School Lunch Politics (12 page)

The looming war crisis, as President Franklin Roosevelt observed, “made it evident that food and nutrition would be at least as important as metals and munitions” in the national preparations. In late 1941, to mobilize popular support for war measures, especially the inevitable restrictions on food and consumer goods, Roosevelt convened a White House National Nutrition Conference for Defense. Bringing together nutrition researchers as well as community and labor activists, state and local officials, school superintendents, farmers, and food processors, the conference provided a vehicle through which nutrition reformers and farm advocates could pool their efforts in developing a national food policy. The “newer knowledge of nutrition,” the conference report insisted, should be used not only for the nation's armed forces but also for “the civilian population as a whole,” particularly for women and children.
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Surgeon General Thomas Parran warned that the poor nutrition of citizens “means a slowing down of industrial production, a danger to military strength, and a lowering of the morale of millions.”
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The conference recommended “vigorous and continuous” nutrition research as well as “translation” of nutrition recommendations “into terms of everyday foods and appetizing meals.” In addition, the conference stressed using school lunches, along with food stamps and milk distribution, to “bring nourishing, adequate meals to those who could not otherwise afford them.” At the same time, the report pointed out, this would “help distribute food surpluses at a fair return to the farmer.”
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The conference marshaled all of its expertise and authority to the development of a national wartime food policy based both on the science of nutrition and on continued government support for the agricultural sector.

Chief among the conference concerns, of course, was the health of army recruits. Food and nutrition in this context were essential elements not only to physical health but to the nation's “virility” and its ability to defend itself. When the Selective Service Commission began drafting young men for service, just as in World War I, alarming numbers of boys were found to be physically unfit. Lewis B. Hershey, head of the Draft Board, estimated that “probably one-third” of the men rejected for service suffered from “disabilities directly or indirectly connected with nutrition.” This fact, Hershey warned, “should be disturbing to us as a people.” Surgeon General Parran warned that “the great preponderance of boys who were rejected for the draft were found to be boys who in earlier school life had poor nutrition.”
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It was clear that these officials believed malnutrition to be a serious threat to the nation's strength on the battlefront as well as on the home front. America cannot be strong, Hershey starkly declared, “when one-half of her sons are substandard physically. America needs whole men not half men.”
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Estimating that two out of every five men called up for the draft were unfit for service, Hershey declared nutrition to be a national concern. Indeed, malnutrition threatened not only the quality of the nation's defense forces but the vigor, if not the virility, of democracy at home. According to Parran, the problem began well before the boys appeared before their draft boards. Most of the recruits who were rejected, he said, “had poor nutrition” as schoolchildren.
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Both Parran and Hershey warned post-war planners that weak soldiers could not defend the nation abroad and weak citizens could not protect democracy at home. The specter of national weakness worried Congress as well. Richard F. Harless, Democratic congressman from Arizona, for example, warned that if one segment of the population “is weak either physically or mentally, it affects the whole of this Nation.”
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Another Democrat, Virginia's John Flannagan, said, “If we develop a strong, virile, intellectual race, consideration will have to be given to the development and training of the mind and body alike.” Democracy, he warned, “is not the creature of intellectual weaklings any more than it is the creature of physical weaklings. It sprang from the loins of men of strong minds and bodies. And if it is to be preserved it will be preserved by the same kind of men.”
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Nutrition had clearly become a key element in maintaining a strong army abroad and a healthy citizenry at home. The link between food and democracy that would characterize cold war foreign policy took shape well before the end of the war.

Fears about the strength of the nation's “manpower” led, of course, to concerns about changing gender roles at home. During World War II, as in other wars, women took on traditionally male jobs both in the public realm and in the private sphere. Ever larger numbers of women, for example, took jobs outside the home in war industries and in other paid employment. By one estimate, almost half of all women were in the labor force by the war's end. What is more, increasing numbers of mothers worked outside the home: the percentage of married women in the work force rose from 14 percent in 1940 to 23 percent four years later.
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In this case, changing gender roles fit well with the emerging concern about nutrition in the national defense. With more mothers in the work force, the case for a national school lunch program appeared even more compelling. George Chatfield's Coordinating Committee warned that mothers working in war industries could not be expected to be home at noon to prepare lunches for their children. Indeed, working mothers, Chatfield observed, did not have time in the morning to pack “well-planned lunches” for children.
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With so many women in the work force, the Office of Civilian Defense declared that school lunches had a “new significance.”
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Work outside the home, combined with food shortages and rationing, left mothers hard-pressed to provide balanced lunches for their children. Frank P. Whalen, assistant superintendent of the New York City Schools, claimed that rationing had “thrown mothers off their stride.” Women, he said, “just don't know where to go, and they pick one thing and another, and they put together a very badly balanced diet.”
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Universal child nutrition was perhaps even more important in wartime than it had been during the Depression. In the economic crisis, feeding children who were poor took precedence. In wartime, the nation needed to ensure the health and vigor of all its children. Predicting that women's wage work would become a permanent feature in the post-war years, United Auto Workers Union spokeswoman Anna Berenson told a congressional hearing on school lunches that “few wartime problems on the home-front have caused so much conflict and confusion as that of proper care and nutrition for the children of working mothers.” A national school lunch program, she believed, now had to be a matter of national health policy.
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Americans seemed happy to concede lunch to the public sector. Unlike European cultures in which the midday meal held major family and social significance, American work habits and social structures emphasized evening dinners over less formal lunches. The argument that the state bore a major responsibility to maintain the health of its citizens—particularly its children—was particularly compelling during wartime. By this time, of course, the federal government already had considerable resources invested in school lunch programs all over the country. School lunch advocates both in and outside Washington mounted a steady call for more permanent funding for children's meals. In early 1940, veteran nutrition reformers in the Bureau of Home Economics, including Lucy Gillett, Hazel Kyrk, and Hazel Stiebeling, began talking with Children's Bureau officials about expanding the school lunch program as part of the campaign for “nutrition in the national defense.”
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Their influence was most dramatically evident in 1943 when Congress authorized continuing funds for school lunches and consolidated the various federal programs (including those operating under the now defunct WPA) into a Community School Lunch Program.
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One of the most notable features of the Community School Lunch Program was the establishment of federal contracts governing school cafeteria operations.

