School Lunch Politics (20 page)

School food service as a profession came of age with the creation of the National School Lunch Program. During the 1930s, school cafeteria professionals formed regional School Food Service Associations that met regularly and articulated standards for nutrition and hygiene. These associations distributed recipes and menus, often sponsored by food industry groups using brand-name products. After the National School Lunch Program went into effect, the regional associations formed the nationwide American School Food Service Association (ASFSA) in 1946. In 1955 the ASFSA hired as its first executive director John Perryman, a man more experienced in business than in children's nutrition. Perryman built the organization through a network of state and regional chapters and within four years boasted a national membership of over 17,000.
³⁷
Perryman deftly guided the ASFSA into the modern era in which food service, and school lunches, constituted a key element in the food and agricultural businesses. He centralized the food-service profession, establishing a national office for the ASFSA and organizing annual conventions in which members could meet not only to learn about the latest nutrition theories and federal school lunch regulations but also to see new food products and cafeteria equipment. Perryman maintained close ties to both the Department of Agriculture and to the food-service industry. The ASFSA regularly sold advertising space in its newsletter and invited private companies to exhibit at its annual national conventions. While during its early years, most of the association's advertising revenue came from kitchen and cafeteria equipment manufacturers, by the end of the 1950s, brandname foods and new food products were commonplace. “I remember the eye-opener of seeing instant potatoes,” recalled cafeteria manager, Lucille Barnett. School food service had, in her professional lifetime, “moved from a cracker-barrel, backwoods business to a billion dollar industry.”
³⁸
By 1952 school lunch programs constituted a $415 million operation, including large investments in equipment in many schools. In 1961 school lunches accounted for $308 million out of $366 million in federal food dollars.
³⁹
That year, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman boasted that the National School Lunch Program was “the largest single group feeding effort anywhere in the world.”
⁴⁰

Like other industrial operations, school food service increasingly depended on unskilled workers and distant supervision. Indeed, school cooks were among the lowest paid professionals in the food-service industry. School lunch workers, more often than not, were working women, mothers and housewives who wanted part-time jobs. These women had little formal training, although everyone agreed “they are a splendid group of people. … their endeavors are most sincere and valiant.”
⁴¹
Unlike dietitians and home economists, who were required to hold higher education degrees, school food-service workers' training, when it was not on-the-job, consisted of workshops and in-service programs. Indeed, by the 1960s, only 38 percent of school cafeteria assistants had finished high school, and just 80 percent of managers had earned a high school degree.
⁴²
As late as 1968, school cafeteria workers earned only $1.60 per hour.
⁴³
In some places wages were even lower. Washington, D.C., cafeteria workers, for example, earned between $1.35 and $1.65 per hour.
⁴⁴
Chief of Pay Systems and Labor Relations for the district's school lunch programs considered school cooks to be less skilled than their counterparts who worked in hospitals. Hospital cooks, he noted, “must be diet cooks” and were expected to prepare three meals a day, while school cooks only prepared lunch.”
⁴⁵
When schools moved toward pre-packaged meals and central kitchens in the 1960s, trained cooks almost entirely disappeared from the cafeteria. States employed dietitians to oversee school lunch menus, but these professionals spent little time, if any, actually working in the kitchen. In Alabama, for example, one dietitian planned menus for all of the state's lunch programs. She supervised several thousand women who did the actual food preparation. The state's director of food-service operations admitted there was “a common feeling that home economists no longer knew much about school lunch programs.”
⁴⁶

T
HE
L
IMITS
OF THE
L
UNCHROOM

In truth, during the 1950s, the National School Lunch Program served up more in rhetoric than in substance. The Department of Agriculture could boast about its school lunch program, and those lawmakers who had an interest in agriculture could feel good about their support for farmers. Despite the generally optimistic tone of domestic politics during the 1950s, however, American social welfare policies, including the National School Lunch Program, were marked by serious limitations. Most notably, the school lunch program's administrative and fiscal structure revealed the influence of southern legislators who insisted on weak federal oversight for social programs and the reluctance of liberal lawmakers to challenge obvious regional and racial inequalities in services and benefits. The popular belief, for example, that any American child who needed a nutritious lunch could get one was largely a myth. The National School Lunch Program's administrative structure fundamentally institutionalized inequality and discrimination and seriously undermined the federal government's claim to be an effective guardian either of national food policy or child nutrition. As with Aid to Dependent Children and other federal welfare programs, federal funds were distributed via state agencies. While this pleased southern legislators who resisted federal involvement, particularly when it came to racial equity, it perpetuated local inequalities when it came to feeding children. Thus, while the National School Lunch Act set nutrition standards for children's meals and insisted that poor children be given free lunches, Congress established no enforcement mechanism—and appropriated no funds—to ensure that these requirements were met.

T
ABLE
5.1
Sources of Funding for School Lunch Program, 1947–68*

Source:
Hearings, School Lunch, and Child Nutrition Programs, September 29–October 1, 1969, Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, United States Senate, 91st Cong., 1st Sess., 184.

*Does not count local contributions.

