School Lunch Politics (7 page)

A modern diet for Americans promised nutrition and health regardless of income or ethnicity. Yet as food reformers were acutely aware, many Americans, whether out of ignorance or poverty, did not enjoy the benefits of healthful diets. During the 1920s, at the very moment that the nutrition message was becoming part of popular culture, malnutrition loomed as an ominous threat to the nation's progress.
⁸⁰
For this reason, food reformers, along with teachers, doctors, and social workers, waged an intense battle during the 1920s with malnutrition. “The improper and unscientific feeding of children,” observed Columbia University home economist Mary Swartz Rose, “is one of the most common causes of disease, disability, incapacity for work, both mental and physical, loss of energy, susceptibility to contract and inability to withstand disease.”
⁸¹
Malnutrition studies documented deficiencies that, while traditionally linked to poverty, appeared now to be subject to scientific—as opposed to social—remedies. And if poverty no longer sufficed as an explanation for malnutrition, then, indeed, nutrition education and school lunches would be essential elements in modern life.

N
UTRITION
AND
M
ALNUTRITION

Defining and measuring malnutrition, however, proved to be an inexact science. Like food advice in general, discussions of malnutrition revealed deeply held cultural notions about health and body type.
⁸²
Traditionally, skinny bodies, pale skin, and sunken eyes were taken to be signs of malnutrition. Physician James Kerr, for example, in his 1916 book on school hygiene, told his readers, “There is no danger of giving too much food.”
⁸³
Subjective observations of body types did not, however, suffice in the scientific age. By the 1920s, physicians and nutritionists had developed elaborate height-weight tables and calorie charts to guide assessments of malnutrition and children's healthy development. Drawing on Wilbur Atwater's tables, measures such as the Dunfermline Scale and later the Baldwin Wood tables used height-to-weight ratios to set standards for normal development.
⁸⁴
Mary Swartz Rose, who advocated for the establishment of national height and weight standards, proposed that children should be labeled malnourished if “they show disturbance of the normal weight curve.”
⁸⁵
Most doctors and nutritionists agreed that that “if the child weighs 10 per cent less than the average … he probably has something the matter with him.”
⁸⁶
Inevitably, a norm based on “Americanborn children of fortunate circumstances” labeled many others as malnourished and in need of professional intervention.
⁸⁷

The seemingly objective height and weight tables provided powerful tools for measuring children's health, but they were equally powerful in establishing racial and gendered body norms. These norms reflected ideal body types that individuals rarely achieved. Most problematic was the fact that the height-weight ratios and calorie recommendations were based on studies of adult males, often soldiers or laborers, and, equally as often, of Anglo-Saxon origin.
⁸⁸
Needless to say, the children of immigrants, as well as African American children, frequently came up short. Thus, not surprisingly, a 1921 study of boys in public and private schools found the public school boys significantly smaller in stature. On the basis of this comparison, the study concluded that malnutrition constituted a serious problem in the nation's public schools.
⁸⁹
At the time, of course, the racial, ethnic, and gendered limitations of these norms were quickly dismissed. Lucy Gillett, for example, attributed the small size of Italian immigrant children to the “high-strung atmosphere” of their households, not to mention their preference for macaroni, olive oil, and “Roman cheese,” which, she complained, left them open to “a deficiency of both iron and vitamines [sic].”
⁹⁰
While Mary Swartz Rose acknowledged that a standard based largely on people of “English, German, and Scandinavian stock” might not be entirely appropriate for Italian children, she believed that science did not yet know “the growth capacities of some of these short-statured peoples.” Short stature was not, she insisted, a “racial characteristic,” but rather was developed by an “unfavorable condition of diet or environment or habit.” Rose was convinced that a healthy diet would bring all children up to the norm.

Underweight school children were subjected to intense programs of behavior modification and nutrition education. Beginning during World War I and continuing through midcentury, women's clubs, community groups, health departments, and teachers sponsored campaigns to identify underweight children. Special examinations and regular weigh-ins became common in schools throughout the country.
⁹¹
Part of an extensive movement centered in the Children's Bureau and led by women reformers and mothers' groups, the weigh-ins reflected a growing concern with children's welfare and maternal health. Culminating in the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act providing health education for pregnant women and mothers, this movement encompassed well-baby clinics, vaccination campaigns, and nutrition education.
⁹²
The weigh-ins were accompanied by extensive propaganda urging children to eat properly. The focus of most school nutrition campaigns was to encourage children to gain weight. In one program, those children who gained properly were placed at one end of the class, and “those who do not gain at the other end.” “The children who gain are praised for their achievement; the one who gains the most receives a gold star.”
⁹³
Another program celebrated little Anna Carado's “graduation” when she gained the proper amount of weight by rewarding her with yellow balloons that said “good health” and a familiar tune saying, “Anna Carado keep it up, Anna you're a dandy, Don't forget the milk and fruit, and leave alone the candy.”
⁹⁴
Children's school meals and nutrition classes, it seemed, provided the perfect laboratories in which nutritionists could explore the best means to convince people to change their eating habits. As one researcher put it, “if children are to acquire good food habits, they must be taught to like the foods that are essential for growth.”
⁹⁵

Figure 1.2. Schools regularly weighed and measured children to identify those who were malnourished. Children are pictured here calculating gains in weight. National League for Nursing Archives, 1894–1952, National Library of Medicine.

