"In
the long view, no nation is healthier than its children,
or more prosperous than its farmers."
President Harry Truman,
on signing the 1946 National School Lunch Act
Before School Lunch
Programs
Most children in America, as in the rest
of the world, went to school only when the farm work allowed.
Children ate lunch out in the fields and only what was
available. This child was helping with the sugarcane harvest.
Up till the mid 20th century, most children
came home for lunch.
In many cases when the schoolhouse was
far from the home, children had to eat lunch at school.
Here is a boy lucky to ride to school carrying his lunch
pail.
Here's a school lunch pail.
Most kids had to wall, like these Amish
children in Pennsylvania.
There were no lunchrooms in most schools
and kids ate informally.
These are Canadian Mennonite boys eating
outside. The girls sit separately.
Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford:
A Pioneer of School Lunch Programs
The USDA's Food & Nutrition Service
website contains an excellent summary of the history of
school lunch programs, a portion of which is quoted below.
Click
here to read the full account both.
"In 1790 a combined program of teaching
and feeding hungry, vagrant children was begun in Munich,
Germany, by Benjamin Thompson, known also a Count Rumford.
An American born physicist and statesman, he spent his
early years in New England. During the Revolutionary War
he became distrusted because of his activities and contacts
with royalists, and in 1784 went to England and from there
he traveled to Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. While
in Munich he established the Poor People's Institute,
involving a program under which poor, unemployed adults
were required to work for clothing and food by making
clothing for the army. The children were also required
to work part time in the forenoon and afternoon. During
the hours between their work schedules they were taught,
reading, writing, and arithmetic.
The food served to children and adults consisted mainly
of soup made from potatoes, barley, and peas. Meat was
not included in the diet because of its high cost. Because
of a lack of adequate funding for his projects, Count
Rumford was constantly seeking to develop meals which
would provide the best nutrition at the lowest possible
cost.
His assistance in developing public mass feeding was
sought by many countries, and he established large programs
in England, Germany, Scotland, France and Switzerland.
In London, for example, 60,000 persons were fed daily
from Count Rumford's soup kitchen. Such large operations
challenged him to develop more efficient food preparation
facilities, and he is credited with having invented the
double boiler, kitchen range, baking oven, fire-less cooker,
pressure cooker and drip coffee pot, all of them being
forerunners of the steam jacketed kettle, compartment
steamer, and commercial ovens used so extensively in school
food service programs today."
School Lunch Programs:
USA 1900-1960
"School meal programs
began during the Great Depression of the 1930's. From
the outset, they had two purposes: to help dispose of
surplus agricultural commodities owned by the government
as a result of price-support agreement with farmers ,
and to help prevent nutritional deficiencies among low-income
schoolchildren. Because chronic disease risk factors were
not an issue at that time, the rules specified meals that
used surplus commodities and were higher in fat, saturated
fat, sugar, and salt---and lower in fiber---than recommended
in later years."
--Marion Nestle, Food Politics (Berkeley, University
of California Press, 2002)
Various efforts by reformers in America
were started in mostly urban schools to feed poor children.
The first school lunchroom kitchens were not bigger than
the average home kitchen. Older students helped with many
of the chores.
Read
more about the early efforts to feed American school childen
here.
University Home Economics departments
began training professional school lunch managers in the
1920's.
During World War Two the USA's War Food Administration
had been helping communities set up school lunch programs.
After the war the US government set up
permanent support for school lunches.
Individual states set up programs to administer
the lunch program.
This token was good for one school lunch in Hawaii.
The 1946 National School Lunch program
provided hot meals for low income students.
The Commercialization
of School Lunch (1960-1990)
More affluent childen could pay for the
hot lunch in the cafeteria, but many brought their lunches
from home, carried in tin or aluminum lunch boxes decorated
with pop culture figures from TV shows, cartoon characters
and ads. After the war, families moved to the suburbs
where cars were needed and many kids rode to school. Click
here for a school lunch box exhibit.
Whether you brought your lunch from home
or ate from the cafeteria line, milk was the standard
beverage for most of the 20th century.
In the 1980's school populations were
expanding and budgets for school lunches were not able
to keep up. Schools turned to outside vendors to provide
meals and additional income. Pizza companies led the way.
