School Lunch Politics (13 page)

N
UTRITION
IN THE
N
ATIONAL
D
EFENSE

The new federal nutrition standards in school lunch contracts came directly out of the work of home economists and nutrition scientists. Working both within the Bureau of Home Economics and in academic departments, home economists and nutritionists had long been involved in trans-Atlantic discussions about food policy and human nutrition. Two women were particularly influential in shaping this conversation. Lydia Roberts, a pioneer in home economics, during the 1930s established an international reputation in child health and nutrition. She spent her youth as a schoolteacher but in 1915 left teaching to study home economics. In 1928, she published
Nutrition Work with Children,
which became the standard text in the field and was reprinted regularly through the 1950s.
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In 1930 Roberts became chair of the Home Eco nomics Department at the University of Chicago. From this post she led in both domestic and international food and nutrition policy. Roberts was particularly instrumental in establishing the idea of “protective foods,” which included green leafy vegetables, eggs, milk, fish, and meat. These foods were known to contain essential nutrients, including vitamins, and formed the basis for what became popularized as “food groups” during World War II. Roberts's younger colleague, Hazel Stiebeling, an Ohio farm girl, studied home economics with Mary Swartz Rose at Columbia Teachers College. During the 1920s she conducted a series of research projects on women's nutrition and the role of vitamin D, finally earning a doctorate in chemistry from Columbia in 1928. Academic opportunities for women scientists were still limited but, like the generation before her, Stiebeling found a home in the new Bureau of Home Economics where she remained for the rest of her career. One of Stiebeling's major interests was the establishment of a national nutrition standard for American diets, which she felt would aid in planning both for agriculture and for welfare. According to most reports, Stiebeling was the first to suggest the idea of “Recommended Dietary Allowances” as a useful category for policy and planning.
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In 1935, Stiebeling and Roberts took their expertise abroad to participate in the development of international diet and nutrition standards. That year, the two women represented the United States on the League of Nations—sponsored international committee on dietary standards. Drawing on the latest vitamin and mineral discoveries, international nutrition standards became important tools for “rational” planning for food and agriculture policy both during and after the war. The League of Nations recommendations were based on World War I estimates that called for 3000 calories and 70 to 80 grams of protein to maintain the health of soldiers and workers (all, of course, assumed to be men). During the 1930s, vitamins were added to the recommendations and increased emphasis was placed on the consumption of protein and green vegetables.
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Working with other women scientists, Stiebeling elaborated on the dietary allowances, adding thiamin (vitamin B
₁
) and riboflavin (vitamin B
₂
) and asserting the efficacy of their recommendations as the minimum nutritional requirements for “normal people.”
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The recommendations included vitamins A and D, and tables for calories, fat, proteins, calcium, and iron. By the end of the 1930s, under the guidance of the League of Nations, most European governments as well as Canada had established nutrition councils to promote the dietary standards.
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At the start of World War II, nutrition reformers became key figures in United States planning for food policy, both military and civilian. The Community School Lunch Program provided a unique forum for nutrition education. The newly instituted school lunch contracts presented the women with their first opportunity to establish national nutrition standards for children. As the United States government enlisted experts in business, science, and the professions to help with the war effort, social scientists, welfare advocates, and nutrition reformers joined the cadre of professionals in Washington planning circles. In early 1940, the National Research Council created two high-profile civilian boards to implement a national food policy. Lydia Roberts chaired the Food and Nutrition Board (FNB), which was charged with developing national nutrition standards that would govern food policy, regarding primarily army meals but also children's lunches. The FNB also had to translate the latest scientific research into popular terms. The well-known anthropologist Margaret Mead chaired the complimentary Committee on Food Habits, which had the responsibility of translating nutrition guidelines into a more popular format.

Figure 3.1. School lunch programs were institutionalized during World War II. “Every Child Needs a Good School Lunch” poster, NWDNS–44–PA–735. National Archives.

