School Lunch Politics (10 page)

Communities throughout the country happily accepted federal funds to supplement local efforts to feed poor children. In Jefferson City, Missouri, for example, black and white children in the public schools as well as children in the city's Catholic schools ate lunch in WPA-sponsored cafeterias. Federal relief funds paid for labor, while the state relief commission supplemented food costs and the local Community Chest provided funds for milk. In addition, the local newspaper sponsored a fund-raising campaign that netted about $1,500 for food in 1935.
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In Colorado, where surveys had revealed that 50 percent of the children were malnourished, the WPA fed hot lunches to over 20,000 students and employed 400 “needy women” as well. Washington, D.C.'s WPA program served 8,000 children. There, 150 women prepared sandwiches, fruit, and milk packages in a central kitchen. The packages were then delivered to schools throughout the city. Children from the “foreign district” of Springfield, Massachusetts, enjoyed hot meals at school, and in Mississippi both black and white schools operated lunchrooms.
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By the early 1940s, WPA “school lunch units” operated in 35,000 schools throughout the country and served an estimated two million children.
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Using menus and recipes along with guides for food storage and preparation developed by women at the Bureau of Home Economics, relief-based lunchrooms became, in effect, test kitchens for a national school lunch program.

Figure 2.2. Schools took advantage of surplus food for children's meals. School lunch program, Federal Works Project, location unknown, 1939. Kansas State Historical Society.

E
ATING
THE
S
URPLUS

A key element in the new school lunch programs was the availability of federally donated food. At the start of the New Deal, a battle waged within the Roosevelt administration and the Department of Agriculture over how best to address the nation's agricultural problems. On the one hand, a group of liberal policy makers sought deep social transformation of the agricultural sector, including a redistribution of land that would allow tenant farmers to own the land they worked. By the mid-1930s, this vision was soundly eclipsed by a group of policy makers led by M. L. Wilson and Chester Davis, who believed that farmers' problems could best be solved by maintaining price levels and market strength.
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For Wilson and his cohort of agricultural economists, a modern, healthy farm sector required government assistance in the form of commodity supports and the technical assistance necessary to ensure increased productivity (e.g., mechanization, fertilizer, and new seed strains). This approach favored landowners over tenant farmers and sharecroppers and pointed toward large-scale operations that would, in the years after World War II, come to characterize the rise of industrial agri-business and the decline of the family farm. Most notably during the 1930s, however, these policy makers promoted the formation of a Surplus Marketing Administration (SMA), which ensured commodity price levels by allowing the government to purchase surplus products.
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While at first the SMA embarrassed itself and the Roosevelt administration by destroying crops while hungry people waited in bread lines for food, the agency ultimately hit upon a brilliant strategy: send the surplus food to school lunchrooms.
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The surplus marketing strategy dramatically changed American food relief policy. Under Section 32 of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, Congress authorized the Department of Agriculture to purchase surplus farm commodities and donate these goods to schools and welfare offices in every state. This effectively transformed free commodity distribution into agricultural price support rather than food aid, and for the first time, national welfare policy became intimately linked to agriculture. Under Section 32 the Secretary of Agriculture now had considerable authority to both intervene in commodity markets and influence children's nutrition, as schools became a key element in an emerging market-based strategy of recovery for the agriculture sector.
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Agricultural economist Milo Perkins and his colleague, H. R. Tolley, two architects of the surplus marketing strategy, declared the plan would “lick” the twin problems of hunger in the cities and low prices on the farm. School lunches, they believed, would “be of benefit to both farmers and to consumers.”
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The surplus marketing strategy tied national food and welfare policy together in unprecedented ways. State welfare offices distributed federally donated commodities directly to families as part of local relief efforts. Surplus food also formed the basis for a short-lived Food Stamp Program under which families on welfare could purchase food stamps and use them to buy surplus food at lower than market prices.
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The most important and lasting part of the surplus disposal program was the distribution of food to school lunch programs. Noting that the “wisest” strategy was to find outlets for surplus food “as soon as possible,” SMA administrator Marvin Jones eagerly recruited schools into the new program. Farmers and children would both benefit, Jones said because “everyone liked to see children well fed.”
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T
ABLE
2.1.
Children Participating in the Surplus Marketing Administration School Lunch Program, Public and Parochial Schools, by Region, 1941

Source:
H. M. Southworth and M. I. Klayman, The School Lunch Program and Agricultural Surplus Disposal, United States Department of Agriculture, Miscellaneous Publication No. 467, October 1941 (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1941),28.

