School Lunch Politics (5 page)

Figure 1.1. Ellen Swallow Richards founded home economics after facing gender barriers in academic chemistry. Richards is pictured here with the MIT Chemistry Department faculty. Courtesy MIT Museum.

Ellen Richards wanted to be a laboratory chemist but instead became one of the most visible and vocal popularizers of nutrition reform and scientific eating. As an undergraduate at Vassar College during the 1870s, she studied chemistry with the nation's foremost female scientist, Maria Mitchell. Despite Mitchell's enthusiastic recommendations, Richards, to her life-long disappointment, found no graduate chemistry program either in the United States or in Germany that would accept women. Mitchell finally convinced MIT to accept Richards as a “special student,” but the university refused to allow her to work in any of their established laboratories.
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Instead, with the support of her husband (an MIT professor and mining engineer) and financial backing from Edward Atkinson (whom she had met while working on a study of water quality for Boston), Richards opened her own “women's laboratory.”
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It was there that Richards developed what became known as the domestic sciences, including studies of human nutrition and food preparation.
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Like Edward Atkinson, Richards and the early home economists believed American's living standards would significantly improve if only people understood the principles of nutrition. Excited about the new discoveries in food science, including Wilbur Atwater's substitution theory, home economists turned their attention first to the eating habits of workers and immigrants. While they were convinced that everyone might benefit from a knowledge of nutrition, the problem of poverty presented the most immediate and dramatic challenge. Early home economics research specifically sought to demonstrate that nutritious diets did not need to be expensive. As Richards put it bluntly, “if once the public can disabuse its mind of any idea of close connection between ‘food value' and cost—namely that a cheap food is a poor food, that a dear food is a good food—then a beginning in scientific dietaries can be made.”
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Home economists became enthusiastic proponents of the “low-budget meal” and menus directed at housewives with a limited food budget. In 1877, for example, in the midst of serious economic depression and the nation's first major railroad strike, Juliet Corson, founder of one of the first American cooking schools, published
Fifteen Cent Dinners for Working-men's Families
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In this pamphlet Corson suggested that a worker's family of six could easily have three nutritious meals a day for less than $3 per week if they ate cheese pudding and stewed tripe.
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Like Edward Atkinson, Corson believed that a change in diet would improve workers' living standards even in the face of low wages. By showing housewives “how to make the best of what they have,” she said, “I am proving myself a better friend to them than those who try to make them still more discontented with the lot that is already almost too hard to bear.”
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A decade later Mary Hinman Abel, an aspiring chemist who, like Richards, ended up in home economics, made her name by publishing “five food principles” for low-budget meals.
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Abel's advice applied Atwater's substitutions to practical recipes designed for working-class housewives. Insisting that while workers' families might not be able to afford “many good tasting things,” they could nonetheless eat healthy meals by following her recipes for bread soup and by serving dinners of “flour soup, fried bread, cheese, and toast” for supper. Abel's work found a national audience when she received first prize in the American Public Health Association's essay contest, and Richards invited her to Boston to help start a model public kitchen.
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Richards tirelessly devoted her professional career to introducing the public to the principles of scientific nutrition. Her singular contribution was the development of institutional kitchens, the first large-scale food service operations. Institutional cooking brought modern, industrial principles to what had been a private, highly individualized domain. In the institutional kitchen, science most directly informed the era's belief in standardization, efficiency, and rational management. Richards's first experiment in institutional feeding was the New England Kitchen (NEK), which opened in a working-class Boston neighborhood in 1890. With the financial backing of Edward Atkinson (the NEK became a key demonstration site for the Aladdin Cooker) and recipes based on Wilbur Atwater's nutrition science, Ellen Richards operated what might be called the nation's first “take out” restaurant. Located in a Boston storefront, the NEK offered model workingmen's lunches as well as tins of food to take home for dinner. With each meal the patron received a card listing the calorie and nutrient content on one side and Atwater's daily nutrition recommendations on the other. Every dish was scientifically developed and carefully measured so that it was easily standardized and could be reproduced at home. Unfortunately, the scientific diet of Indian pudding, oatmeal cakes, pea soup, and cornmeal mush turned out to have little popular appeal. One customer reportedly told Richards, “I'll eat what I want to eat.” Another, objecting to the decidedly Anglo-Saxon tone of the menus, warned Richards not to “try to make a New Englander out of me.”
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After three years the NEK was forced to close due to a lack of customers. Although in operation only for a short time, the NEK nevertheless became a model for institutional meal service and standardized menus.

Despite the failure of the NEK, Richards's experiment established significant principles in institutional feeding and nutrition education. Her standardized recipes and menu cards became models for large-scale food service operations. Richards proudly declared her beef broth, for example, to be as “as unvarying in its constituents as the medicine compounded to meet a physician's prescription.”
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Thus the recipe could be replicated at home on a small scale or in a school, hospital, or factory for large numbers of people. In either case, the nutrition content and the taste would be consistent. In 1898, again backed by funds from Edward Atkinson, Richards opened another model kitchen at the Chicago World's Fair. Here she distributed menu cards that included the weight and nutrition components of each dish. The World's Fair venue, known as the Rumford Kitchen, fed thousands of fairgoers and opened nutrition science to a whole new audience: the middle-class consumer.
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Standardization combined with education to produce the first modern institutional food service model. Home economists added to their agenda studies of food processing and preservation, food service management, and, increasingly, lunchroom administration.
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Richards's World's Fair project signaled an important shift in home economics and nutrition research. While the early studies took as their task improving the health and diet of the nation's poorest groups, the World's Fair kitchen attracted workers and middle-class people.
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Here was an opportunity to influence people who might be able to afford plenty to eat but who might not understand the principles of nutrition. Indeed, Richards expressed the central tension in food reform when she suggested that anyone, “working man, student, or millionaire,” could suffer from poor nutrition. The challenge, she wrote, was not “how to get enough food, but how to choose from the bewildering variety offered that which will best develop the power of the human being.” Nutrition, in her view, promised not only an efficient, healthy life, but intellectual and moral development as well. Poor diets, she insisted—and the inability to avoid the temptation of “bad” foods—“weakens the moral fiber and lessens mental as well as physical efficiency.”
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Richards thus committed herself to modernizing the American diet and bringing the gospel of science to a middle-class audience. Whether rich or poor, she concluded, everyone needed nutrition education.

