A. R. Ruis, Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States

Abstract

Although often framed as ‘food fights’1 in today’s policy debates, school food disputes are not all that new, as Andrew Ruis reminds us in Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States. In six concise chapters, Ruis examines the many school meal programmes in place across the country prior to the passage of the National School Lunch Program in 1946. Chronicling in rich detail the origins, composition and challenges these early school food programmes faced, Ruis offers a history that deepens our understanding of mid-century federal legislation and informs present day policy decisions. Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat examines tensions central to public health and social medicine—namely, promoting health within the divides between public oversight and private responsibilities. In this way, early school meal programmes suffered from Progressive Era concerns about dependency, compounded by the lack of clear data on child hunger and malnutrition or of programme costs and benefits. The case of school food was, and is, further complicated by its numerous stakeholders, including the federal government, the state, schools and parents, not to mention charitable organisations, advocacy groups, the food industry and farmers. Furthermore, school food’s difficulties lie within the complex nature of nutrition knowledge, which Ruis argues is a ‘fundamentally social process’, rooted in variable understandings of ‘which foods are healthful (or not), what constitutes a meal, how foods should be prepared and consumed, and even what counts as “food”’ (p. 6). Ruis argues these ‘are not empirical questions to be answered in labs or clinics but social questions continually addressed through the combination of scientific, cultural, and political—but also historical—processes’ (p. 6).