Tater tots and stakeholders

Abstract

Of the many school lunches I consumed as a child in rural Connecticut (USA), I remember tater tots—those delicious, deep-fried potato dollops—best. In 1911 New York City, a child might remember crullers from a pushcart. Or cocoa served in the school kitchen. Children's tendency to choose less nutritious options is possibly the greatest constant in the history of school lunches. Another constant, as A R Ruis explains in Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States, is the negotiation between stakeholders with vastly different priorities. First came tension between the state and the private domain. The earliest school lunch programmes started around the turn of the 20th century. As states passed compulsory education laws, more children spent their days in the classroom. Now legally responsible for children's education, were states also responsible for their nutritional care at school? Traditionally, the feeding of children fell within the private domain of hearth and home, the responsibility of mothers. Lunch programmes faced vocal opposition from conservatives wary of state encroachment. Ironically, mothers themselves largely welcomed the programmes. Support grew more widely when World War 1 revealed the extent of malnutrition. “Of the over 3 million young men who applied for military service in 1917–1918, more than 30 percent were rejected on medical grounds, mostly for defects of the heart, eyes, and bones; the fifth leading cause of rejection was underweight, and 8 percent of those rejected for medical reasons suffered from some physical, developmental defect. Surgeon General Rupert Blue and other health authorities drew a clear connection between many of these defects and chronic malnutrition during childhood.” Then came conflict between the private and public sectors. Charities often ran the first school lunch programmes, as their private funding gave them the agility needed to “experiment”. Once proven programmes were developed, the state offered the resources required to scale these programmes regionally. Local charities refined school lunch programmes with this in mind, hoping that the government would eventually take over successful ones and scale them regionally. This transition from a private to a public operation, when it did occur, often reduced the thoughtfulness and sensitivity of the programmes. For example, in 1908 home economist Mabel Hyde Kittredge founded the School Lunch Committee (SLC) to feed the poorest communities of New York City, comprised primarily of immigrant children. Approximately half the city's residents were foreign-born, and Kittredge determined that the best way to provide both appealing and healthy food was to hire cooks from local communities and cater to children's native tastes. “This evoked an agenda of health promotion—getting children to eat nourishing food—over one of cultural assimilation—getting children to eat more like Americans.” Schools in Jewish areas provided kosher meals, and schools in Catholic neighborhoods provided meat alternatives every Friday. When the Board of Education reluctantly took over from the SLC, it contracted the lunch programme to concessionaires who offered less nutritious fare to compete with the sweets of the pushcarts outside the schools. “The concessionaire system, though it may have contributed to some children's nutritional health incidentally, was little more than a profit-driven enterprise.” Following the Great Depression and trouble in the agricultural industry, another negotiation took place. The combination of monoculture farming and increasingly efficient methods led to surplus crops, which drove prices down to a point no longer profitable for farmers. In 1935, the Works Progress Administration bought surplus crops from farmers and provided them to schools free of charge. The goal of this intervention was to protect and stabilise the agricultural industry, setting the precedent for future federal involvement and legislation. When the National School Lunch Act was introduced in 1947, the US Department of Agriculture “received the bulk of the funding, putting an emphasis on surplus disposal over public health nutrition or nutrition education”. Over the course of about 70 years, school lunches grew from local experiments to a federal entitlement. Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat charts this process masterfully, in fascinating detail. Ruis dissects broad historical movements and events, including first-person accounts that anchor matters of policy in tangible reality. “If you could get in the back of the pushcarts, you could steal anybody blind. There were always potatoes fallin' off the back and gettin' pushed out into the street”, recalls one man of his New York childhood. Ruis places present dilemmas surrounding school lunches in a revealing historical context. The lure of junk food has always been an obstacle to reformers intent on improving children's health. In the early 1900s, campaigners lobbied to ban candy in Boston's schools. Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat serves as a primer to the complexity of enacting any public health policy. As a child, I took the cafeteria and my tray of food for granted. I certainly don't anymore.