School Lunch Politics (6 page)

The search for an American diet during the 1920s thus focused on two goals. First, food reformers, usually women who were native-born and middle-class, hoped to translate nutrition science into practical, everyday menus that all housewives could prepare. This meant teaching immigrant women to eat “American” food, but it also meant teaching middle-class housewives about vitamins, proteins, and calories. At the same time, food reformers, along with teachers, doctors, and social workers, faced the continuing problem of poverty—people who had limited food choices and, by definition, poor diets. In either case, however, reformers believed that the key lay in teaching children how to eat right. Although food reformers struggled to teach women to prepare what they considered to be balanced, healthy meals, housewives were notoriously stubborn in their food habits and reluctant to adopt new foods or new recipes. Reformers thus turned to the children. Instilling the values of nutrition and good food habits at an early age, reformers were certain, would reap rewards far into the future.
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Not only would the children develop into healthy adults, but they would take nutrition lessons home to their mothers, who would learn to serve healthy meals to the entire family. As a captive audience, schoolchildren appeared to be the perfect candidates for nutrition education and the school lunch the perfect vehicle through which to introduce new foods.
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Yet what exactly was the purpose of school lunch programs? Nutrition scientists, home economists, child welfare advocates, and school administrators rarely had a clear answer to this question. In some schools mothers, teachers, or civic groups simply provided free meals to poor children. In other schools, home economics teachers used the lunchroom to train girls in domestic skills. These home economics classes would often sell lunch to other students, albeit at relatively low prices. Many schools used lunchrooms as revenue-generating operations, hiring managers and selling meals to children who could pay. While home economists insisted that lunchroom operations should always be paired with nutrition education, in most cases the education consisted of a poster or an occasional assembly. During the 1920s, however, home economists and child welfare advocates began to envision school lunches as part of a comprehensive public health and nutrition program. While the desire to feed poor children continued to underlay school meal plans, an expanded notion of universal child health gradually began to inform nutrition education and school cafeterias. Throughout the 1920s, food reformers engaged in an ongoing battle with school administrators and welfare workers over the purpose of lunch and what should be served.

The question of what to serve for lunch was no simple matter. Indeed, battles over what constituted “proper” food went far beyond ideas about the science of nutrition. Although food reformers aimed to modernize American diets generally, their message carried different meanings for different ethnic and racial groups. Recent historians have interpreted the early twentieth-century reform impulse, particularly in its Americanization efforts, as an exercise in social control if not cultural imperialism. Historians regularly point to lessons in Americanization through housework to suggest that reformers held only scorn for their clients' cultures and traditions. Gwendolyn Mink, for example, observes that the “centerpiece of cultural reform was the cooking class.”
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Laura Shapiro argues that the ubiquitous white sauce found in American recipes symbolized the desire to transform ethnic differences into a homogeneous “perfection salad.” George Sanchez describes the efforts of home economists to convince Mexican-American women to forsake chilis and tomatoes as elements in “a system of social control intended to construct a well-behaved citizenry.”
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Harvey Levenstein suggests that “the acrid smells of garlic and onions wafting through the immigrant quarter seemed to provide unpleasant evidence that their inhabitants found American ways unappealing; that they continued to find foreign (and dangerous) ideas as palatable as their foreign food.”
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Indeed, one need not look far to find examples of “food imperialism” in the writings of home economists. Descriptions of workers who “reek of food and strong breath” were the common stuff of scientific as well as popular reporting.
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There were plenty of descriptions like Dorothy Dickins's in the September 1926
Journal of Home Economics
complaining that “the ordinary country Negro woman is a poor cook, and only years of careful training from some white woman can justify her reputation for good cooking.”
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Columbia Teachers College nutritionist Mary Swartz Rose regularly peppered her reports with ethnic stereotypes and racial characterizations, noting, for example, that it “is no easy task to feed little Jews, and Italians … when they have never had regular meals nor acquired a taste for the right kind of food.”
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While it is true that Progressive Era and 1920s nutrition reformers, like most public activists of their generation, often paid insufficient attention to the preferences of the nation's new immigrant working class or to the cultures of rural people, whether black or white, their diet lessons cannot be dismissed simply as one more effort to Americanize immigrants and subsume all ethnic differences under a ubiquitous white sauce.
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Nutrition science held the very real promise of improved health, stronger bodies, and longer lives. Indeed, one might argue that the work of reform through food was more complex and not as singularly biased as the either historians or the contemporary rhetoric might suggest. When it came to eating habits, nutrition reformers seemed to understand both the cultural significance of food and the limits of their own power to change people's preferences. Their efforts to modernize diets had a larger purpose than assimilating immigrants. They believed they had in their hands the potential at once to eliminate malnutrition, the most visible symbol of poverty and inequality, and to improve the health of all Americans in the process. A closer look at the research on malnutrition as well as on immigrant diets suggests a complex interplay of science and culture.

