School Lunch Politics (31 page)

T
ABLE
8.1
Federal Cash Assistance to Children's Nutrition Programs, 1947–85 (in thousands)*

Source: “Child Nutrition Programs: Issues for the 101st Congress,”
School Food Service Research Review
13, no. 1 (Spring 1989): Table 11, p. 37; Robert H. Haveman, ed.,
A Decade of Federal Antipoverty Programs
(New York: Academic Press, 1977); and USDA, Production and Marketing Administration, Food Distribution Branch, “Supplement to School Lunch and Food Distribution Programs: Selected Statistics, Fiscal Years 1939–51.”

*Does not include value of commodity donations.

 

 

 

Increasing the number of free lunches without substantially increasing the overall resources meant that states had to bolster their contributions or local administrators had to raise the price of lunch. School administrators across the country balked at “coping with this financial burden which grows larger every year.”
²¹
California state officials, for example, responded to a lawsuit demanding free lunches for all welfare children by asserting that such a measure would, in effect, “force the paying children to subsidize the needy.”
²²
Because Congress was unwilling to order states to cover the true costs of lunch, federal policy simply shifted the burden of free lunches onto paying children. Despite the urging of congressmen such as Illinois's Roman Pucinski, who told the Department of Agricul ture to “use a little more imagination and come up with answers,” it was, as Orville Freeman had warned, the “near poor” who suffered most under the new funding schemes; children whose families could afford full-price meals simply stopped eating school lunches at all. Pucinski correctly predicted that unless substantially more money was put into the overall program, expanding the number of free lunches would actually limit who would be eating at school.

Indeed, the distance between poor and non-poor children grew as school lunchrooms became places inhabited by children labeled “low-income,” “disadvantaged,” or “at-risk.” By the mid-1970s, public schools in most major cities had majority black and majority poor populations. As an indication of the level of poverty among children in the nation's schools, the Department of Agriculture estimated that in 1976 about one-quarter of all children in public schools received their meals free or at reduced price. Put another way, in 1976 poor children made up almost 40 percent of all school lunch participants, and within ten years that figure reached 50 percent.
²³
The School Breakfast Program was entirely oriented toward the poor, particularly urban, black children.
²⁴
School cafeterias became racially and economically segregated zones. As one historian observed about the welfare system more generally and Aid to Dependent Children specifically, “this transformation poses something of a historical paradox.” Aid to Dependent Children, according to this analysis, while intended to serve poor children, was, like the National School Lunch Program, administratively structured so as to discriminate, particularly against African Americans. Both ADC and the School Lunch Program by the 1970s, however, had become programs that did not just include African American children, but served them “disproportionately.” In the case of ADC, the perception of “disproportion” created a “growing backlash against the racial profile of public assistance.”
²⁵
In the case of school lunches, however, overall public support remained relatively strong albeit not in the form of either state or local financial commitments.

The economic climate of the 1970s only exacerbated school lunchroom fiscal difficulties. The period's inflation meant that overall food prices went up and operating costs increased. By the end of 1972, food prices were at all-time high levels. Beef, pork, and chicken, as well as fruits and vegetables, all saw record increases. According to one USDA report, the price of food went up by 12.5 percent in one year.
²⁶
At the same time, surplus commodities, long a staple resource for school lunches, disappeared and commodity donations to school lunch programs dried up. Predictably, as the price of lunch increased, fewer families could afford the cost of full-price meals. By the end of the 1970s the nationwide average full price lunch had gone up between 15 and 30 cents. In Connecticut elementary school children saw the price of lunch jump from 60 to 75 cents. High school students had to pay 90 cents. New York children paying full price faced an 80 cent lunch. While some of the National School Lunch Program's critics charged that students dropped out because they “did not like the taste of lunch,” school food-service administrators believed it was because the price had gone up. The other factor, ASFSA representatives noted, was that federal income eligibility levels for free lunches went up during the early 1970s as well. The result was that fewer children overall could afford to eat at school.
²⁷

Children's nutrition was caught in an ongoing struggle for resources that pitted state and local communities against federal mandates. School lunch advocates insisted, as they had since the 1940s, that children's nutrition was a national responsibility. Harvard Medical School's Julius Richmond, for example, argued that “nutrition is a national not a state issue.” All children needed a well-balanced lunch, he said, regardless of where they lived. Leaving school lunches up to local communities, Richmond believed, would mean that “children in states with less resources … will not be served as well.”
²⁸
Richmond had substantial historical grounds for this fear. As late as 1980 few states compensated for overall reductions in federal school meal budgets. Indeed, according to
New York Times
reporter, Robert Pear, “Such states as Oklahoma and Louisiana, which have the resources to increase spending, generally lack the desire to do so.”
²⁹
Department of Agriculture officials, who viewed federal resources as just one part of the school lunch budget, had little sympathy for school lunch officials who complained about dwindling resources. If school cafeterias faced a fiscal crisis, the Department of Agriculture maintained, blame rested with local communities that refused to contribute to children's welfare. G. William Hoagland, head of the Food and Nutrition Service, charged that local authorities had raised the price of lunch “much more than the 11 cents they had lost in Federal subsidy.”
³⁰
Hoagland admitted, however, that his department had not anticipated the extent to which paying students would leave the program once the price of lunch increased. This was despite the conventional wisdom in the field that held that for each nickel the price went up, participation rates would drop by one percent.

