, as well as families facing “temporary emergencies” and children showing signs of malnutrition or “clear-cut neglect.”
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Eligibility for free lunches often varied from school to school within the same state. In one Georgia county a family with two children and an annual income between $2001 and $2500 had to pay five cents for lunch, while in the neighboring county those children could eat for free.
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Local decisions about which children received free lunches revealed a continuing legacy of paternalistic, if not racist, practices. In most cases, eligibility for free meals was determined by school officials—teachers, social workers, or principals—or by other individuals in the community, including PTA members, welfare case workers, or local ministers. School lunch founder, Senator Richard Russell, for one, saw no problem with such a personal approach. Local officials, he believed, were best suited to “determine the ability of the children to pay for lunches, with the free lunches to go to the neediest children.”
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This was, of course, precisely the paternalistic, often discriminatory system that welfare and civil rights activists sought to avoid by establishing objective, national eligibility standards. For one thing, principals and teachers regularly made moral judgments about the behavior of students and parents when deciding which children could eat for free. In Florida, principals, teachers, and social workers oversaw the eligibility process.
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The result was inconsistent at best and discriminatory at worst. A child in Collier County, Florida, who Health Department director Charles Bradley admitted was “malnourished,” nonetheless did not qualify for the free lunch program. The problem was that the child did not appear thin enough. “Look at the fat arms and muscles,” Bradley said, “that kid's all right.”
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In San Diego, Texas, school superintendent Bryan P. Taylor was confident that he knew the children's “mothers and the grandmothers and their fathers and their fathers before them,” and would have no trouble deciding which children needed free lunches.
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Children in Appalachia were regularly denied free lunches if their fathers were considered to be alcoholics. A Florida school lunch supervisor “let” two children have free lunches because she found out that their father was going into the hospital. However, when she discovered that the family had a television set in their home, she took away the privilege, saying, “If they could afford a television set, they certainly could afford good nutrition for their children, so I refused to put them on the free list.” The trouble with “these people,” she concluded, “is that they have no sense of values—they just don't know what's important and what isn't.”
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Thus, in most states, the decision as to which children received free lunch was personal and often arbitrary.
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Leaving eligibility determinations up to local officials had predictable results. In some schools poor children were required to carry out the garbage, sweep the floors, or clean the washrooms in return for lunch.
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One district went so far as to insist that poor children “clean their plates,” while paying children were allowed to leave food. Another state required regular school attendance and insisted that the poor children “apply themselves well” before they were deemed eligible for free meals. All over the country free lunch children stood in separate cafeteria lines or paid for their lunches with special, easily identifiable tokens. Ultimately, neither weak Department of Agriculture guidelines nor the posturing of elected officials prevented children from experiencing the social stigma attached to poverty.

The chaos of state and local free lunch eligibility requirements reflected one of the central tensions in President Johnson's War on Poverty. On the one hand, public pressure had dramatically altered the context for discussions of poverty. Grass-roots welfare-rights and anti-poverty movements demanded that poor people be treated with dignity and respect, particularly from public officials in places like welfare offices and schools. At the same time, targeted programs separated poor and black people from middle-class Americans, increasing the distance and the stigma attached to poverty. While the school lunch program's congressional advocates, including Allen Ellender, for example, insisted that there be no distinction between poor and paying children, they were unwilling to let federal officials intervene in local school decisions. Thus, although Ellender insisted that rich and poor children “should play together and work together and eat together,” he believed that community tradition and local officials could best decide which children needed free meals.
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But local officials simply perpetuated the racial and class discriminations common across the country. Many school officials, north and south, found themselves having to make judgments for which they were neither prepared nor entirely sympathetic. As one former state school superintendent observed, school boards often differed in class, race, and ethnicity from the poor children they were being asked to serve. “I think they had an awakening in the last few years,” she said. “They found a lot of people there that I don't think they considered to be people—Mexicans, Negroes, Indians and so forth.”
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The debate about which children qualified for free lunches quickly became a microcosm of the growing debate about poverty in America. Certainly, no national standard existed in 1966 that defined who was poor, who was near-poor, and who could afford 30 cents a day for lunch. Civil rights and anti-poverty activists increasingly demanded national standards for eligibility and service, but it was not at all clear what such national standards should be. Any “objective” measure of poverty had always been elusive, and measures of hunger similarly subjective. While nutrition scientists could identify conditions that constituted starvation and had successfully identified diseases caused by nutrient deficiencies, judgments about malnutrition in school children remained largely impressionistic.