The school lunch contracts codified expert nutrition advice and expanded the federal bureaucracy invested in school lunch programs. Women in the Bureau of Home Economics and the Children's Bureau had been critical in shaping New Deal child welfare policy. When it came to nutrition policy, however, the women vied for authority with male policy makers in the Department of Agriculture as well as in the War Department. The women were successful, however, in establishing national standards for child nutrition and for the school lunch programs that were now operating throughout the country. School lunch contracts established standards governing food preparation and service as well as cafeteria administration and record-keeping. The contracts also stipulated that every child in the community was to receive a “lunch of optimum nutritional value,” and every child from a low-income family or a family on welfare was to receive a free meal.
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The Department of Agriculture hired an entire staff of officials, both in Washington and in the states, to verify the nutrition content of meals, maintain records on the cost of lunches, monitor the number of children served—both those who paid and those who ate for free—and generally document lunchroom operations throughout the country. The significance of the contracts, however, rested less on actual lunchroom operations (in most cases, the contract provisions were only minimally enforced) than on the fact that the federal government, for the first time, asserted national standards for a school-related program.

While the school lunch contracts stipulated standards for lunchroom operations and children's nutrition, there were serious limitations on the use of federal resources. Federal funds, for example, could be used only to purchase food and to pay for professional nutritionists. Schools had to raise local resources if they wanted to expand existing kitchen facilities or to build new lunchrooms. This was a particular problem in urban schools, most of which had been built without lunchrooms. Pre—World War II city planners by and large assumed that the mothers would prepare lunch at home for their school-aged children. While this was clearly not the case in many working-class neighborhoods, urban schools nonetheless lacked kitchen facilities. Schools were also prohibited from using federal resources to pay salaries for lunchroom labor. At the same time, however, school lunch contracts required schools to maintain professional rather than voluntary staffs. This meant, in effect, that only schools in areas with sufficient local resources could sign on to the community school lunch program. While this provision was intended both to ensure proper management and, not incidentally, to create a demand for professional dietitians, it precluded schools from using their traditional (largely free) labor force of neighborhood volunteers and PTA mothers.

Federal school lunch contracts firmly established professional authority over school meals. Participating schools had to hire trained dietitians or nutritionists to oversee lunchroom operations, and they were prohibited from contracting with private restaurants or commercial vendors to provide food or services. While the women (and men) crafting these measures believed they were establishing national professional standards of operation, as is often the case with good intentions, these provisions had farreaching and unanticipated consequences. Most states, for example, simply hired one nutritionist or dietitian to administer all of their school lunch programs. This, in effect, meant that most schools operated with little direct supervision, as one person tried to supervise dozens of programs often spread out over wide geographic areas. Similarly, the provision prohibiting schools from contracting with private operators was intended to ensure that school lunches adhered to scientific nutrition standards and that the meals served were of high quality. But this provision had the unintended consequence of limiting school lunch programs to those schools, districts, and states that had the will and the resources to raise local funds to supplement the federal resources. Thus the contracts that were intended to establish equity and standardization in children's lunches in effect ensured deep inequalities in the program.

The most far reaching element in the school lunch contracts was the stipulation that schools receiving federal funds serve all children equally and provide free meals to poor children.
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Congressional legislators were particularly insistent on this matter. At every opportunity over the next two decades, senators and congressmen regularly quizzed school administrators and Department of Agriculture officials about local practices regarding the distribution of free lunches. Over and over, despite the realities of segregation and discrimination in communities across the nation, school lunch administrators insisted that they treated all children equally. No one, the administrators insisted, knew which child paid and which received a free lunch. This was, of course, patently absurd. Every child in every school lunch line knew perfectly well which ones received free lunches. While Congress insisted on a rhetoric of equity and opportunity, it neglected to include any enforcement mechanisms in the contract provisions. True, federal officials could withhold resources from schools that did not meet the standards, but few public officials wanted to be accused of refusing to feed children. The War Food Administration's school lunch chief, William C. Ockey, admitted that he held little leverage over states or districts that did not operate according to standard. Most particularly, local officials could distribute the federal school lunch resources in any way they saw fit. School lunch programs therefore largely mirrored local inequalities. This was particularly significant for southern states, which operated racially segregated school systems. Virginia, for example, received over $400,000 in federal funds, but the money went to only a few schools in the state. Iowa, which received fewer dollars supplemented federal resources with state tax funds and so was able to feed more children than Virginia was. Similarly, Texas, which received nearly 1.5 million from the federal government, only provided about 200,000 lunches; New York, which received substantially less federal money, used local taxes and fed 372,000 children.
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What is more, even those states contributing local funds did not provide substantial numbers of free meals. Indeed, most states relied on children's fees to match federal contributions and to cover the costs of operation. This meant that, from the start, paying children subsidized free meals for the poor. While almost six million children ate government-subsidized school lunches by the time the United States entered World War II, few of those lunches were served free and few of the children served were poor.