In the search for a scientific or American diet, home economists understood as well as any sociologists of the day the deep cultural significance of food. As one research team observed, “dietary habits are remarkably fixed habits.”
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Food reformers, however, were firm believers in science, and this was the lesson their dietary advice was designed to promote. Home economist Grace Farrel, for example, believed that while it would be “impossible to graft all the American habits” onto immigrants, her profession could “give them a vision of the better, easier, and more modern way of life.”
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Two women, in particular, offer examples of the complex outlook governing food reform during the 1920s. Lucy Gillett, a home economist who worked for the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor during the 1920s and served as chair of the Social Services Section of the American Dietetic Association, conducted a major study of immigrant food habits during the early 1920s. Sophonisba Breckinridge, a pioneer social worker at the University of Chicago and a major figure in the early twentieth-century woman's movement, conducted numerous studies of immigrant lives. One of her most im portant works,
New Homes for Old,
was published in 1921 as part of the Americanization Studies series sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation.
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Both women expressed a belief in scientific diet that verged on cultural arrogance and an appreciation of ethnic diversity in American democracy and a sensitivity to the particular limitations on immigrant women in the markets and kitchens of their new homeland. Breckinridge acknowledged, for example, that “the problem of how far the immigrant groups should be encouraged to modify their diet can be determined only after a careful study of their dietary practices.”
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It was unclear, she said, to what extent “racial customs” should enter into any “Americanization scheme.”
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Gillett counseled her students that, “by showing respect for and acknowledging the good that is in all diets[,] there is sure to be an interchange of food habits which will be one of the ways of amalgamating the people living in one country.”
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Indeed, Gillett concluded, “So far as I know we have very little evidence that the better class of Italians need attention
more
than the better class of Americans.”
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Nutrition reformers allowed that some ethnic foods could be part of a proper American diet. Nutrition science, particularly Atwater's theory of substitutions, afforded reformers some measure of respect for immigrant diets.
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In particular, they understood Edward Atwater's substitution theory to mean that there was more than one way to get enough of the essential vitamins, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates needed for healthy living. Lucy Gillett, for example, advised social workers and home economics teachers to learn the names of various vegetables in the languages of their students.
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The only reason to change immigrant food habits, Gillett argued, was to “make them consistent with health, and perhaps of greater convenience to the people.”
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Gillett and Breckinridge were particularly critical of young social workers or home economists who blindly criticized immigrant food habits. “The foreign born woman,” Gillett wrote, “does not see why she should change the customs of centuries to suit the whim of a youthful person who does not know what her perfectly good food habits are.”
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Breckinridge similarly took young reformers to task for not understanding the cultures of their clients. In a widely quoted report from Massachusetts, for example, a young social worker blamed the peeling wallpaper in tenement housing on the ubiquitous steam rising from pots of cabbage that immigrant housewives kept on their stoves. The social worker tried to convince the women to fry their food instead of boiling it. Breckinridge dismissed this advice as “misguided” and cautioned against trying to “give advice on diet without … knowing much about it.”
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Much nutrition knowledge may have been lost in translation. While traditional diets may have contained many elements of nutrition, immigrant housewives—often via their children—had to learn new names for familiar foods and to substitute unfamiliar items for staples not available in American cities. The immigrant housewives interviewed by Breckinridge, for example, admitted that they did not know how to ask for the foods they needed. The result, Breckinridge said, was that they ended up “eliminating various essential elements and completely upsetting the balance of the traditional diet.”
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Even when women were willing to try new foods, however, they often did not know how to prepare them. A Detroit welfare worker, for example, complained that her clients “boiled whole grapefruit for hours and still found it tough,” while others cooked the leaves of the cauliflower and “threw away the flower.”
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American diet lessons were often limited by the structure of the grocery industry as well. Breckinridge found, for example, that stores in Chicago's Lithuanian neighborhoods rarely stocked fresh vegetables. Restricted diets, she wrote, were due less to women's unwillingness to try new foods than to the fact that “the markets afford so little variety.”
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(It was for this reason that Breckinridge became an early advocate of standardized, chain grocery stores.)
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While home economists had long preached the gospel of eating better for less, those familiar with working-class and immigrant kitchens knew that immigrant housewives lacked more than a knowledge of vitamins. As Lucy Gillett observed, “we must make the conditions possible for good nutrition.”
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There is, Sophonisba Breckinridge acknowledged, “the question of the means with which to buy.”
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According to most estimates, the average semi- or unskilled male worker during the early 1920s earned less than $2,000 per year, often considerably less.
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Breckinridge's own 1921 cost of living figures found that, on average, immigrant families spent more on food as a proportion of their incomes than did native-born families. In her study, immigrant families earned an average of $900 to $1200 per year and spent between 35 and 40 percent of that on food.
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The estimate that working-class families spent about one-third of their incomes on food was confirmed continually through the 1960s.

An American diet hinged on more than just the right food. Modern eating required a modern kitchen as well. The lessons of scientific eating might be difficult to apply whether in urban tenement kitchens or in tenant farm shacks. During the 1920s home economists developed classes for women in household management. They also targeted girls in school.
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Finally, many American kitchens lacked modern appliances and electricity well into the mid-twentieth century.
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Poor women often owned only a few cooking utensils and might not always have enough money to pay for gas to fuel a stove. Agricultural Extension workers in the American South, for example, found that large numbers of tenant farm houses had no stoves, so the women cooked over open hearths.
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Urban immigrant women had to learn how to use appliances (if they could afford them) and cooking utensils that were different from the ones they had grown up with. One research team commented that immigrant women were not familiar with egg beaters, tin cook ware, or double boilers. Lucy Gillett admitted that it was difficult to teach scientific cooking to women whose “entire outfit consists of two saucepans, perhaps only one, a knife, a spoon, and a tea cup.” She worried about whether the young girls in her nutrition classes who came from tenement homes would know how to apply what they learn.
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