A Photo History of American School Lunches
Before the first lunch lady ever plopped a gelatinous brown mass onto a compartmentalized plastic tray, children pretty much had to fend for themselves when it came to the midday meal, and were lucky if they got enough to eat. Nowadays, the problem is that kids are obese and unhealthy partly because of what they're eating at school. How did we get from there to here?
Library of Congress1/24A Fine Pickle
In the 19th century, there simply was no such a thing as a school lunch (unless it was an act of charity). Children either went home for lunch, went hungry, or were given a penny by their parents to buy food. (These high-school girls having a picnic in Pelham Bay Park in New York in 1911 were obviously among the lucky ones.) Streets run amok with penny-wielding kids led at one point to a moral panic about what they were eating—and it wasn't candy, notes Culinary Institute of America food anthropologist Willa Zhen: "Poor kids were using their pennies to buy pickles, which were considered the addictive, terrible junk food of the time, and people were debating how to keep them away from kids."
U.S. National Archives2/24Do-Gooders Step In
By the 1920s, however, Americans had become entranced by the relatively fledgling science of nutrition and home economics, says Susan Levine, director of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of the greatly informative School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America's Favorite Welfare Program. Lunchrooms became a standard part of school architecture, schoolchildren were weighed and measured for signs of malnutrition, home economists lectured about what to cook and eat (the pupils in this 1933 were Tennessee mothers), and activists argued that "the right kind of food" would help assimilate waves of immigrant children who needed to be turned into "proper Americans." Most school-lunch programs were still volunteer efforts, however.
U.S. National Archives3/24Shirley Temple Likes Milk
</head>Soon after they became commonplace, school cafeterias became yet another place for schoolchildren (like these 1936 young 'uns) to absorb lessons—or propaganda, depending on who you're asking. Kids are still being exposed to it. "They traditionally would hang posters and homemade slogans that were very didactic about food and nutrition," Levine says. "Then, by the '60s and '70s, the food-service companies and corporate brands would send their posters to schools, and they'd put those up on cafeteria walls so that the brands were visible. Eventually school nutritionists sued."
Enoch Pratt Free Library, Maryland Department, Photograph Collection4/24A Great Hunger
During the Great Depression, those volunteer programs couldn't handle the influx of children who now relied on school lunches as their major source of sustenance, like these undernourished Maryland school kids in 1935. Meanwhile, farmers across what was still a largely agricultural country were struggling, and the federal government feared the economy would implode.
USDA5/24Two Birds
Economists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture hit upon an elegant solution that would serve two purposes: The government would pay farmers for their surplus foods, then donate that food to needy schools to use. In 1933, Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act, one of the core pieces of legislation of the New Deal, and, for good or ill, paving the way for the school lunch as we know it today. In this photo, needy kids in Taos, NM, are still eating thanks to the surplus-commodities program in 1941.
NARA6/24Surplus Stores
The problems with relying on a vast bureaucracy to turn surplus commodities into school lunches quickly became obvious. Among the most ludicrous was the fact that schools got whatever foods farmers had to get rid of lots of, which led to situations where school officials had to make hundreds of children's school lunches out of nothing but onions or olives or grapefruit. It was becoming clear, Levine says, that for the USDA, feeding schoolchildren healthy meals was secondary to keeping farmers afloat.
Bonhams.com7/24Lunch with Mickey
The government and activists weren't the only ones who saw a future in getting involved in what kids were eating. In 1935, the very first themed lunch box was released, and it had Walt Disney's seven-year-old star, Mickey Mouse, on it, grinning as he carried his schoolbooks.
U.S. National Archives8/24The Home Front
As the U.S. prepared to enter World War II, the entire country had to re-engineer itself for war—and many saw an opportunity to re-engineer children's eating habits, as well. As FDR observed, "food and nutrition would be at least as important as metals and munitions." This kid learning about ration coupons in 1943 knew that, too.
U.S. National Archives9/24Patriotic Duty
It wasn't just about happy kids. In World War I, one out of every three U.S. military recruits was rejected because he was malnourished or had defects related to being undernourished as a child. As they prepared for another world war, federal officials were genuinely worried that an America of undernourished schoolchildren wouldn't be physically strong enough to fend off the growing threats abroad, the underlying message of this War Food Administration poster from the last three years of the war.
Smithsonian Institution10/24The Science of School Lunches
The Roosevelt administration hired famed anthropologist Margaret Mead (pictured) and other experts to come up with scientific guidelines for children's nutrition, or the Recommended Daily Allowances—teenage girls were supposed to consume 2,400 to 2,800 calories a day, teenage boys between 3,400 and 3,800, to come from "balanced meals" of meat or beans, green and yellow vegetables, citrus fruits, milk, bread, and butter.
U.S. National Archives11/24Melting Pot
Mead recommended that children be allowed to make choices about what they ate, and that school officials begin introducing "modernized" ethnic foods to broaden the American palate. (In this photo, children of Japanese detainees have school lunch with other Americans in San Francisco in 1942.)
