School Lunch Politics (9 page)

In fact, the National School Lunch Program created in 1946 bore only slight resemblance to the goals of nutrition scientists and home economists. The program was, in its goals, structure, and administration, more a subsidy for agriculture than a nutrition program for children. Indeed, the political will to forge a national school lunch program came not from the New Deal social welfare coalition but rather from the Department of Agriculture and a group of southern Democratic legislators who generally opposed federal social programs. While women in the Bureau of Home Economics as well as nutritionists and children's welfare advocates insisted that government-subsidized meals adhere to scientific nutrition standards, the gendered structure of Department of Agriculture policy making meant that their influence on the program would be relatively limited. Within the Department of Agriculture, home economists took a back seat to agricultural economists when it came to developing relationships with legislators and formulating policy. In the end, nutrition science provided a convenient and appealing justification for a school lunch program that was designed primarily as an outlet for surplus food. Nutrition reformers—the women who had pioneered home economics food research—got what they wanted, a national school lunch program. But the school lunch program crafted in the political arena did not look like the scientific meal program imagined by Ellen Richards and her followers. In the arena of congressional politics, nutrition reformers were forced to compromise on the content of school lunches and to entirely give up any sustained public support for nutrition education in the schools. What is more, the women home economists who pioneered in child nutrition also ceded control over the federal administrative apparatus of the school lunch program to agricultural economists, usually men, who formed a key part of the large Department of Agriculture bureaucracy devoted to surplus commodity disposal and distribution. In return, however, the nutrition reformers encoded into law the potential for a universal child nutrition program along with the principle of free lunches for children unable to pay for subsidized school meals.

During the 1930s, President Roosevelt's New Deal catapulted the federal government into the business of social welfare in unprecedented ways. The twin crises of industrial unemployment and plummeting farm prices made food a central element in local as well as federal relief and recovery efforts. Fears of spreading malnutrition among the urban poor, particularly young children, raised calls for direct food relief and reinforced the importance of nutrition education. As the depression deepened, however, another relief front began to open up. With agricultural prices at record low levels, farmers too began to demand relief from the government. In a happy convergence in an otherwise unhappy era, agricultural policy makers found a way to protect farm prices and send food to American children at the same time.
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Indeed, the school lunch program that emerged during the depression was shaped by a market-based model of surplus commodity disposal even more than on theories of nutrition or plans for children's welfare. Still, for nutrition reformers, the opportunities were clear. As the government began to buy surplus food and send it to schools, the women and men who had long advocated for nutrition science found new legitimacy and an institutional base from which to promote public welfare through scientific eating.

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Hunger and malnutrition reappeared during the economic depression of the 1930s as major threats to the nation's well-being. While no one knew the actual extent of malnutrition—whether among adults or among children—reports from almost every state suggested that hunger was on the rise.
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Bread lines in the nation's cities and images of homeless farm families whose land mortgages had been foreclosed by the banks starkly suggested the extent of the Depression's reach. Teachers were worried about hungry children in their classrooms, and doctors documented the resurgence of nutrition-related diseases including anemia, dental cavities, and rickets. In October 1932, for example, a group of New York physicians warned of a serious problem in the city's schools. Fearing the winter would be “one of the gravest facing the community,” the doctors estimated that at least 20 percent of school-aged children were malnourished. Dr. Charles Boldurn, director of New York City's Bureau of Health, warned that the effects of poor nutrition on children would soon result in “reduced resistance to infectious diseases.”
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Researchers in Texas similarly estimated that 20 percent of the state's children were anemic. A South Carolina study discovered dangerously low hemoglobin levels among poor children, and in Louisiana, 13 percent of the state's white children and a quarter of the black children were found to be malnourished. Outside the South, conditions were no better. One study estimated that 85 percent of Vermont's children suffered from rickets and poor teeth.
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In Chicago 72 percent of schoolchildren, according to one study, “failed to meet a standard lower than that recommended by the National Research Council.” Detroit reported 20 percent malnutrition rates among schoolchildren, and a study in Ohio estimated that 31 percent of the state's children were underweight.
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The litany of poor health continued as the Depression deepened.
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In 1936, Columbia Teachers College nutritionists reported that American children weighed significantly less than they had five years earlier.
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School lunches appeared as a logical form of relief for the Depression's generation of hungry children. Physicians and home economists alike had long documented the debilitating effects of hunger, both physical and mental, on children. Children who came to school without proper meals, nutritionists warned, would be unable to take advantage of their education, nor would they fully develop into strong and responsible citizens. “A good meal at school,” nutritionists and child welfare advocates agreed, “could do much to help correct these conditions.”
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Teachers and parents testified to the marked improvement in children's health and school performance resulting from a good hot lunch. Rose Widtsoe, head of the University of Utah's home economics department, articulated a common view when she lauded her own state's school lunch effort. “The teachers,” Widtsoe said, “cannot find words to express the change in pupils since they are being properly fed. Their application has improved; their deportment, their general health, and their interest in everything has increased.” Social workers similarly observed a “sudden desire of children to attend school,” and attributed this to the fact that this might be their only opportunity for a “proper and well-cooked” meal.
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Sparked by the magnitude of local unemployment and hunger, ad hoc school lunchrooms sprang up throughout the country. Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs) organized free meal programs for poor children, and teachers brought in food for their students. In 1932, for example, New York City teachers raised over $260,000 for a free lunch program. George H. Chatfield, Director of School Attendance for the Board of Education, set up eighty lunch centers and fed 45,000 children during the next year. Serving cheese and lettuce or chopped egg sandwiches along with creamed onion soup, canned peaches, and chopped apples, the teachers' lunch program offered nutrition to children of the city's unemployed. Soon the lunch program also became a source of emergency employment as state funds were used to hire lunchroom workers. Chicago's Board of Education similarly established a lunch program in 1934. Using donated food and volunteer labor, the city operated lunchrooms in fifty-five high schools and 126 elementary schools, about half of all the schools in Chicago.
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Other cities followed suit, as did rural communities. In Kentucky, for example, a volunteer school lunch program aimed to offer “every child in school” a nutritious and appetizing meal. Kentucky officials, however, did not abandon earlier nutritionists' goals linking food habits to socialization and Americanization. Their lunch program aimed to develop “good food habits … good table manners … [and] habits of cleanliness.”
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While states had long supported public education and regularly appropriated money for buildings, teachers' salaries, and textbooks, lunch had always been considered a family responsibility. Before the 1930s, school boards and municipal governments occasionally appropriated local taxes for cafeteria operations or to hire home economics teachers, but most lunch programs depended on donated food and women's volunteer labor. This all began to change when increasing numbers of children began coming to school hungry. Local charities and volunteer efforts were generally overwhelmed by the numbers of unemployed, homeless, and hungry families. Neither school administrators nor volunteer housewives could cope with the numbers of children now seeking hot meals at school. By the mid-1930s the states began to enact laws allowing local boards of education to use tax money to pay for children's milk and school meals. In 1934, for example, the New York legislature agreed to use $100,000 of its relief funds for free lunches.
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California approved a special district tax for free lunches, Washington put state money into a special milk program for poor children, and the Louisiana legislature appropriated a million dollars for school lunches.
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These local appropriations were strictly temporary, though, and could not meet the increasing demand to feed hungry children.