* West: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming. Midwest: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Wisconsin. East: Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia. South: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia

** Continental U.S. (In Puerto Rico, 16% of children participated; in the Virgin Islands, 52.7% participated.)

 

 

 

The availability of federally donated food sparked an immediate expansion in the number of schools offering lunchtime meals. Education administrators throughout the country signed on to receive surplus commodities for their lunchrooms. In the first year alone, an estimated 60,000 schools in twenty states received donated food.
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In 1936 the Department of Agriculture boasted that it was feeding almost 350,000 children each day. The number of schools participating in the federal program increased each year, and by 1942, the Department of Agriculture estimated that 78,851 schools and over five million children were involved in the program (see
Table 2.1
). These figures represented about one-third of the total number of elementary and secondary schools in the country and about one-quarter of all schoolchildren.
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The USDA economists believed that the ability to send surplus commodities to schools exerted a positive effect “throughout the market.” Overall, they claimed, there was a rise in prices and an increase in the quantity of food available to consumers. In 1942 the SMA distributed 4.5 million pounds of food valued at over $21 million.
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The program, agriculture officials concluded, “added increase in farmers' incomes over and above the value of the net quantity removed from the market.” What was more, school lunches, at least in theory, created new demand for farm goods by “introducing foods to children that they might never have tasted.” Department of Agriculture officials declared that “no other method of surplus disposal brings farmers so large an increase in income per dollar of government subsidy as does the school lunch program.”
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Even critical assessments that questioned the program's actual impact on farm prices admitted its significance as a social measure. The school lunch program, noted agriculture historian Don Paarlberg, “gave the lobbyist, the congressman, and the secretary of agriculture a chance to improve relations with farm constituents.” The program's combination of “myth, self-interest, and goodwill was the process by which Johnny got his hamburger, his applesauce, his prunes, and his peanut butter.”
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The problem was, of course, that Johnny as often got surplus apricots or olives as hamburger and applesauce for lunch. Tying school menus to agricultural surplus significantly shaped school menus and the nutritional content of children's diets. Department of Agriculture officials appealed to Wilbur Atwater's food substitution theory, to justify an admittedly unbalanced and inconsistent supply of surplus commodities. As one historian put it, “The USDA was trying to create the very problem that commodity distribution was originally supposed to ease—consumers' ability to afford a nutritionally adequate diet.”
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Bureau of Home Economics school lunch recipes, for example, advised cafeteria operators that eggs could replace meat “as a protein in the lunch” at least a few days a month. School administrators knew, however, that abstract nutrition theory would not work in the lunchroom.
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Stories of “dumping” food in school cafeterias took on the status of urban legends. Sidney B. Hall, a professor of school administration at George Washington University, complained that USDA supervisors sent “loads of onions or grapefruit or whatnot to communities, when, as a matter of fact, the people there did not need those commodities.”
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Similarly, New York City Board of Education member George Chatfield reported that the USDA shipped huge quantities of apples to his city schools. “Do you know where they went?” Chatfield asked. “They came so frequently in the lunch program that they went in the toilets. The kids didn't eat them.”
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Montgomery County, Maryland, cafeteria supervisor Gertrude Bowie reported that the children in her district used the surplus grapefruit “to play catch with” because they were unfamiliar with the fruit and refused to eat it. Other schools reported receiving so many eggs that they had to serve hard-boiled eggs for days at a time. The result of such a menu, complained one cafeteria manager, “may be that the children will revolt at the very sight of eggs.”
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While schools were happy to receive free food, under the surplus commodity program lunchroom administrators never knew from month to month, or from one year to the next, which foods would be available. Just ten commodities, for example, made up 90 percent of the food sent to schools. While milk and dairy products were generally available, as one report put it, “what foods are provided at any time and how much of them depend on the current purchase programs of the Surplus Marketing Administration, and these programs are planned primarily to meet farmers' needs,” not the needs of children's nutrition.
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This made it difficult to plan meals and even more difficult to plan budgets, because cafeteria administrators had no way to know how much extra money they would need to supplement the donated commodities. Schools that participated in the program were required to accept whatever foods were distributed and thus had to craft meals often out of foods most children refused to eat. Indeed, the Bureau of Home Economics, in recognition of this dilemma, produced scores of recipes and menus based on items like almonds and apricots, in an effort to help cafeteria managers use the surplus foods. Even so, a 1940 study of nutrition in school lunches found the meals “might well have been more ample in some nutrients.”
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Uncertain supplies and a reliance on surplus commodities from the start seriously undercut the claim that school lunch programs could provide children with nutritious meals.