School Lunch Politics (33 page)

As soon as federal nutrition standards changed and restrictions on private contracts were eased, school districts invited private food-service corporations into their lunchrooms. In the face of continuing fiscal shortfalls, school lunch administrators felt they had little choice but to turn to private companies that promised efficient service and lower costs. The Department of Agriculture justified opening school cafeterias to private food companies as a way to provide new revenues to ailing lunch programs. At the same time, the food industry was entirely eager to enter the school lunch market.
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Commercial interests promised to supply meals at lower costs and more efficiently than the local, state, and federal government “partnership” that had characterized the program since its inception. Large cities, in particular, eagerly contracted with companies that offered city-wide service. Because urban schools often lacked cafeterias, centralized kitchen facilities were a cheaper option than adding lunchrooms to existing schools. Contractors hired truckers, supplies, food, and cooks and delivered pre-packaged meals to each school. The Buffalo, New York, school board for example, signed a contract with Service Systems Corporation, a subsidiary of Del Monte, to provide lunches in their low-income schools. Service Systems delivered 9,000 “packaged school lunches” every day and hot lunches once or twice a week. According to Buffalo School Board officials, this arrangement allowed them to serve lunches for the first time to children in inner city schools. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the district contracted with a central warehouse that offered to supply over a hundred schools that then “bid” for food that was stored in large coolers and freezers. The Tulsa warehouse purchased food in large quantities but took the brand names off the products before sending it to the schools.
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Economies of scale in food delivery, storage, and preparation all appealed to school lunch operators, who saw no new influx of public resources coming their way.

By the 1970s food service, and lunch in particular, had become big business. Lunch, noted one report, “has become the daily institutional meal, and more than half of the nation's population now eats the noon meal” at work, at school, in a hospital, prison, or in the Army.
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Within a decade the lunch business mounted to $23 million each year. School cafeterias formed a major part of the food-service industry, with annual receipts worth an estimated $4.5 billion by the mid-1970s. As federal restrictions on private contracts eased, one report noted, “more and more companies are zeroing in on this market.”
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By 1975, the National School Lunch Program operated the third largest food service program in the nation, larger than the Army and trailing only McDonald's and KFC.
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Major national food corporations increased their school-focused operations significantly as Department of Agriculture restrictions were lifted. In 1969, for example, the Automatic Retailers of America reported that it added the school market to its already lucrative college, hospital, business, and airline operations. A company spokesman boasted that ARA served “more people daily than any other organization in the world.”
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The company's lunch operations included the Montreal Olympics, while its vending machine business supplied cigarettes, music, games, and snacks to Holiday Inns, Gino's and Denny's restaurants, and flight kitchens for fifty airlines. Other corporations followed suit. Sysco Corporation, for example, entered the school food-service business in the early 1970s and saw its net worth skyrocket from $115 million to over $23 billion in two decades.
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By the early 1970s, food industry giants such as Morton's, Glidden-Durkee, and Pronto, a division of Hershey Foods, held school lunch contracts.
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These were highly diversified industries in which schools were only a part of the overall operation. In addition to centralized school cafeterias, the Ogden Corporation, for example, also dealt in transportation, metals, service to theaters and recreational centers, and race tracks. Armour, the venerable meatpacking company with origins in the nineteenth century, entered the school market during the 1970s. The company, then a subsidiary of the Greyhound Corporation, supplied meats, poultry, and dairy products to other food-service businesses as well as to school lunchrooms. Among Armour's specialties were pre-packaged airline meals. Entrees such as beef stroganoff, stuffed peppers, and “Salisbury steak with Polynesian sauce” catapulted the company into the leading ranks of the new prepared food industry.
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Fast food and “convenience” foods transformed the form and the content of American meals, whether at home or at school. The American food industry had changed dramatically since the early days of school lunches. While American agriculture continued to enjoy large tax subsidies, by the 1970s, the traditional family farm all but disappeared. The food industry was no longer characterized by small farmers whose concern was growing and marketing their produce. The industrialization of agriculture in the years after World War II resulted in what one critic described as “a gigantic, highly integrated service system in which the object is not to nourish or even to feed, but to force an ever-increasing consumption of fabricated products.”