Not surprisingly, the campaign to weigh all schoolchildren uncovered a staggering number who were “underweight.” Armed with objective measures of malnutrition, home economists, physicians, and teachers began to see cases everywhere. Indeed, coinciding with the discovery of nutrition, malnutrition “scares” appeared with regular frequency in both the professional and the popular press.
⁹⁶
The
Journal of Home Economics,
as well as
Parents Magazine,
regularly published malnutrition studies. A 1917 of New York City children estimated that 21 percent were undernourished, while a study the next year estimated that as many as onequarter of all children in the nation were malnourished. In 1921 another study suggested that 10 percent of all urban children were more than 10 percent underweight, half had rickets, and 90 percent had decayed teeth.
⁹⁷
Yet another study found that over half of Michigan's public school students and 60 percent of those in parochial schools were underweight.
⁹⁸
These shocking figures provided ready evidence that the nation's children needed nutrition education, not to mention nutritious meals.

By the 1920s, a consensus was forming among professionals, teachers, and parents alike that lunch programs could address the most serious nutrition problems facing American children.
⁹⁹
Like the benefits of public schooling itself, lunch programs promised a certain leveling of class and ethnic differences and socialization into mainstream American culture. As early as 1901 home economist pioneer Caroline Hunt observed that school lunches not only “satisfied the bodily needs” but developed “the cultural side” of children as well. The question of school lunches she noted, should “properly be regarded as an educational one.”
¹⁰⁰
Studies of school lunch programs unanimously found improvements in children's health and enhanced performance in school. In 1922, for example, a study concluded that children would “do much better in school work in the afternoon” if they ate a hot lunch.
¹⁰¹
Montana State College home economist Lottie Milam found that the hot school lunch “has brought about greater interest in school work improvement in the general physical condition of pupils, less need of discipline, increased interest in home work, improved attendance especially on cold days, less hurried eating, habits of cleanliness and neatness, good table manners, and proper eating habits.”
¹⁰²
In New York, home economists noticed “a marked improvement in physical condition and orderly ways” of children who had received milk in the morning and soup at noon.
¹⁰³
Mary Swartz Rose estimated that the grades of well-nourished children averaged 3 to 4 percent higher than those of their more poorly nourished peers. In Detroit, Rose documented that underweight boys earned 1.5 percent lower grades than did those whose weight was “normal.” Indeed, she observed that boys “who were ahead of their age in weight performed 2.6 percent above average.”
¹⁰⁴
In Winslow, Arizona, the school lunch manager claimed “significant weight gain among Mexican children.” The school board there was so impressed with the results of the hot lunch program “that it voted to continue the work at any cost.”
¹⁰⁵

S
CHOOL
L
UNCH
AS
P
UBLIC
P
OLICY

Until Richards's experiment in Boston, school meals in the United States, as in Europe, had mainly been arenas of private charity. During the late nineteenth century, voluntary organizations regularly operated free lunch programs for poor children in American cities. In Philadelphia, for example, the Home and School League sent home economists into high schools to teach girls how to prepare meals and to feed children who could not afford to bring their own lunches. The Women's School Alliance of Milwaukee similarly offered lunches to poor children using donations from churches, individuals, and private clubs. Cleveland high school principals arranged for lunch baskets to be delivered to their schools “to avoid dangers of food sold by corner groceries, push carts, and street vendors.”
¹⁰⁶
In many towns and cities, women's organizations like the mother's clubs and the General Federation of Women's Clubs sponsored milk programs or lunch wagons.
¹⁰⁷
While some of these school meal programs paid no heed to nutrition but rather had as their purpose simply feeding hungry children, others took up scientific motherhood and promoted nutrition education along with nutritious meals.
¹⁰⁸
Richards's efforts, for the first time, codified nutrition education for school children. Her efforts also marked the entry of the state into the arena of children's nutrition.

During the early twentieth century, both European and American reformers began to envision state-sponsored welfare systems that would mitigate the inequalities resulting from industrial development. While in the United States, the state governments had always been deeply involved in both education and social welfare, until the early twentieth century, the federal government rarely intruded itself into the daily lives of citizens. During the second decade of the twentieth century, however, largely drawing on trans-Atlantic social welfare initiatives, American reformers began to push the federal government to become more active through a range of social and economic regulatory legislation including income tax, workmen's compensation, and industrial protective legislation. In Europe, school lunches had long been part of traditional state-sponsored programs for the poor. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, for example, local governments in Germany and France provided food as well as textbooks and clothing to needy children. Other nations adopted similar measures, and by the end of the nineteenth century, most European states fed children either in schools or in poor-houses. After the 1898 Boer War, British policy makers became alarmed at the poor health of military recruits. As a result, the 1905 Provision of Meals Act in England became a model of state-sponsored child welfare. This act authorized local educational authorities to use public funds for school lunches. Under the Provision of Meals Act, an estimated 100,000 children received hot noontime meals. Lunchroom equipment became a regular part of equipment expenditures, and “restaurants” became permanent features of English schools. Other European countries enacted similar provisions shifting school lunches from the realm of charity to state-supported public welfare.
¹⁰⁹