School Lunch Politics (8 page)

In the United States, children's school meals, like other social welfare programs, developed as a combination of private and public initiatives. While until the 1930s, the labor, food, and equipment in most American school lunchrooms was supplied by local charities or volunteer groups, most of the expertise in nutrition and meal planning was nurtured by government-sponsored research and training. Indeed, dating from Wilbur Atwater's tenure as Director of Experiment Stations, the USDA became not only one of the biggest federal agencies, but also home to large numbers of professional women working in nutrition research and home economics. Atwater had long insisted that the state had an interest not only in agricultural productivity but in human productivity as well. His efforts to expand the Department of Agriculture's work in nutrition were eagerly taken up by women who found in government service a professional home denied them in academic circles and private industry. Indeed, during the Progressive Era, women developed what one historian has called a “female dominion” in government agencies like the Children's Bureau and the Women's Bureau, both parts of the Department of Labor. Here women with professional skills and training created an institutional base through which they could shape public policy, particularly directed at the welfare of women and children. In a similar vein, women became prominent in research and policy in the Office of Home Economics, created in 1915 as a result of the Smith-Lever Act establishing the Agricultural Extension Service.
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In 1924, the Office became the Bureau of Home Economics.
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While the Women's and Children's Bureaus attracted women trained in social policy, the Bureau of Home Economics drew women interested as much in scientific research as in welfare per se. Like Ellen Richards, however, women rarely found opportunities to pursue research in chemistry or biology. Instead, women drawn to these disciplines often ended up in home economics. Indeed, home economists as a profession owed much to government support. While a few private universities, notably, Columbia Teachers' College and Stanford, opened home economics departments during the early twentieth century, the profession's base lay in the public land grant colleges. The expansion of the Department of Agriculture proved particularly significant for women who were interested in scientific research but who continued to be excluded from academic careers. By the eve of World War I the Department of Agriculture stood as the nation's largest employer of women scientists—almost all in the Office of Home Economics.
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Beginning in the World War I period, the Department of Agriculture dramatically expanded its research and educational programs. One historian has characterized the USDA as “the most dynamic portion of the national state in the early twentieth century.” The department became, by World War I, “a reservoir of expertise and administrative capability that put it in a position to harvest the fruits of the farmers' discontents, as well as to respond to new middle-class concerns.”
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Ideas about expertise, efficiency, and scientific knowledge permeated agricultural policies just as they influenced the industrial and social arenas. While American agriculture was still numerically dominated by small family farms and tenant or sharecrop arrangements, large-scale farm production held the promise of increased productivity for the growing urban, consumer market. The push to increase farm output led, for example, to research on things like more productive seed strains, hardier livestock, and the development of chemical fertilizers.
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At the same time, of course, rural Americans remained among the poorest of the nation's citizens. Thus, while agricultural research concentrated on improving productivity, home economists and agricultural extension agents concentrated on teaching scientific methods—including nutrition—to farmers and their wives. The 1914 Smith-Lever Act and the 1917 Smith-Hughes Act funding vocational education proved particularly important for home economists. Their discipline now had federal support as one of the major areas of vocational education for women.
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According to one historian, the “significant linkage of agriculture, science and government” contributed to a dramatic increase in the number of USDA employees. Between 1909 and 1917 the Department of Agriculture grew from 11,279 employees to 20,269, becoming the third largest branch of the federal government after the Departments of War and the Interior.
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Indeed, the number of extension agents increased from 2,500 at the beginning of 1917 to 6,215 by the end of the war.
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The USDA employed large numbers of women Agricultural Extension agents and teachers in the related land-grant colleges and as researchers and administrators working out of Washington, D.C.

