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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States by A. R. Ruis Amy L. Best Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States. By A. R. Ruis. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017. ix + 201 pp. Cloth $95.00, paper $29.95. Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States by A. R. Ruis is a carefully crafted account of some of our nation's earliest school food programs. The book is part of the important Rutgers University Press book series Critical Issues in Health and Medicine and is composed of six substantive chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue. Built upon extensive archival investigation, Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat offers much insight into how the National School Lunch Program took early shape at the turn of the twentieth century, a period of rapid urbanization, industrialization, and demographic change. Taken together, the chapters help us to understand the historical context and changing social tides that left a lasting imprint on a program that has been the subject of substantial debate for more than a century. Changing ideas about health, the ascendance of scientific expertise, growing recognition of poor nutritional health among children, increasing opposition to child labor, and the changing value of the child serve as a backdrop. Of particular relevance to understanding the early iterations of school food programs in the United States was the shifting understanding of school itself. Whether school was fundamentally an institution of the state or a community institution, [End Page 470] a social welfare institution committed to the betterment of children or exclusively an educational institution was a subject of widespread disagreement. This is a point Ruis revisits on several occasions, revealing tensions about the relationship of the state to individuals and the collective body informing public and policy discussion. Most early school lunch programs were organized by private charity. The view that a state-sponsored subsidized lunch program would cultivate national dependency, pauperization, and moral degeneracy was widely held by state and municipal government officials and middle-class charity organizations. Yet there was also considerable variation, with some city school boards adopting broad, school-based health initiatives. The majority of school boards relied on community partnerships with women's clubs, churches, and settlement houses to skirt rules against use of public money for school lunch. A few school boards sued states and municipalities to secure legal funds to cover the cost of school lunch. To understand these municipal differences and their sociopolitical contexts, Ruis spotlights two contrasting cases of school food programs. In Chicago, the subject of chapter 2, public obligation for children's nutritional health was taken as a given. But widespread indifference characterized New York City (chapter 3), whose school board saw feeding children as an activity belonging to the private realm of home. Both chapters offer rich detail of the complexity in administering school lunch programs and provide interesting contrast between the two cities in their willingness to address religious and ethnic differences among immigrant student populations. From the two cases, we also learn some things haven't changed all that much. Early school lunch programs had to compete against the pull of commercial food vendors. In the early 1900s, the concessionaires and street food tempted many children, much in the way McDonald's does today. Chapter 4 examines school lunch programs in rural schools, detailing an altogether different set of obstacles. Despite rural children's proximity to farm food, malnutrition was common. The high cost of rural education and few resources made the task of feeding rural children difficult. At the turn of the twentieth century most rural schools were single-room schools, with little more than a wood-burning stove to heat the room, let alone an appropriately equipped kitchen. Yet rural food programs, unlike their urban counterparts, did attempt more comprehensive nutritional programming. The final two substantive chapters offer a lead-up to the National School Lunch Program and the changing role of the federal government in the 1930s, a period marked by soaring relief registers, high demand for food aid, and the...