A Photo History of American School Lunches
Before the first cafeteria worker ever plopped a gelatinous brown mass onto a compartmentalized plastic tray, children pretty much had to fend for themselves at 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.