 

 

 

School lunch funding structures perpetuated America's regional and racial inequalities. In order to encourage local “buy-in” for the school lunch program, congressional appropriations covered only a small fraction of the cost of children's lunches. After the first three years of operation, states were obligated to match federal contributions on a three-toone basis. Most states, rather than raise local taxes, decided to charge children a small amount for lunch and count those fees as their part of the match. Thus, until the early 1960s, the National School Lunch Program's financial base rested on families who were able to pay the cost of subsidized meals for their children. For this reason, lunches during the 1950s came to be seen as a subsidy for the middle class, broadly defined as families who could afford to pay for school lunches.

Although congressional appropriations for children's lunches increased each year during the 1950s, the federal government's real share of school lunch budgets actually declined (see
Tables 5.1
and
5.2
). In 1947, the program's first year of operation, federal contributions accounted for 32 cents out of each school lunch dollar, while state and municipal contributions made up about 12 cents. Children's lunch money, along with contributions from PTAs and civic groups, made up the rest of the program's operating budget. In 1952 the federal school lunch contribution fell to only 12 cents and state government payments accounted for just 9 cents. In point of fact, the only source of school lunch funding that increased during the 1950s was the amount that parents sent to school for their children's meals. By 1952, parent contributions in the form of lunch fees covered over half of the program's costs. Indeed, between 1947 and 1968, state and local contributions averaged only 21 percent of the total pro gram costs, while children's fees nationwide, accounted for 55 percent.
⁴⁷
In 1962, Department of Agriculture officials boasted that the states paid nine million dollars in matching contributions. Two-thirds of that nine million, however, came from children's school lunch fees and not from state or local treasuries.
⁴⁸
Some state legislatures actually passed laws prohibiting the use of local taxes for school lunch programs. Others contributed only to food expenses and refused to pay for operating costs or equipment. In Louisiana, despite Allen Ellender's commitment to the program state funds made up just over one-third of the school lunch operating expenses. In Georgia, the situation was even worse. State funds made up only 0.4 percent of the cost of lunch. Northern states were only somewhat more generous. New York State, for example, paid only 21 percent of the cost of lunch, and Massachusetts contributed only 11 percent.
⁴⁹
In other words, while the federal government took credit for a National School Lunch Program, it was children's fees that kept the program going.
⁵⁰

T
ABLE
5.2
Local Sources of Financing for National School Lunch Program, Selected States, 1967*

Source:
Committee on School Lunch Participation,
Their Daily Bread: A Study of the National School Lunch Program
(Atlanta, Ga.: McNelley-Rudd Printing Service, 1968), 38–39.

* Some states were not listed because the figures were incomplete at the time of publication.

** This was the first year Florida appropriated funds for school lunches. At the time of the study, the governor had just vetoed it.

 

 

 

The consequences of the School Lunch Program's financial structure meant than many American children had no access to subsidized meals. Because states were not obligated to participate in the federal program, as late as 1960 only about half of the nation's public and private schools (64,000) contracted with the department of Agriculture for lunch programs. While the department boasted that it fed over fourteen million children, this was only a third of the nation's public school students.
⁵¹
Most of the children eating school lunches during the 1950s came from rural, white school districts in the South and southwest. The program's heavily rural and southern bias clearly reflected the continued influence of legislators like Richard Russell and Allen Ellender, who enthusiastically backed the program well into the 1960s. Not surprisingly, both Georgia and Louisiana claimed among the highest participation rates in the nation (73% and 74%, respectively), this despite the fact that the states themselves contributed little to the program.
⁵²
Indeed, in 1960, not one of the nation's large cities contracted with the Department of Agriculture for school lunch subsidies.
⁵³
As late as 1962, only 5 percent of Philadelphia's schools participated in the federal program. Chicago and Detroit offered subsidized lunch for only 10 percent of their schoolchildren, while Cleveland and San Francisco fed fewer than 20 percent. The only major city boasting even 50 percent participation was Miami (62%), reflecting the program's general Southern tilt
⁵⁴
(see
Table 5.3
).

The program's rural bias reflected the structure of urban schools as much as the interests and influence of southern lawmakers. Many city schools had been built during the 1920s' expansion of public education. Designed as neighborhood schools in an era when middle-class mothers had not yet entered the work force in large numbers, most of these schools had no cafeteria facilities—school boards as well as school architects assumed children would go home for lunch. Whether this reflected the reality of life in urban, working-class neighborhoods of the 1920s and 1930s is questionable. It is certain, however, that by the 1950s, despite the rise of a post-war “culture of domesticity,” large numbers of mothers held jobs outside their homes and could not wait in their kitchens for their children to come home at noon. The domestic ideal, combined with a general disinterest in agricultural programs, however, explains why, until the mid-1960s, most northern politicians as well as liberal civic groups paid little attention to the workings of the school lunch program. Only after 1963, when the civil rights movement looked to the North, and politicians as well as activists “discovered” poverty, did school lunches become an issue for legislators in states such as Illinois, Ohio, California, and Massachusetts. As one historian put it, during the 1950s, the school lunch program worked well in the South and in rural areas but was “no issue at all for big-city liberals.”
⁵⁵