F
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Establishing a measure for poverty in the 1960s, began, as it had earlier in the century, with estimates about family food budgets. Traditionally, the ability to afford a “decent” standard of living hinged on a healthy or “adequate” diet. The line between self-sufficiency and dependence for many families lay in the price of food. The post-World War II economic boom and the success of trade union negotiations solidified the notion that living standards depended on the price of consumer goods, particularly groceries.
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Even in affluent America, the price of food and the definition of poverty were closely linked. As home economists and others had long argued, the cost of the “market basket” determined the standard of living of most families. It is not surprising, then, that a home economist, working in the Social Security Administration, came up with a formula for measuring the “poverty line.” Mollie Orshansky combined a 1955 Bureau of Home Economics household budget survey showing that families generally spent one-third of their incomes on food with the Department of Agriculture's recommended nutrition standards, better known as RDAs. Orshansky estimated how much income a family needed to “provide its members RDA on a regular basis.” The formula, as Orshansky later admitted, would provide only the minimum of health and well-being. No family, she said, could live at that level “for any length of time beyond an emergency.”
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Indeed, Orshansky ruefully observed, no one in America would settle for mere subsistence “as the just due for himself or his neighbor, and even the poorest may claim more than bread.”
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Critics such as Michael Harrington dismissed any effort to create a standard poverty line. Such an attempt, he said, merely set “a minimum measure for life at the bottom.”
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Senator George McGovern echoed Harrington's hesitation, pointing out that the problem of defining standards lay in deciding whether adequacy should be based on a minimum, optimum, or intermediate level of need. Nonetheless, Orshansky's formula provided a quick and convenient way for government officials, trying to shape new welfare programs, to determine who would be eligible for benefits. In 1965 the federal government, through the War on Poverty's Office of Economic Opportunity, officially adopted Orshansky's formula as the basis for eligibility for its programs.
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Other agencies quickly followed suit.
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Despite obvious drawbacks, the federal “poverty line” soon became the standard measure of eligibility for welfare benefits, including school lunches. The problem was that poverty remained a relative condition, and no national “poverty line” could realistically describe conditions in every part of the country. Indeed, because any objective measure of poverty was illusory, the “poverty line” quickly became the lowest possible standard of living. Further, because income and cost of living varied considerably from region to region, the actual “line” below which families were deemed to be “poor” varied as well. State guidelines for determining which families qualified for food stamps or which children should eat free or reduced price school meals were thus wildly inconsistent.
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While the federal poverty line determined minimum eligibility for benefits such as food stamps, states as well as local districts could set their own criteria for local welfare payments as well as for free lunches.

An “objective” measure of poverty did not eliminate the stigma of being poor in America. Throughout the country, children receiving free lunches were routinely treated differently from paying students. Local officials, often the same individuals who had been carrying out discriminatory policies all along, were being asked to alter long-held practices. Some rose to the occasion, others did not. A Palm Beach County, Florida, welfare worker complained that “children receiving free lunches are too frequently reminded that they are not paying and are made to feel guilty if they do not eat all of the food.”
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As one report on the National School Lunch Program observed, “where teachers who collect school money are overworked, where the principal regards the School Lunch Program as an unnecessary burden, where the community in general is hostile to welfare recipients in any form, those [federal guidelines] are ignored and those instructions are violated with monotonous regularity.”
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While local administrators promised that poor children would not be singled out in the lunchroom, parents and children knew better. The Chicago Board of Education, for example, announced that welfare recipients would “have to identify themselves” if they wanted their children to receive free lunches.
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In Detroit, families had to list their weekly budget expenditures in their applications for free meals.
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In Washington, D.C., poor children went through the cafeteria line “like anyone else,” but when they got to the food counter, it was another story. The paying students paid 42 cents and received a hot lunch with “a few extra items,” including a salad; poor children received a different meal entirely. School lunch administrator Jacobs admitted that “as much as we try, there is no point in my trying to kid anybody there. … I don't believe there is a school in the fifty states where everyone doesn't know who is needy.”
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Testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, Margaret Mead reprised her role as an expert on American foodways, noting, “It is very foolish to talk about integration and democracy in our schools” and then establish a separate lunch system for poor children. Americans, she said, “are willing to face the fact that everybody does not have a Cadillac … but on food, which is the necessary basis of life, the fact that someone cannot provide it for his children is very stigmatizing.”
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The stigma associated with free lunch programs would not disappear, ASFSA executive director John Perryman predicted, until “food for thought and food for stomach are made available equally to one and all.”
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When it came to poverty policy, anti-hunger activists, like other 1960s liberal reformers, could not decide whether they were dealing with economic inequality or cultural disability. In the case of food policy, the line between cultural practice and economic decisions was even more problematic. Reformers and policy makers had long questioned the food choices of poor and working-class people. Since at least the late nineteenth century, nutrition scientists insisted that rational food choices would alleviate the worst effects of low wages and economic deprivation. In the 1960s, the notion that cultural attitudes were responsible for economic status gained new credence as “the poor” increasingly became a distinct, and racially marked, class. Attempts to alter the “culture of poverty” appealed to a generation of liberal policy makers who resisted the idea that American inequality might stem from deep-seated racial discrimination and institutional bias. Democratic advisers to President Kennedy, notably, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, insisted that in affluent America, poverty and malnutrition were products of cultural deprivation as much as material want. In the past, Moynihan observed, “the poor were poor, no more than that.” In the modern period, however, Moynihan argued, poverty had became a decidedly cultural (often racial) liability. Adopting anthropologist Oscar Lewis's notion that cultural attitudes (like “bad” food habits) associated with poverty could be transmitted from one generation to the next, Moynihan and others promoted the notion that a “culture of poverty” had developed that influenced urban racial ghettoes as well as rural America. Poverty, Moynihan argued, caused “structural changes in personality and behavior.”
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In this view, malnutrition in particular had to do not with scarcity of resources—everyone agreed that the country produced an abundance of food—but rather with poor choices and lack of education. Moynihan's Harvard colleague and leading nutritionist Jean Mayer went so far as to suggest that the term “malnutrition” should precisely “refer to the consumption of the wrong sort of food,” rather than to the more general notion of insufficient nutrition.
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Columbia nutritionist William H. Sebrell similarly asserted that in the United States, malnutrition was largely due to “ignorance of the importance of certain foods.” Food choices, Sebrell insisted, were as much the result of “cultural patterns” as scarcity or low wages.
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In a world of consumer abundance and economic growth, hunger and malnutrition boiled down (so to speak) to cultural choices. The poor, it seemed, simply needed more—or at any rate better—education. It was an argument that food reformers had been making for almost half a century.