Figure 2.1. School lunch programs offered etiquette and hygiene along with hot meals. Penasco, New Mexico, pupils “must wash their hands before eating hot lunch in school.” Photo by John Collier. Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress.

State appropriations for education and welfare were nothing new. What was new during the 1930s was the expanding role of federal relief agencies. New Deal programs, for the first time, brought Washingtonbased funds and federal officials into the nation's schools. By the end of the 1930s, “a clearly organized social welfare bureaucracy” existed within the federal government.
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The New Deal also deepened the federal government's role in agriculture and farm policy. One scholar has described the period of the New Deal as the development of an “agricultural welfare state.”
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The 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act along with the 1935 Social Security Act were the core of New Deal welfare. Indeed, according to some theorists, New Deal agricultural policy proved more lasting and successful than industrial recovery or social relief, largely because of the strength of agricultural interests both in Congress and within the USDA. The core New Deal welfare programs, however, reflected fundamental inequalities in American society. Social Security, for example, excluded whole categories of work—notably, domestic service and agriculture work, occupations that employed large numbers of women and African Americans. The administration of New Deal relief also rested on local officials who reproduced regional and racial attitudes that excluded blacks in particular, and other minorities as well.
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The expansion of federal welfare functions during the Depression encompassed children's nutrition as well as public health and food aid. Indeed, nutritionists' long-standing concern with the diets of poor people and their work on menus for low-income families provided a scientific rationale for food relief in the deepening economic crisis. As the USDA's M. L. Wilson put it, “There is a widespread acceptance of the idea that low-income people should be well fed as a health measure—at public expense if necessary.”
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Beginning in the early 1930s, a number of federal agencies began to distribute food to needy families and also to school lunch programs. In 1932 one of the New Deal's central relief agencies, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation began to lend money to communities that wanted to start school meal programs. These funds went to states and school districts to pay for cafeteria space or equipment. Within a few years, almost every state had signed on to receive those funds.
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In 1935, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) also got into the school lunch business. While normally favoring (white) men in its emergency work programs, the WPA instituted a sizable school lunch operation that employed women as bakers, cooks, and clerks in school cafeterias. Ultimately, the WPA employed over 5,000 women in its lunchroom projects.
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The WPA also ran gardening and canning projects that produced food for school lunches.
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The agency employed men in state food warehouses as well as in shipping and storing donated food for children's meals.
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Other federal agencies also contributed to school lunch projects. The National Youth Administration, for example, employed about 16,000 young people in school lunchrooms. Federal regulations prohibited the youth from handling food, but they were allowed to clean and maintain the facilities and take care of the lunchroom equipment.
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