USDA12/24Yum
But Mead also said that, because school lunches had to appeal to children from all backgrounds, food in school cafeterias ought to be "fairly innocuous" and with "low emotional value." As this 1966 school lunch can attest, Mead's exhortations that school officials provide kids "low toned foods" were being followed two decades later, unwittingly or not.
U.S. National Archives13/24Family Unit
Mead also suggested that to counter the natural chaos of a school lunchroom, that officials place children into mock family units as they ate their meals to reinforce family ties and learn about nutrition, conversation, etiquette, and gender roles. In some schools, one boy and one girl acted as host and hostess for the table, as if preparing themselves for a future in the middle class. As for the ending-chaos-in-the-cafeteria part, we all know how that turned out.
USDA14/24It's Official!
In 1946, President Harry Truman signed the National School Lunch Act into law, making permanent the USDA's control of the national school-lunch program and at least nominally divvying up the financial burden for school lunches with states.
U.S. National Archives15/24Extra!
The USDA also continued the tradition of using school cafeterias to funnel surplus agricultural commodities. This St. Louis elementary-school boy uses his school's government-supplied food as toys in 1969.
USDA16/24Ike Likes Cake
But though the program boasted of caring for the nation's neediest children in lofty language, the reality was that, for its first 15 years (in this photo, President Dwight D. Eisenhower celebrates the program's 10th anniversary), the program reached relatively few children, and the poorest and minority children were scarcely fed at all, Levine says.
EnvisioningtheAmericanDream.com17/24TV Lunch
Meanwhile, the convergence of school lunches, new technology, and valuable entertainment brands continued, with the first TV-themed lunch box in 1950: Hopalong Cassidy.
USDA18/24Big Business
By the 1952, the school-lunch industry had grown from the efforts of several independent volunteers to a $415 million business. As Levine notes, administrators and money men grew more influential as nutritionists and home economists receded into the background. (This photo depicts the central kitchen making meals for the public schools of Pittsburgh in 1975.)
LBJ Presidential Library19/24The Great Lunch Society
In the 1960s, school lunches came under fire by activists who recast the concept of feeding schoolchildren as part of the nation's War on Poverty. In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson (pictured here in 1967) signed the Child Nutrition Act, the first federal program that set aside money for free lunches for needy children. School lunches had transformed from an agricultural subsidy to "one of the nation's premier poverty programs," Levine writes.
USDA20/24Fast Food
Schools also began to increasingly rely on private contractors who prepared their meals off-site, and more and more, these contractors were larger and larger corporations like Armour and Marriott, which sensed a windfall of a market. Inside the schools, administrators began to look admiringly at the companies behind the country's fast-food explosion. At the same time, ethnic and regional foods (albeit watered-down versions) like tacos and fish and chips began spreading across school lunchrooms alongside burgers and french fries, thanks in part to the influence of fast food, Levine says. Meanwhile, nutritionists began warning not of undernourishment, but the opposite—a growing obesity problem among Americans and their children.
Wikimedia Commons21/24Crack in the Door
In 1979, the USDA, which had been loosening nutritional requirements for school lunches over the decade, issued new guidelines that stated that foods sold in the lunchroom only need to have "minimum nutritional value," allowing candy to be sold in public-school cafeterias. One USDA official said that "if a candy bar has only one nut in it, we feel it is above our minimum nutrient standards."
U.S. National Archives22/24The Gipper's Ketchup Problem
In the 1980s, the business of government became all about the bottom line. After Ronald Reagan took office, the administration set about cutting budgets and governmental waste, and the increasingly expensive school-lunch program—whose recipients were increasingly made up of the poor—looked like a plump target. In 1981, the USDA infamously approved changing the guidelines to count ketchup as a serving of vegetables in school meals, hoping to save the government millions of dollars that would otherwise go to pricier actual vegetables.
Photo courtesy of Flickr's kellyhogaboom, under under Wikimedia Commons license23/24Barbarians at the Gates
In mid-'90s, the federal government broke down the barrier between the fast-food industry and made it okay for corporations like McDonald's, Taco Bell, and Little Caesar's to open up shop inside schools. School officials embraced the companies, which offered what they saw as the only way to keep their lunch programs financially viable, Levine writes. (School vending machines alone brought the Oakland, Calif., school district $600,000 a year.) The chains, for their part, saw an opportunity to develop brand loyalty at a young age, and didn't find it difficult to enrich their usual offerings just enough to meet nutrition standards.
By Bob Nichols/USDA24/24Brave New World
Starting in the early 2000s, celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver began promoting an overhaul of the lunches schools offer, but the movement's highest-profile proponent turned out to be Michelle Obama, who made children's fitness her official project as first lady. Their efforts culminated in the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act signed into law by President Barack Obama, which directed the USDA to renovate school-meal nutrition standards for the first time in 15 years. Levine, however, has learned not to be too optimistic: "It's a good idea, there's nothing wrong with it. But again, to my my mind, the opportunity to do what she's saying to have healthy school lunches is limited the problems of the school systems and the budgets. The real takeaway from history is that a healthy school lunch depends a lot less on what individual choices kids make or the particular foods in front of them, and is really about the social and political decisions we make about how we want to feed our kids and how we want to pay for it."