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Industrial farming, large-scale food processing plants, and national networks of food-service providers characterized the industry. Frozen food, dehydrated mixes, and preheated or re-heatable entrees found an increasingly important place at the American table. According to one estimate, the spectacular rise in potato consumption in the United States was due “almost entirely to the purchase of French fries at franchised restaurants.”
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Particularly after the introduction of the home-kitchen microwave oven, convenience foods claimed an ever increasing share of the food market.
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These new products were key to the ability of schools, particularly those without existing kitchen facilities, to serve large numbers of free lunches. The use of frozen and dehydrated foods, observed Richard Flambert, a San Francisco food-service consultant and designer, “is certainly the most important thing that has happened recently.” Mashed potatoes, for example, Flambert said, can now be made without the need for peeling or cooking the raw potatoes. Packaged mashed potato mixes could easily be “poured into a kettle without being touched by human hands.” Within five years, he predicted, dehydrated foods would be so common that schools would not even need freezers or refrigerators for food storage. “All that will be required,” he was certain, would be “cold or hot water to prepare our foods.”
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Indeed, by 1978, according to one report, over half of all institutions serving meals relied on pre-prepared convenience foods.
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School lunch administrators played an important role in introducing new foods to American schoolchildren. Regional and ethnic dishes had become nationalized in a school food market that spanned the continent. “Tacos have moved east and fried clams moved west,” noted one reporter.
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National norms for the size and shape of hamburgers, fish sandwiches, and French fries defined American food culture. While the children may have already discovered hamburgers as fast food, during the 1970s, the ethnic food market had not yet captured the national market.
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In 1976, for example, Henrietta Green, district school food service director in Colorado, decided to introduce her children to Jewish food to pay tribute to the Jewish New Year. The suburban Denver district featured bagels, baked chicken, red cabbage, and honey cake for its holiday meal. Unable to prepare the bagels in the traditional manner (boiling them in salt water), Green decided to use biscuit dough with eggs and sugar and then bake the “bagels” in the oven. Unfortunately, the special occasion selected for the Jewish meal was Yom Kippur, which Green belatedly discovered was a fast day. Another problem arose when Green discovered that Jewish dietary laws prohibited serving milk and meat at the same meal. Because the Type A lunch required milk, she had to adjust her offerings. Undeterred, Green said, “I'm sure we'll make a lot more mistakes … but at least we're getting an education.” Indeed, Green went on to plan other ethnic offerings, including pretzels (Germany), fish and chips (Scotland), chicken curry (India), and quiche Lorraine (France). “I'm hoping someone will come up with a lunch representative of the American Indian,” she said.
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For school lunch administrators, the new food technology presented a perfect solution to the problem of feeding large numbers of poor children without having to invest in new equipment and facilities. Schoolchildren became a captive market for “pre-plated” pre-packaged, and pre-heated meals. Using the model of airline meals and TV dinners, school districts around the country contracted with central kitchens to prepare and deliver pre-cooked meals. Like airplane passengers, school children were offered a plastic “cold-pac” and an aluminum “hot-pak.” Unlike airline travelers, however, children still received a carton of milk with their meal.
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Washington, D.C.'s Bruce Elementary school, for example, employed the new food technology to switch from cold sandwiches, “which everyone agreed were tasteless,” to new Styrofoam “traypacks.” The precooked meal trays included a napkin and disposable plastic utensils. While children enjoyed the novelty of the new lunches, the meals they ate were no doubt bland and not much tastier than the cold sandwiches, because the central kitchen maintained a policy of using very few spices in its food preparation.
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The food delivery model that most attracted school lunch operators was the growing fast-food industry. Indeed, fast foods claimed an increasingly large share of the nation's food budget. According to one estimate, “the palatable, fat-rich hamburger, pizza, fried chicken, and ethnic take-out cuisines rose from 3 to 16 percent of US food outlays between 1963 and 1993.”