Beginning with the Nixon-era free lunch expansion and continuing through the Reagan and Clinton administrations, Congress began to pull back on funding for welfare programs. With the budding tax revolt and the rise of a militant conservative movement, local support for public spending, particularly on education and welfare, began to erode. States and school districts thus began to search for new sources of revenue to keep school lunchrooms going. The Department of Agriculture, which had always been reluctant to enforce nutrition or eligibility stan dards in the school lunch program, nonetheless housed an ever expanding school lunch bureaucracy charged with administering meals for the nation's poor children. Finding unenthusiastic partners in state legislators, the National School Lunch Program gradually began to rely ever more heavily on the commercial food-service industry. School lunch officials found eager allies in a rapidly growing food-service industry, and among the ever more ubiquitous fast-food companies, including McDonald's, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell.

Privatization gained unexpected allies in the push to feed poor children. Since the program's founding, nutritionists and school food-service professionals had carefully guarded the cafeteria boundaries, resisting efforts to allow commercial operators into school kitchens. The new free lunch mandate, however, challenged those boundaries. The 1969 White House Conference, for one, recommended easing the ban on private companies operating in school lunchrooms. Asserting every child's right to “equal access to nutrition,” the conference report acknowledged that existing school lunchrooms were unable to provide meals “at fair cost or reduced cost” to children who most needed the nutrition. The conference majority agreed that the most practical solution in light of the continued reluctance or inability of states to increase their contributions to school lunch budgets was to begin dealing with commercial food-service operations. As long as private companies agreed to meet “all quantitative and qualitative nutritional requirements,” the White House Conference Report recommended that schools be permitted either to contract with private companies to bring meals into their schools or to “have the lunches provided elsewhere by the private sector.”
³¹
Department of Agriculture officials welcomed the suggestion. The future for children's lunches, Agriculture Department representative Aaron M. Altschul predicted, lay in “convenience foods” and other industry innovations. “School feeding,” he said “does not differ in principle from any other kind of institutional feeding.”
³²
Because institutions like the military, the airlines, and hospitals increasingly relied on food-service management companies for their meal service, Altschul believed schools could—and should—easily follow suit.
³³
The only voice dissenting from this recommendation was American School Foodservice Association executive director, John Perryman.
³⁴

The first step in the public-private school lunch partnership required nutrition professionals like Perryman to relax their traditional mistrust of commercial food operations. With over 50,000 members nationwide, the ASFSA membership maintained an ambivalent attitude toward the privatization of school lunches. Although many women who found careers in home economics happily landed positions in the private food industry, school lunch advocates, by and large, viewed commercial enterprises with suspicion. Fearing that restaurant or food-service corporations would be concerned more with profit than with children's health, National School Lunch Program planners, since the 1920s, tried to keep private interests out of school lunchrooms. School food-service professionals, in particular, the ASFSA, may have welcomed corporate sponsors at conventions and brand-name food ads in their newsletters, but they resisted direct involvement of restaurants or food-service corporations in school lunchrooms. “My experience,” noted Santa Barbara superintendent Norman Scharer, when asked about how to best equip school kitchens, “has been that it is much better to get a food service consultant who has no equipment to sell.”
³⁵
At the same time, the ASFSA and school lunchrooms depended on the food industry in significant ways. Food advertisements funded the association's publications, and revenues from food industry displays underwrote their annual national conventions. The ASFSA rank and file viewed the incursion of private companies with mixed feelings. Alfreda Jacobsen spoke for many in her profession when she worried that private food companies would be “interested
only
in making a profit.” Corporations, she said, “will sell anything to the child as long as he has the money to pay for it.”
³⁶
Jacobson, the school lunch director in Perry, Iowa, protested to President Johnson both as a professional food-service worker and as a mother against legislation “that would allow any food company the benefits of money and commodities from the National School Lunch Program.” As a mother, she said, “the fact that my own children would be exposed to the possibility of choosing hamburgers, French fries, and a bottle of pop for every noon school lunch is reason enough to protest.” Jacobson told the president, “if we are ever going to have a healthy race of people we are going to have to educate our children to accept only foods that are best for growth and health and not give them a chance to choose only foods that they like.”
³⁷

Professional protestations against private involvement in school lunches increasingly rang hollow, however, in the face of state and local resistance to fund free lunches. Children's Foundation head Rodney Leonard observed wryly that any time the suggestion was made that private food management companies might be a way to bring school lunches to areas not yet served, particularly “within the urban ghetto where facilities do not exist,” school food-service professionals “immediately claim the non-profit ideal of the school lunch program is about to be raped.”
³⁸
While Leonard acknowledged that the commercial food industry was often known more for “sharp operators and poor service” than for professional management and nutrition, it was, in his view, an “undeniable fact” that private companies, not the Department of Agriculture or local school districts, had made significant technological advances in efficient and inexpensive food-service practices. It would be “an absurd waste of money,” Leonard insisted, for states and school districts to invest in build ings and equipment “when food service technology now available are already eliminating the need for these facilities.” Food-service companies clearly had the capacity to prepare, freeze, and deliver meals more efficiently than did the schools. Rather than invest in new cafeterias, Leonard suggested, schools should simply buy freezers and microwave ovens.
³⁹
The fact was, Leonard argued, private companies might be able to run lunch programs in areas where the professionals, the government, and the Department of Agriculture had failed.