Soft drink companies followed. By the 1990's fizzy sugary
drinks had replaced milk and pizza was the favorite meal.
Greg Critzer's
Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People
in the World chapter "Who Let the Calories
In?" (to school lunch rooms) documents this history
School Lunch Reform
Movement. (1995-present)
During the last decade an increasing number
of parents, educators, elected officials and interested
citizens in the USA, United Kingdom and other economically
developed nations became concerned with rising obesity
rates among children, teens and the adult population.
These reformers called for an end to vending machines,
fastfood type offerings, sticking to nutritional guidelines
and finding ways to reconnect children to food. These
include: gardening, cooking and dining in a more informal
leisurely way with children. Adding food across the curriculum
is also an important goal.
School Gardens
Give
the children an opportunity to make a garden.
Let them grow what they will. It matters less that they
grow
good plants than that they try for themselves.
--Liberty Hyde Bailey
Liberty
Hyde Bailey, horticulturalist, author, dean of the
College of Agriculture at Cornell University vigorously
advocated that every school in America should have a garden.
He probably wasn't the first to promote the idea that
children would benefit from studying how plants grow etc.
But he had a certain influence. However, the biggest boost
to children gardening in school was World War I.
The pamphlet War Gardening (see
the cover illustration above) argued school children and
school yard gardens were urgently needed to supply the
nation's food. In a letter entitled "The Duty of
the
Schools," J. H. Francis, director of The United States
School Garden Army wrote:
" There is a mighty army of boys and girls, thirty
to fifty million strong, who have heads, hearts and hands,
leisure time and patriotism to spare. There are also hundreds
of thousands of acres of tillable land uncultivated......Superintendents
of schools must make their schools a vital, an actual,
force in giving more food to the world and in conserving
what is produced....Through the school children we can
make the undertaking not merely immediately porductive,
but a permanent factor in American life as well."
By the 1930's outdoor education and school gardens were
popular. The map at the beginning of this report shows
a fictional school garden. It is from a book called Robert's
School. It tells the story of a reluctant boy to go to
school until he discovers that he can help start the school
garden.
Many teachers can attest that giving children a chance
to garden, transforms even the most challenging student.
Of course, in many parts of the world, school
gardens are a common experience. Below is a school garden
in India.
Here are links for more about school
gardens:
Kids
Gardening website of the American Gardening Association
: which has lots of information books for teachers and
parents.
Edible
Schoolyard
Here is an online exhibit
about the life and times of Liberty
Hyde Bailey: A Man for All Seasons.
Click
here for our School Lunch Reform issue with links
Images
used in this exhibit:
Lunchroom wide angle: www.sliceny.com/
archives/seltzerboy/
WW2 poster with baseball player: www.sirc.org/timeline/
1943_large17.html
WW2 poster with kids in line: www.world-war-2-history.com/
posters/ww1645-62.jpg
Hawaiian lunch token: www.ukulele.com/.../
hawaii/aliiolanitoken2.jpg
boy with sugarcane: The Food Museum
dumplings for lunch: The Food Museum
horseback: www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/ozar/hrst.htm
lunchpail: www.pbs.org/.../evolving_ classroom/school.html
Amish walking to school & Mennonite boys: www.unshod.org/pfbc/bfs_amish.htm
Count Rumford: www.a-i-f.it/STORIA/Immagini/sito%aif%20
Early school kitchen: www.arthurdaleheritage.org/
loc/8b13660u_Schoo...
Serving: newdeal.feri.org/ images/L81.gif
More modern school kitchen: www.arthurdaleheritage.org/
loc/8b13660u_Schoo...
Serving window with line: boe.cabe.k12.wv.us/
history/Martha%20Elementar...
Lunch box scene: www.wholepop.com/ features/lunchboxes/
Drinking milk: www.extension.umn.edu/.
../diverse01.html
Tony’s Pizza: http://www.sampson.k12.nc.us/Countypage/Child%20Nutrition/NSLW.htm
School lunches tested: www.zillions.org/Features/
Lunch/lunch001.html
Weapons of mass destruction: www.finalcall.com/.../
publish/article_608.shtml
Reach Your Peak: www.sampson.k12.nc.us/.
../nutritio.htm
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