Susan Levine

School Lunch Politics

THE SURPRISING HISTORY OF AMERICA'S FAVORITE WELFARE PROGRAMBy Susan Levine

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14619-5

Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables.....................................viiAcknowledgments......................................................ixIntroduction The Politics of Lunch...................................1Chapter 1 A Diet for Americans.......................................10Chapter 2 Welfare for Farmers and Children...........................39Chapter 3 Nutrition Standards and Standard Diets.....................54Chapter 4 A National School Lunch Program............................71Chapter 5 Ideals and Realities in the Lunchroom......................89Chapter 6 No Free Lunch..............................................105Chapter 7 A Right to Lunch...........................................127Chapter 8 Let Them Eat Ketchup.......................................151Epilogue Fast Food and Poor Children.................................179Notes................................................................193Index................................................................243

Chapter One

A Diet for Americans

School lunches owe their origin to the science of nutrition and the efforts of early twentieth-century social reformers to improve American diets and thereby mold American culture as well. Chemists, home economists, and child welfare advocates together engaged in a lengthy struggle to convince Americans that rational, scientific eating habits not only would improve individual health but would raise living standards and strengthen democratic institutions as well. It may have been a leap to go from the kitchen table to the ballot box, but scientists and social reformers alike believed the connection was direct and essential. Efforts to modernize diets, however, went beyond the usual Progressive Era attempts to Americanize immigrants, contain class or racial discontent, or shape a welfare state. Dietary reform addressed native-born white Americans who could afford to eat steak as much as it addressed workers on tight budgets or immigrants who preferred olive oil and sausage to white sauce and aspic. Indeed, the science of nutrition transformed eating into an act that went beyond pleasure and the satisfaction of hunger pains. Eating and cooking, particularly with regard to children, became, in the era of science, activities with implications far beyond the kitchen.

From the end of the nineteenth century until the Great Depression of the 1930s, nutrition scientists, home economists, and social reformers engaged in a long battle to transform American eating habits. They were only partially successful. Their efforts, however, provide a window onto some of the central issues confronting the nation's political and social development in those years. Food reform before the New Deal suggests, first, the central role science played in shaping American attitudes about class, race, and ethnicity. Food reform also speaks to ideas about the causes and cures for poverty and inequality, particularly in a democratic society. Food reform finally, reveals the gendered dimension within American reform in the early twentieth century. Food reform and nutrition science provided women an important avenue through which they could contribute to scientific knowledge and also influence public policy.

Food reformers, however, do not fit into neat categories. While dietary prescriptions appear to be, for example, the epitome of social control and cultural imposition, nutritious diets could, in fact, significantly improve the health of children as well as adults. Hunger and malnutrition threatened poor families most directly, but, as nutrition scientists discovered, even people who were not hungry could suffer from nutritional deficiencies. Herein lay a central tension marking food reform and efforts to establish school lunch programs. Efforts to popularize nutrition science were aimed not only at poor people, immigrants, and other groups outside the "mainstream" of white, middle class America. Indeed, food reformers continually battled to modernize the eating habits of the middle-class just as they struggled to Americanize immigrant or African American food preferences. Thus, the central policy question attached to nutrition, particularly when it came to children's meals, was whether to target all children or to concentrate on only those most obviously suffering from hunger and malnutrition.

One of the central arenas in which food reformers sought to influence American eating habits was children's meals, most notably, school lunches. Originally the purview of charity workers and mother's clubs, school lunches in the nineteenth century had little to do with nutrition science. They were, basically, benevolent activities designed to provide free meals to the poor. With the discovery of nutrition science during the late nineteenth century, however, school lunches entered the realm of public policy. Although food reformers were largely unsuccessful either in convincing native-born Americans to "eat right" or in convincing immigrants to forsake their traditional fare, they were much more successful in building a network of lasting institutions in school lunchrooms and a powerful base of operation within the United States Department of Agriculture. As the federal agency most concerned with the nation's food supply, the USDA provided a natural home for nutrition research. Indeed, discoveries about the relation of food to human health originated in research about livestock and agricultural products. While the federal government did not become directly involved in school lunch programs until the 1930s, USDA nutritionists and home economists early on began to translate nutrition research into popular recipes and menus. Food reformers, whether within the USDA or in other arenas, however, never resolved the fundamental policy tension that underlay their work: should nutrition education and food programs target people who were economically needy, that is, people who literally did not have enough to eat, or should they target the nutritionally needy, people who might have plenty to eat but who did not understand a balanced diet? School lunch programs neatly combined the two goals.

During the early twentieth century, nutrition science defined a set of ideas that described what Americans needed to eat in order to maintain their personal health and the health of the nation as well. Institutionalized in schools throughout the country by the 1920s, the lunchroom became an arena in which children (and, by extension, their parents) could learn the principles of nutrition and the importance of science in daily life. School lunch programs solved two central problems raised by science and its emphasis on food as a nutrition delivery system. On the one hand, hot lunches promised to protect America's youth from the scourge of malnutrition. Healthy children, like public education more generally, signaled America's democratic strength. At the same time, school lunches promised to Americanize immigrant families by teaching children the values of science and health. As Jane Addams, the era's most well-known social reformer, said, "an Italian girl who has had lessons in cooking ... will help her mother to connect the entire family with American food and household habits." Food and household habits had always been two pillars of cultural identity. In the lunchroom they became pillars of civic culture as well.

The...