School Lunch Politics (34 page)

School food service supervisors who had previously eschewed commercialism came to embrace brand names and advertising techniques in order to attract paying children into their lunchrooms. Frances Pietrangelo, school food-service supervisor in East Greenwich, New Jersey, pointed out that her lunchroom had to compete with television advertisements for the food dollars of children who could pay full price for meals. Pietrangelo tried to entice children into the school lunchroom with games and prizes by disguising vegetables in desserts like “beetnik cake” and “carrot cookies.” This was, she feared, a losing proposition. Even poor children who received free or reduced-price lunches and had no alternatives preferred fast food.
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Like the East Greenwich district, schools across the country found themselves competing with food industry advertisements for children's money and attention. St. Louis tried to attract children with a “Vita-lunch” that was essentially an assembly-line cold lunch prepared in a central kitchen and delivered to the elementary schools. The city's high schools served a “Gateway Special” billed as the “gateway to good nutrition, gateway to a good food bargain.”
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Indeed, school lunch administrators conceded that offering fast food was the only way to attract children—particularly paying children—into the lunchroom. ASFSA representative Tami Cline found herself touting pizza as offering “a substantial nutritional value.” In addition to protein and carbohydrates, Cline insisted, pizza crust offered vitamin B, and the tomato sauce “has a lot of vitamin C in it.”
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Private food-service corporations had no trouble tailoring their products to the school market. During the late 1960s, for example, Hostess cakes developed “Astrofood,” a vitamin-fortified (and sugar-filled) cake offered for school breakfasts in cities including St. Louis, Memphis, Buffalo, Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York.
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The problem with fortification, observed Thomas Farley, director of Milwaukee's school lunch program, was that it encouraged children to believe that fast food was healthy. Although Len Frederick's combo meals, for example, were forti fied with vitamins and protein, they were still high in carbohydrates and relatively low on vegetables. What is more, some nutritionists warned that fortification masked the underlying content of fast foods and lulled students into thinking they were making healthy food choices. What was worse for nutrition educators was the fact that by mimicking commercial meals, fast-food lunches reinforced “bad eating habits.” With fast food in school, nutritionists feared, children would simply never learn “what a balanced meal consists of.”
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At the very moment when the government began to heavily subsidize nutrition for poor children, physicians and nutritionists began to sound the alarm about the general state of American diets. The ubiquitous presence of fast-food restaurants combined with the industrialization of agriculture and the growth of the food-service industry seemed to have the ironic effect of providing Americans with more food choices than ever before while at the same time resulting in poorer diets overall. Americans, rich and poor, had come under the sway of food industry advertisements and fast-food restaurants. According to one estimate, for example, the average American consumed far more soft drinks each year than milk.
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Another study suggested that in 1955, 60 percent of Americans ate a good diet, but by 1965 that figure was down to 50 percent.
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As early as 1973, President Nixon's nutrition adviser, Jean Mayer, warned that a national epidemic of obesity threatened the state of American health. A report that year ominously estimated that as many as 50 million Americans were overweight.
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Another study reported that the percentage of high school students who exercised had declined “greatly” between 1979 and 2001. Yet another report suggested that “the average ten-year-old American boy” weighed fourteen pounds more than he had in 1960.
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As in the past, the 1970s “malnutrition scare” focused particularly on the diets of poor children. This time, however, school lunches, intended to provide needy children with nutrition they would otherwise not get, appeared the culprits—or at least the allies—in promoting poor food habits.

Some experts trotted out the old explanation that blamed the decline in American nutrition on the fact that more mothers were in the work force and were hence unable to prepare nutritious meals for their families. Spartanburg, South Carolina, school food-service supervisor Lucille Barnett, for example, opined that with 18 million mothers working outside the home, “they have insufficient time to prepare adequate meals.” The mother's income provides “plenty of money for snacking,” Barnett com plained, but “too little training in eating for their health's sake.”
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Other researchers pointed to the lack of nutrition education in the schools. Neither the food industry nor the USDA, it seemed, provided substantial nutrition education to the American public. Indeed, the National School Lunch Program, which was intended, at least in theory, to teach children nutritious food habits, had never developed much of a nutrition education program to go along with lunch. Most experts, however, echoing the traditional lament of nutrition reformers, blamed people for simply choosing “the wrong kind of food.”
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The 1970s concern with diet differed in important respects from earlier malnutrition debates. In the past, physicians and nutritionists alike believed malnutrition resulted from a lack of essential nutrients, vitamins, and, most particularly, calories. That is, the poor had always been assumed to lack sufficient food in both quantity and quality. Poverty and malnutrition, it was thought, could be detected by deficiencies in weight and height. Now, however, the chronic diseases formerly associated with malnutrition—rickets, pellagra, and anemia—were largely replaced by heart problems, diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity.
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The issue was no longer calories; children were getting plenty of those. Rather, doctors, nutritionists, and food writers alike now focused on things like fat, sodium, and cholesterol. Where nutritionists—not to mention physicians, pundits, and politicians as well—assumed that abundance would temper working-class eating habits and encourage the consumption of nutritious foods, instead, the more foods people had access to, the poorer their diets seemed to become.
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If the late twentieth-century poor no longer suffered from insufficient quantities of food, they nonetheless, according to the experts, persisted in exercising poor choices when it came to diet. The language of obesity itself revealed this new attitude. As one nutritionist observed, “how often today do we describe a fat person as ‘corpulent,' ‘portly,' or ‘stout'?” Instead, we use words like “obese” or “overweight,” which have distinctly negative connotations.
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Where an earlier generation of home economists criticized poor and immigrant housewives for squandering their meager incomes on steak and butter, 1970s nutrition experts accused them of eating “junk food.” As one historian observed, “not only did this make it difficult to think of the poor as hungry, it also put any blame for their inadequate nutrition back on their shoulders: on their ignorance, or, more commonly, their inability to resist temptation and postpone gratification.”
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Nutritionists and children's welfare advocates blamed the Department of Agriculture as much as fast-food restaurants for children's obesity. As the number of children, particularly poor children, eating school lunches increased, the critics focused particular attention on the quality of food served. In theory, of course, school lunches provided a significant portion of each child's nutritional needs. But the fact was, nutritional standards had changed very little since Lydia Roberts first estimated RDAs during World War II. In 1946, when the National School Lunch Program began, nutritionists worried that children's diets did not provide sufficient calories to maintain health and vigor. The goal of the Department of Agriculture's “Type A” meal had been to ensure that children received at least one-third of the recommended nutritional requirement over the course of a week's school lunches. Government nutrition guidelines mandated that the Type A meal include whole milk and that each lunch regularly include butter, creamed soups, creamed sauces, and puddings. In 1968, however, these foods loomed as the major culprits in children's obesity.

