School Lunch Politics (32 page)

Privatization of school lunchrooms was a particularly attractive solution to the problem of providing large numbers of free meals to poor children. During the 1970s, an unexpected alliance formed between community activists and corporate America in an effort to bring economic resources into poor communities. Some anti-poverty leaders saw the potential for the development of local school food-service operations that would foster businesses and expand the resources in poor communities. Committee on School Lunch Participation spokeswoman Jean Fairfax, for example, believed that commercial kitchens could become community-controlled corporations “in the ghetto” and could not only provide food for needy children but also create jobs and skills training for neighborhood residents.
⁴⁰
Anti-hunger activist and chair of the Citizen's Board of Inquiry John Kramer saw privatization as a way to lessen the hold of the Department of Agriculture on school lunches and at the same time enhance opportunities in poor districts. “Nobody is asking that there be a wholesale invitation” to private companies, Kramer said; “we are instead asking that the door be opened.” Kramer took the Department of Agriculture to task for its sluggish response to demands for free lunches and for being too slow to see the value in allowing private companies into school lunchrooms. Because neither the federal government nor the states were willing to put sufficient resources into school lunchrooms, Kramer thought, perhaps private food service might be able to turn cafeterias into more viable operations. The issue was not about supplying books or equipment to public schools, he insisted; “we are talking about feeding children.”
⁴¹
Congressional representatives from districts with large populations of poor children likewise saw private investment as a way to fund free lunches. Illinois congressman Roman Pucinski, for example, became excited at the prospect of bringing private food-service companies into Chicago's poorest school districts. This, Pucinski believed, would offer the perfect solution for schools in his district that had no cafeteria facilities on site. In the Senate, liberal Democrat George McGovern picked up the call for privatization. “If we are going to solve the nutrition problem in the United States,” he said, “we have got to have the cooperation of private industry.”
⁴²
In effect, once free lunches were mandated for all poor children, public officials and hunger activists alike began to cede the pro gram to the private sector. Because neither Congress nor the public in general seemed willing to fund children's “right to lunch,” perhaps the corporate market might be better suited to ensuring equal opportunity for all.

In 1969, as one of his last acts as Secretary of Agriculture, Orville Freeman announced a new set of regulations that would, for the first time, allow school districts to contract with private companies to run, operate, and manage their lunchrooms. Freeman estimated that at least nine million children attended schools in areas that had no lunch facilities. Most of these, he noted, were in “urban ghetto” or rural areas, both home to large numbers of poor black children. Under existing funding restrictions, schools had to raise local money to build new kitchen facilities. If the federal government undertook to finance new cafeterias, Freeman argued, not only would the costs be “astronomical” but such action would destroy the traditional separation between federal and state educational responsibilities. “We are going to have to develop some new delivery systems,” he said, particularly in order to expand the availability of free lunches.
⁴³
Working with state nutrition administrators and food management companies, Freeman proposed elaborate contracts that allowed private companies to prepare, transport, and serve meals but also stipulated that all management and administrative responsibilities for the lunch program would remain in the hands of a professional school lunch supervisor. The Agriculture Secretary invited six urban schools that lacked lunch facilities to enter into private contracts on an “experimental” basis. Admitting that he faced a “a strong emotional feeling” about maintaining the public character of the school lunch program, Freeman promised that he would not allow the program to be “exploited for commercial purposes.” Although private food-service companies had to operate under the “profit motive,” Freeman believed that they could nonetheless keep children's welfare as their main goal. “I see nothing to be lost and lots to be gained by testing under carefully controlled circumstances,” he said.
⁴⁴
Calling the new contracts a “service company approach,” Freeman assured his critics that privatization was “simply another tool to help assure every child an opportunity for a nutritious meal in school.”
⁴⁵
Indeed, Freeman went so far as to suggest that the “market strategy” might actually provide better service than his department had been able to provide.

As the professionals feared, however, the “service company approach” did not remain limited to food preparation and delivery. Three years after Freeman's initial foray into private food-service contracts, Congress opened the door to soft drink vending machines in schools. The 1946 National School Lunch Act definitively restricted the sale of “competitive foods” in the schools. To protect lunchroom revenues and also to ensure that children actually ate their lunch (rather than fill up on cakes and candy), the School Lunch Act reflected the influence of professionals who wanted to maintain control over the nutrition content of school food. For years, however, private industry had longingly eyed the school market. Until the free lunch campaign and the budget crisis of the early 1970s, however, there had been little incentive for schools to engage with commercial businesses. The pressure to serve more free lunches and the persistent refusal of states to take up the school lunch budget slack pushed school officials into a desperate search for new revenue sources. In 1972, the National Soft Drink Association finally succeeded in securing an amendment to the school lunch reauthorization bill that would eliminate the restriction on “competitive food.” Although the amendment received little attention at the time, the consequences were far-reaching.

School lunch administrators, nutritionists, and newspaper columnists loudly protested vending machines in the schools, but when they realized the true nature of the legislation it was all but too late.
New York Times
columnist Jack Anderson accused the vending machine companies of pulling “a sleeper.” The amendment, he said, would only increase private profits “at the expense of children's eating habits.” For the first time, Anderson warned, “candy bars, potato chips and soda pop” would be allowed to directly compete with nutritious meals.
⁴⁶
In an effort to repeal the amendment the following year, Gretchen Plagge, director of food services for the Santa Fe schools, accused the vending industry of duping Congress with its “advertising efforts” and said that no one in the professional community, including medical authorities, nutritionists, and PTA members, “sought such a law.” Plagge warned that vending machines would provide students with “countless opportunities for the purchase of foods with little or limited nutritional value.” A vending machine snack, she said, was a poor substitute for a “balanced, well-prepared meal.” In Plagg's view, Congress had a “moral as well as legal responsibility” to protect children's health, and it would be unethical for schools to exploit children's “desire for sweet, high calorie foods.”
⁴⁷
Children, Plagg believed, simply should not be allowed to choose unhealthy foods. The problem, nutritionists feared, was that the “junk food” would compete not only with more healthful food choices but also for children's lunch money. Columbia University nutritionist Jean Gussow warned that American taxpayers supported the school lunch program in order to provide nutritious food for children—not to supply snacks. The vending industry, however, insisted that any restriction on its access to children was an attempt to “federally control” the market.
⁴⁸