World War I saw an expansion of government interest in food and nutrition. Food conservation programs galvanized home-front support for the war effort as campaigns for “wheatless” and “meatless” days brought nutrition science into ordinary kitchens and turned everyday eating into patriotic duty. Herbert Hoover's War Food Administration (WFA) publicized vitamins and calories and catapulted home economists into the public light as the architects of popular nutrition education programs. Hoover brought private industry food processors and distributors, as well as researchers and academics, into “close collaboration” with government agents in his leadership of the WFA.
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In 1917, for example, Hoover appointed Columbia Teachers College professor Mary Swartz Rose as Deputy Director of Food Conservation. Rose, one of the most prominent home economists and nutrition researchers of her time, developed wartime menus stressing the “three pillars of home economics”: conservation, efficiency, and food substitution.
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Rose also worked closely with Hoover to oversee domestic food production and to coordinate post-war food relief efforts abroad. She was instrumental in introducing scientific recipes and balanced menus to military planners and pioneered in the development of what became known as army rations.
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Herbert Hoover's experience in World War I significantly influenced the development of food policy in the United States after the war. Coming from a Quaker background, Hoover was educated at Stanford University, site of one of the few academic programs in nutrition science. He majored in geology and spent much of his early working life as a mine inspector and technologist Australia and China. When World War I began, Hoover was living in London and was tapped by the United States Embassy to coordinate aid for Americans who were stranded there. This work directly led him to the Committee of Relief for Belgium, a group trying to get food to the starving people behind the German lines. As part of the relief effort, Hoover's group set up lunch programs for school children. The Belgium relief work drew considerable public attention and was his first foray into food aid; it would prove formative for both Hoover and the United States. When America entered the war, President Wilson appointed Hoover to be the nation's first U.S. Food Administrator. In that capacity Hoover oversaw food consumption and distribution efforts and pioneered in national conservation campaigns. As Secretary of Commerce in the Harding administration after the war, Hoover continued his work in agriculture and food policy.
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Wartime experience in large-scale military feeding operations provided the model for domestic food service industries as well. By the 1920s, hospitals, schools and even some factories were running cafeteria operations on a scale never imagined by Ellen Richards. The war opened the way to an expansion of the food processing industry in the United States and introduced new products like canned foods and breakfast cereal to wider markets than ever before. It was perhaps the war, more than any food advice offered by home economists, that began to alter the American diet. Just as women were trying new products and recipes at home, soldiers were introduced to new foods in the Army mess halls. As the food historian Harvey Levenstein observed, military service (and the rise in wages after the war) significantly altered working-class eating habits as, for example, army cooks served “spaghetti, food of our ally.”
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By the 1920s a culture of nutrition had permeated public awareness, particularly regarding children's development. During the 1920s school systems throughout the country began to offer hot lunches. The programs varied considerably in structure and purpose and in nutritional content. While most school lunch programs during the 1920s depended on contributions of both money and labor from mothers' “hot lunch clubs” or parent-teacher fund-raisers, some school districts began to appropriate public funds to lunchroom operations. Some programs offered free meals to poor children, others charged for food. In many schools, girls' home economics classes prepared the meals, thus training the girls while at the same time providing nutrition education for other children. Most state Agricultural Extension Service Offices ran school lunch programs and developed nutrition education materials for home economics teachers.
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Home economists, like social workers and other professional women, struggled to build professional identities and establish the legitimacy of their field. The women who ran school lunch programs worked hard to instill their domain with professional standards and the latest scientific methods. Indeed, by the mid-1920s professionals claimed control over the majority of the nation's lunchrooms. According to a study by Bureau of Home Economics researcher Mabel Kitridge, half of all school lunch programs were operated by professional managers and another quarter were run by home economics teachers. In Kansas City, Missouri, for example, home economics classes prepared and served the lunches. In Buffalo, New York, the home economics teacher held night classes to train women to be “practical lunch-room managers.” These semi-professional managers were supervised by dietitians paid by the city's board of education.
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Home economists institutionalized their own professional status by instituting home economics curricula, which included nutrition education as well as practical cooking experience for junior high and high school girls.

During the 1920s, home economists actively publicized their nutrition message. Using the latest advertising techniques, including radio commercials, they distributed recipes, preached the virtue of vitamins, and published family meal plans. Even with these “new methods of psychological persuasion,” the imprimatur of scientific expertise and the seal of government approval through the Bureau of Home Economics, nutrition advice met resistance. Study after study suggested that Americans were falling below adequate nutrition standards.
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Indeed, the very repetition of dietary advice indicates the extent to which people resisted any change in their food habits.

In the case of children's meals, home economists often found themselves at odds with other women in the community, notably teachers and mothers. Nutrition professionals were notoriously skeptical about lunch rooms that were run by volunteers not trained in the science of food content and preparation. “The average teacher,” noted the
Journal of Home Economics,
“does not know enough about food preparation” to serve adequate meals. The professionals trusted mothers even less than teachers to understand the principles of nutrition. Mothers, they feared, would turn lunch preparation into “cooking contests” and ignore “food values.” Worse, untrained women would give children “bad foods” like coffee, candy, “frankforts,” potato chips, pickles, or olives.
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Volunteer lunches, one
Journal of Home Economics
reporter concluded, “did not fulfill the real purpose of a school lunch, which is to provide the proper kind of food for children.”
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Providing the proper kind of food for children promised to enhance the health of the entire nation. By the end of the 1920s, a wide range of children's welfare advocates adopted the gospel of nutrition. In 1926, for example, Mabel Kitridge, concluding a study of school lunch programs, declared that “a spirit of service and real democracy is developed.”
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Recognizing that meals represented more than the opportunity to ingest nutrients, home economics translated lunch into an opportunity for civic and moral lessons as well. A hot lunch, the
Journal of Home Economics
assured its readers, would allow “both students and teachers [to] enjoy a quiet social lunch hour during which many lessons in food selection and good habits may be incidentally taught.”
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Mary Swartz Rose emphasized the two pillars of school lunch programs: “first, the knowledge of how to build a good body through daily food, and second of how to care for the machine built and maintained at so great a cost to the end that it may have the greatest usefulness for the human spirit it carries.”
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From the start, experts as well as the public were convinced that school lunch programs offered tremendous benefits not only to individual children but to the nation at large. Despite an emerging agreement about the value of nutrition, however, food reformers continued to struggle with the public over what exactly should be served at lunch—and who should pay for children's meals.

CHAPTER 2

 

Welfare for Farmers and Children

At the end of the 1920s nutrition reformers and home economists were poised to shape a national food and nutrition policy that would address hunger and poverty and at the same time promote modern, healthy diets for all Americans. The economic depression of the 1930s and the New Deal's vastly expanded federal role in relief, recovery, and social welfare opened opportunities for nutrition reformers, farmers, and social welfare advocates to promote their varied agendas. During the next decade and a half, to a remarkable degree, the food reformers succeeded in their efforts to popularize ideas about vitamins, calories, and nutrients. By the end of World War II, the American public regularly looked for vitamins in their foods, and housewives—at least those who read popular magazines and newspaper food columns—understood the mechanics of a balanced meal. What is more, in 1946, Congress created a National School Lunch Program that, at least in theory, offered free meals to poor children and subsidized healthy lunches to all American children. Yet while the science of nutrition provided a theory—not to mention a menu—for healthy eating, a national food and nutrition policy required political savvy and an entirely new set of allies.