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By the early 1970s, school food service increasingly adopted the fast-food model in school cafeterias. While acknowledging the Department of Agriculture nutritional guidelines for children's meals, most school lunch administrators were under pressure to run their operations on business and management principles. This meant that sales and participation rates took precedence over nutrition. In practice, both the Department of Agriculture and the ASFSA encouraged the business model. School lunch operators claimed that fast food drew paying children into the lunchroom and thus provided key program revenue. Tacos, pizza, and French fries, they believed, would be the only offerings that could bring in enough business to shore up what could only be described as failing enterprises.

The most highly publicized and replicated example of the fast-food school lunch model came from the Las Vegas school system. There, in 1972, local businessman Len Frederick, a retired supermarket executive, offered to save the city's school lunch program by instituting fast-food restaurant practices. Boasting that he could “sell better, fresher food … for less money,” Frederick set out to revive the city's school cafeterias that had been languishing from lack of funds and low participation rates. Paying children, it seemed, flatly rejected the traditional Type A hot meal. Frederick was “appalled” at the school lunch program's high deficits poor food, and disgruntled employees. Predicting that he could compete successfully with local fast-food chains for children's dollars, Frederick replaced the traditional school lunch menu with “super shakes” and “combo meals.” When he began his reformation, only about 10 percent of the city's students participated in the school lunch program, and the city's school cafeterias were running a $200,000 deficit. Within a year Frederick boasted a participation rate of 90 percent and claimed a profit of over a million dollars.
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To meet Department of Agriculture nutrition standards, Len Frederick's combo meals had to be fortified and enriched. The school lunch guidelines required that reimbursable meals provide children with at least one-third of their RDAs over the course of a week. Frederick therefore made sure that his tacos, pizzas, hot dogs, and French fries were all enriched to meet USDA standards. The Las Vegas “combo meals” provided the required two ounces of protein, three-quarters of a cup of vegetables, a slice of bread, and a half-pint of milk, for the Type A lunch reimbursement. Frederick developed a recipe for “shakes,” for example, that contained the required eight ounces of milk. The shakes also, however, were high in fat and chemical additives. Frederick counted the pickles and lettuce in his hamburger sandwiches as the vegetable requirement, and he used buns that contained wheat germ. The combo meal French fries were fortified with vitamin A and iron. Despite Frederick's claims to business success, however, his nutritional achievements may have been overrated. After visiting the Las Vegas experiment, for example,
New York Times
food critic Mimi Sheraton reported that fewer than half of Las Vegas students actually chose complete combo meals. She noticed students choosing “two cinnamon buns and a Coke, four sugar cookies and a Sprite,” or “two bags of French-fries and a milk shake” for lunch. Even if fortified, these items hardly constituted a balanced meal. Nonetheless, Sheraton noted, the Las Vegas schools counted all of those students as school lunch participants—and thus claimed reimbursements for all of their lunches.
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While Frederick's success may have been inflated, his menu inspired school systems across the country. New York, for example, quickly tested the fast-food model in three high schools. Dubbed “the Energy Factory,” New York's experiment promised to supplement the Las Vegas-style fastfood combos with “homemade soups, salad bars, and a steam table of conventional main dishes.” In an effort to appeal to children's tastes and to attract paying students into the cafeteria, New York planned to expand the program throughout its schools. Cheeseburgers and French fries began to appear regularly on the city's school menu. “I love the shakes,” one student told Mimi Sheraton.
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Despite her general dislike of fast food, however, Sheraton admitted that the new menu had increased school lunch participation in New York from under half to over 65 percent.
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Dade County, Florida, similarly initiated a fast-food menu at Miami Beach high school. The beef and cheese tacos, cheese pizzas, meat-andbean filled burritos, corn dogs, and fried chicken all supplemented traditional offerings like grilled cheese sandwiches, turkey rolls, and cottage cheese. Many of the choices were, according to one report, “secretly” fortified. Wheat germ was added to the buns and pizza crust, while “nondegerminated corn” was added to the tacos. Under pressure to increase the number of paying children, lunchroom supervisors incorporated popular items like French fries and pizza into their menu choices. As one pizza industry representative put it, school food-service operators “are learning from their commercial counterparts to be customer driven.”
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