The snack and soft drink industry, in a new move, however, claimed that their products, in fact, contributed to children's health. Asserting that “there is more to nutrition than vitamins,” industry spokesmen told a congressional panel that “quick energy, assimilation of liquid,” and “en joyment” contributed as much to children's well-being as vitamins and minerals.
⁴⁹
Nutrition arguments held little sway in the face of shrinking budgets, and within a short time school vending machine contracts were worth millions of dollars.
⁵⁰
Realizing that it would be almost impossible to legislate snack food out of children's lives, school lunch professionals suggested a compromise. If Congress allowed vending machines in schools, their use should be limited to non-lunch hours so as not to compete with the “non-profit” school lunch program.

Claiming that children had a “right to candy,” food industry spokesmen defended the sale of snacks as a legitimate source of extra revenue for cash-strapped school systems.
⁵¹
Despite professional and public protest, soft drink “pouring rights contracts” were seductively appealing, particularly for poor schools. In exchange for pouring rights, schools received hundreds of dollars' worth of athletic equipment and other supplies. In addition to revenue from the machines themselves, schools received sports equipment (shirts with the company logo), educational materials (math posters with the company logos), and other resources. Despite the warnings and protests of professionals, snack foods gained a solid footing in the schools. Indeed, within a few years at least one-quarter of all middle schools and 42 percent of all high schools regularly sold soda and candy, and by the end of the century 43 percent of elementary, 74 percent of middle schools, and 98 percent of senior high schools had contracts with vending machine companies and soft-drink distributors.
⁵²
While many of the vending machines were closed during lunch hours, according to one report, one in five high school students could access snack food at any time during the school day.
⁵³

C
OMBO
M
EALS
AND
N
UTRITION
S
TANDARDS

Once private industry had a foot in the door of the school building, it was only a matter of time before the cafeteria lines opened as well. Foodservice giant Sodexho vice president Tom Callahan predicted that as long as federal reimbursements did not keep up with “food and labor cost” and state contributions continued to be “embarrassingly low,” schools would either have to drop out of the National School Lunch Program or find “creative ways” to meet their costs. The easiest route, he predicted, would be private contacts.
⁵⁴

The free-lunch mandate ultimately altered the menu as much as it altered the demographics of the school lunchroom. While never known for being tasty, school lunches had, in general, been prepared on site and, until the late 1960s expansion, were almost always hot, threecourse meals that included the major food groups. The Department of Agriculture's nutrition standards mandating that the Type A, fully subsidized lunch provide at least one-third of a child's nutritional requirements over the course of the week defined the meals that had appeared on children's lunch trays since the 1950s. Although the Department of Agriculture admitted that only about 37 percent of the children participating in the National School Lunch Program actually ate a Type A meal, this menu served as the model for school lunches across the country.
⁵⁵
Chicken breast with gravy biscuits and honey butter, celery and carrot sticks, a piece of orange, and an oatmeal and raisin cookie with milk could be found, however, only in schools that had kitchens or school districts that could afford to invest in new cafeterias. Faced with providing large numbers of free or reduced price lunches, many schools turned to “bag lunches” or pre-packaged meals delivered by private contractors. Predictably, given more choice in menu options, children chose hamburgers, French fries, or pizza over the three-course balanced meal of meat, vegetable, and potatoes.
⁵⁶

At the very moment when large numbers of poor children finally gained the right to free school meals, the Department of Agriculture began to modify its recommended nutrition standards. In 1970 the department eliminated the traditional Type A, B, and C meal designations and announced that henceforth it would reimburse only Type A meals. While requiring all schools to serve the nutritional equivalent of a Type A meal appeared on the surface to be an improvement in the regulations, in fact the change allowed for the introduction of fast foods, snacks, and “a la carte” offerings that easily added up to a less than nutritious meal.
⁵⁷
In 1979 the rules were loosened even more when the Department of Agriculture issued new guidelines allowing for the sale of “foods of minimum nutritional value” in school lunchrooms. Designed specifically to sell candy and snacks in the lunch line, the rules stipulated that if the “food” supplied more than 5 percent of the RDA of just one basic nutrient in a 100 calorie serving, the item could be served for lunch. If the nutrition value fell below that already low bar, then sale of the product was restricted to after lunch hours. What was more, the new rules put no restrictions on the amount of salt, sugar, or fat those products could contain. Assistant Secretary of Agriculture for Food and Consumer Affairs Carol Tucker Foreman admitted that “any manufacturer of candy bars, snack foods, cakes or soft drinks could simply fortify his product with the required 5 percent of any one of the eight nutrients and so have the product declared minimally nutritious.” Foreman's assistant, Jody LevinEpstein, went further, acknowledging that “if a candy bar has only one nut in it, we feel it is above our minimal nutrient standards.” Lunch supervisors, nutritionists, and PTAs across the country loudly protested. “I think it's almost a total cave-in to the snack-food industry,” wrote Michael Jacobson, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Jean Gussow lambasted the rules, declaring that “they are really banning nothing—not even jelly beans—when you consider how cheap and easy it is to fortify any food with a little vitamin C and so qualify.”
⁵⁸