Shortly after the end of the 1898 World's Fair, Richards hit upon the perfect system for bringing nutrition science to a wide public: the school lunchroom. Here she could teach children the value of nutrition, and, what is more, the children would take those lessons home and influence mothers as well. Richards could reach children who came to school hungry, but also those who were well fed but potentially nutrient deficient. She opened her first lunchroom almost by accident. While conducting a study of the sanitary conditions in Boston public schools, she discovered that the high school janitors were selling food to the students. The janitors, of course, were in business for profit and did not care about the nutrition content of the food. Richards convinced the Boston School Committee to let her open a scientific lunch program. Her effort got off to a rocky start when the janitors refused to help, and local restaurants posted signs announcing, “Here you can get what you want to eat, and not what the School Committee says you must.”
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Richards's scientific message, however, won the allegiance of the School Committee, and within a year five thousand students were eating lunch at school every day.

Richards's experiment proved a triumph for nutrition science. Indeed, despite their zeal, home economists and nutritionists had been relatively unsuccessful in changing popular eating habits. While scientific advances surely held the potential to improve everyone's health, most people regularly eschewed expert advice. As a result, experts themselves often adopted a judgmental tone that only alienated their audiences even more. Home economists, largely native-born, white, middle-class, educated women, easily adopted a moralistic, if not proselytizing tone in their food advice. As one historian has observed, “like the schoolteachers, social workers, librarians, and settlement house workers, the women home economists could act as missionaries trying to save society and its victims through better nutrition and home life.”
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Poor food habits were regularly labeled “sins,” and women who served inadequate meals were often dismissed as poor or neglectful mothers. Home economist Lucy Gillett, for example, considered coffee and tea “the worst food sins of children.”
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> Indeed, the new nutrition discoveries, particularly vitamins, lent themselves to a missionary purpose. Home economists as educators particularly took as their duty the effort to convert the American public to a belief in nutrition and to convince ordinary people to behave (i.e., eat) according to the new gospel. Richards herself set the tone when she observed that “the parent who neglects this part of his child's upbringing is culpable and his sin will surely be visited upon the third and fourth generations.”
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Richards and her followers, however, did not limit their missionary activities to immigrants or the poor. Echoing the eugenicists' theory that Anglo-Saxon Americans were in danger of committing “race suicide,” Richards warned that the “well-to-do” classes “are being eliminated by their diet.” It was the rich, even more than the poor, she believed, who were “most in need of missionary work” when it came to nutrition.
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To this day, Richards's professional and intellectual descendants equate proper eating with virtue. The reward for scientific eating would go beyond healthy individuals by invigorating American democracy itself.
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And what better way to promote the virtues of a nutritious diet than to begin with the young, in the school lunchroom?

A D
IET
FOR
A
MERICANS

By the 1920s, a science and a culture of nutrition permeated discussions about food in the United States. World War I had revealed a shocking level of malnutrition in America. By most estimates, almost one-third of all young men called up for military service had been rejected either because they were underweight or because they suffered from some nutrition-related condition, such as rickets or poor teeth.
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Traumatized by the specter of a weak defense and malnourished citizenry, army officials, public health physicians, and home economists spent the next decade preaching the science of nutrition and trying to get the American public to adopt scientific eating. Schools, hospitals, and even some factories began to run meal programs on a scale never imagined by Ellen Richards. Nutrition was becoming public policy.

In the post—World War I climate of relative prosperity (at least in certain sectors of the economy and certain sections of the country), nutritionists as well as the rapidly expanding food industry promoted a more generalized concern with well-being, health, and nutrition—and malnutrition as well. Pioneering a new consumer age, food advertisements touted the vitamin content of foods and provided testimonials to their product's contribution to individual vigor and energy. Well-baby clinics and pure milk movements sprang up throughout the country. As one home economist in the Bureau of Home Economics observed, “it is high time that every mother should know as much about feeding her family as the thousands of successful farmers now know about feeding livestock.”
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The discovery of the nutrition age was that anyone—rich or poor—could suffer from malnutrition. Where discussions about food had for centuries connected hunger and poverty, the modern nutrition message combined compensatory nutrition for the poor with a general mission to improve the health of all Americans. Nutrition science had, in essence, dramatically altered the relationship between food and poverty. As New York home economist Lucy Gillett observed, one could find “underweight and malnourished children in all types of families, in the families of those who have plenty of money as well as in families of limited means.”
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Poor people might suffer from insufficient quantities of food, but it was the quality of what they ate that really mattered. At the same time, even people with plenty to eat might face malnutrition if they did not make informed food choices.