School menus reflected the Department of Agriculture's reliance on the food industry in setting nutrition standards for the nation's children. Despite growing concerns about obesity, school diets were still heavy on fat, salt, and carbohydrates.
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As late as 1998, according to one report, the school lunch program
“was required to offer
as one of its fluid milk options ‘whole milk' containing nearly four percent butterfat.”
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It was not until the mid-1970s that the USDA required schools to offer low-fat or skim milk as an option. What is more, it was not until 1976 that the Agriculture Department removed its requirement that butter be served with each school lunch.
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“There is a profound reluctance,” noted Jean Mayer, to use other (polyunsaturated) fats in school lunches, even though studies had firmly established the dangers in butter-based diets. As far as Mayer could see, as long as the National School Lunch Program continued to be an outlet for surplus food, there would be no incentive to move toward a healthier diet. It was, he said, the department's continuing policy of sending surplus commodities to school lunchrooms that skewed children's diets so dramatically toward unhealthy foods. The school lunch program, he charged, “does not deal with what is desirable nutritionally. Rather, it deals with the fact that we have ‘too much' of certain foods.
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The Department of Agriculture proved particularly lax when it came to enforcing its own nutrition standards in school lunchrooms. While the USDA published extensive nutrition tables, recipes, and menus to help housewives as well as institutional food-service managers—and school lunch administrators—meet the recommendations, actual adherence to the nutrition standards was largely self-reported. The department only asked schools to make “a good faith effort” to meet nutrition standards when they applied for federal reimbursements.

By the end of the 1970s, the National School Lunch Program suffered from both financial and nutritional shortfalls. Despite private contracts and fast-food options, school lunchrooms continued to run significant deficits. They could not seem to attract enough paying children to keep their enterprises afloat. Nor could school administrators drum up sufficient local support to supplement federal reimbursements to cover operating expenses. Although school lunchrooms certainly might have operated more efficiently, when it came to feeding children, efficiency often failed. The vast majority of children eating lunch at school were poor, and the vast majority of lunches served were free or reduced-price. While the American public continued to support the school lunch program in theory, taxpayers refused to foot the bill. The inflation of the 1970s combined with a declining supply of surplus food meant that school lunchrooms continued to operate in crisis mode.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1980 he promised to “downsize” government and eliminate waste in public programs. One of the first targets in the downsizing effort were child nutrition programs, particularly school lunches. At the time, the National School Lunch Program was one of four major non-cash federal programs available to low-income households. (The others were food stamps, housing subsidies, and Medicaid.)
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The Reagan budget eliminated $400 million of the school lunch program's $4.6 billion budget. The following year's budget eliminated $35 billion from all domestic programs, including $1.4 billion in child nutrition programs. This amounted to about a quarter of the National School Lunch Program's budget. The school lunch program received the largest cut of all child nutrition programs, reducing reimbursement rates, lowering eligibility criteria for free and reduced price lunches, and excluding many private schools from government subsidies. The budget cuts disproportionately affected black children. According to one study, three million fewer black children qualified for free lunches, and 500,000 fewer received free breakfasts.
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When it came to school lunches, the Reagan administration hoped to “narrow the focus of federal support” by eliminating all subsidies for meals served to non-needy children.
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Indeed, Reagan's budget director David Stockman argued that the school lunch program was “wasteful” because it subsidized children whose families could afford to pay for lunch.
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Reagan administration officials were convinced, furthermore, that thousands of federal dollars could be saved by identifying and eliminating families who fraudulently applied for government subsidies, including school lunches. To root out those children who, in the administration's view, did not deserve a free or reduced price lunch, the Department of Agriculture revised the application procedures for free meals and made the process “look more like a traditional welfare program.”
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As one report put it, the old application was “simple, and the emphasis was on feeding children rather than on ensuring that benefits were being awarded correctly.”
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In the past, school officials simply accepted self-declarations of income and family size. Now, however, schools were required to verify the information on free lunch applications. What is more, school lunch applications now required parents to provide the names and social security numbers for each adult in the household. Although the new, more rigorous application procedures were designed to eliminate abuse in the system, in fact, relatively little fraud turned up. One study concluded that discrepancies in reported income levels were due not to fraud but to the fact that low-income families often experienced irregular earnings. The study found that families usually filled out free lunch applications in August, but schools did not verify the forms until October or November. It was this time lag, which revealed “normal changes in income and household size between the time of application and the time of verification,” and not fraud, that accounted for the “misreporting” on school lunch application forms.
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