While the FNB's central task was to develop nutrition standards for military diets, the board also developed guidelines for civilian meals and school lunches as well. Aiming to “enlist” the nation's housewives in the “all-out effort for preparedness,” the FNB embarked on a public nutrition education campaign.
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Hazel Stiebeling convened a group of social reformers including Faith Williams, a social worker from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Martha May Eliot, a physician with the Children's Bureau, and Harriet Eliot, also with the Children's Bureau, to sift through the latest nutrition research and make recommendations. Soon the committee expanded to include nongovernmental groups with an interest in wartime mobilization, including the Red Cross, the American Home Economics Association, and the American Dietetics Association. Harriet Eliot applauded the group's ability to work together, saying, “All of us have a major defense job to do—the job of improving our standard of living and of keeping ourselves strong and physically fit.”
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Roberts and the FNB had no easy task in front of them, as the research on human nutritional requirements, while prolific, was often conflicting. Roberts recalled that when her committee was initially charged with developing a set of RDAs, she feared that nutrition science had too many different methodologies and approaches and that the morass of competing priorities among food and nutrition researchers would make it impossible to come up with a unified recommendation. She nonetheless persevered, bringing together a prominent group of nutrition researchers in what she termed a “democratic” effort to identify the appropriate studies and methodology. The task proved even more difficult than Roberts feared because the food industry carefully monitored the committee's work, making sure that their products and commodities were not slighted. Stiebeling, for example, had to fend off congressional efforts to prevent federal funds from paying the salary of “any person advocating lessened consumption of any wholesome food.” Of course, every agricultural industry representative believed his crop to be entirely wholesome, so when nutritionists counseled, for example, substituting beans or eggs for beef, the cattlemen objected.
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Ultimately, despite industry efforts to shape the process, Roberts and her committee settled on a set of RDAs based on international standards that called for between 2,500 and 4,500 calories for men and 2,100 to 3,000 calories for women. The range depended on how active individuals were during the day. Thus, laborers or domestic servants required more calories per day than clerks or saleswomen. Children's RDAs increased with age, with teenaged girls requiring between 2,400 and 2,800 calories and boys a full thousand over that.
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As chair of the FNB, Roberts had to reconcile scientific research with political and economic agendas. She also had to contend with a scientific establishment that preferred not to recognize the research contributions of women. Roberts's committee was scheduled to announce a set of nutrition standards at the National Nutrition Conference for Defense convened by President Roosevelt in May 1941. As Roberts recalled, the committee had a great deal of trouble agreeing on a clear set of RDAs. The night before the conference began, Roberts gathered a small group of women together in her hotel room. “While the men, we felt sure, were out seeing the town,” Roberts recalled, she, along with Helen Mitchell and Hazel Stiebeling, “thrashed out” a set of standards. These were presented to the conference the next day and, along with the newly created “food groups,” quickly became the standard government dietary recommendations.
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By all accounts, the establishment of the RDAs “represented the most authoritative pronouncement on human needs” since the League of Nations addressed the subject during the mid-1930s.
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Within a short time, the RDAs, accompanied by suggested menus and recipes, appeared in newspapers, women's magazines, radio programs, and posters in school lunchrooms. Particularly with the beginning of food rationing during the war, the RDAs became important elements in the national campaign of nutritional instruction. In 1941, the Bureau of Home Economics released a pamphlet calling on Americans to “do your part in the National Nutrition Program” by eating from each food group every day.
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Lauding the publication's timely contribution to the defense effort, the
New York Times
told housewives they would find “the most thorough education in how to feed their families ever provided by any nation in the world.”
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The pamphlet counseled housewives to look at the content of food labels and familiarize themselves with vitamins, minerals, and the various food groups. Although the number of recommended food groups kept changing, the principle became firmly entrenched in the popular imagination. Where, for example, a 1941 poll indicated that most people did not know the difference between a calorie and a vitamin, by the end of the war, vitamins, RDAs, and the idea of “balanced meals” became part of a shared vocabulary.

Insisting that the RDAs could be satisfied by a wide variety of diets and products, the home economists hoped both to include ethnic and regional food preferences and not to offend any particular farm group. The food groups, as two historians put it, included “the full range of American food and agricultural products.”
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Because the foods in each group were essentially interchangeable as far as nutrition went, Stiebeling assured the public that every community could make its own choices. “Food habits differ from one part of the country to another;” she said, “so, we would not want to specify any more closely than we have in our diet plans.”
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The goal, she insisted, was “to introduce new foods into regional and racial diets.”
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Despite regional variation, however, Stiebeling recommended what became known as the “basic seven.” In 1943 the USDA released Stiebeling's suggestions in what became one of the department's most widely circulated and often reprinted pamphlets. The “National Wartime Nutritional Guide” (after the war, simply the “National Food Guide”) recommended seven food groups: green and yellow vegetables; oranges, tomatoes, grapefruit; potatoes; milk and milk products; meat, poultry, fish, eggs, and dried peas and beans; bread, flour, and cereals; and butter or margarine. Based largely on Wilbur Atwater's substitution tables, the USDA guidelines suggested alternative choices in each group—a particularly practical idea given the wartime shortages of many food items.
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The extent to which Americans actually embraced the value of “scientific nutrition” is unclear, of course, Indeed, if the protestations of nutritionists and home economists are any indication, “balanced meals” actually appeared on few American dinner plates. While the Bureau of Home Economics insisted that its dietary recommendations could be met even on limited incomes, many housewives probably found it difficult to prepare “balanced” meals. The BHE's “sample low-cost dietary” appearing in women's magazines and newspaper food columns throughout the country, for example, suggested that adults needed to consume a pint of milk, three ounces of meat, two servings of vegetables, two fruits, bread, butter, and sugar at every meal in order to meet the RDAs. Even when the menus were changed to reflect wartime shortages in sugar and flour, expensive and scarce items such as beef, milk, and butter held strong. The suggested meals not only revealed an unrealistic assessment of American family food budgets, but promoted a decidedly bland Anglo-Saxon menu as well. Popular food writer M.F.K. Fisher loudly protested the whole idea of “balanced meals.” Calling the RDA charts “one of the stupidest things in an earnest but stupid school of culinary thought,” she scoffed at the idea that meals should be “balanced” at all. She heaped even more scorn on the suggested monthly menu plans “marked into twenty-six or so squares with a suggested menu for each meal of the week.” Asserting that it was difficult enough to prepare even one “supposedly tempting” dish a day, Fisher declared scientific meal planning to be “hard not only on the wills and wishes of the great American family, but it is pure hell on the pocketbook” as well.
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