ONE
The Radical Roots of School Lunch
Free lunches for all. School gardens. Cooking classes. Canning and food preservation workshops. Health, nutrition, and biology classes that spark childrenâs curiosity and widen their ability to think across disciplines through the experiential study of food and agriculture. Children participating in the labor of lunch, learning from and building relationships with well-trained, adequately compensated adults in a community economy of care. Family and neighborhood engagement. This was all part of Emma Smedleyâs vision for a nonprofit school lunch program that would operate not as âa mere appendage of the educational systemâ but rather as âone of the arteries through which the active blood of co-operation runs.â1 While these lofty aspirations sound like the goals of todayâs school lunch advocates, Smedley, one of the most influential leaders of the nonprofit school lunch movement, was writing about them back in 1920.
Smedleyâs name has been lost to history, yet her vision is remarkably modern. Sheâd fit right in with Alice Waters, the famed chef, author, and sustainable-food activist who launched an online pledge for public education at the beginning of the 2018 school year. On the webpage announcing the pledge, Waters describes cafeterias as âthe heart of our schools.â2 Itâs almost as if Waters is calling forth the ghost of Emma Smedley, heart metaphor and all, to urge the American public to recognize and elevate the status of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). The campaign asks individuals and organizations to promote the values of nourishment, stewardship, and community by pledging their support for free, sustainable lunches made with food purchased directly from farmers and ranchers who take care of the land and their workers.3
Transforming the NSLP in the way Waters proposes offers a path to begin living out a democratic ethos of care that extends beyond the walls of our public schools to the farms, ranches, and fisheries that turn ânatureâ into food. But if Smedley and her compatriots were unsuccessful a century ago, when opposition from ingrained political interests and Big Food companies was much less severe, what hope do present-day activists have in finally realizing the full power and potential of public school lunch programs?
I, for one, am optimistic. The time Iâve spent over the last seven years learning from leaders working to create a new economy of care within the NSLP has left me with a strong sense of just how widespread the desire for change actually is. This isnât a âfringeâ movement. Thousands of dedicated parents, school lunch workers, public health advocates, local food activists, and nonprofit organizations are already engaged in this work. Their school lunch reform agendas span a range of interrelated topics, including public health, racial justice, economic development, workersâ rights, and environmental sustainability. These issues are also bound up within what feminist scholars call âsocial reproduction,â defined by Giovanna Di Chiro as the âintersecting complex of political-economic, socio-cultural, and material-environmental processes required to maintain everyday life and to sustain human cultures and communities on a daily basis and intergenerationally.â 4 That includes care work, a form of reproductive labor that keeps people clothed, sheltered, and fed. Without it, daily life wouldnât be possible.
How the reproductive labor necessary for social reproduction should be organized (who should do it and how much itâs worth) and the desirability of âcheap foodâ economies have long been debated. For well over a century, the premise that social reproduction should be cheap, if not free, has driven down standards of care and limited the power and possibility of public school lunch programs. Itâs meant that the workers (mostly women) who care for children are paid poverty wages in districts that arenât unionized. And it has allowed school lunch to remain semiprivatized, while the âeducationalâ side of public schools is paid for collectively. Math, English, and a host of other academic subjects are offered to children free of charge, but when they walk through the cafeteria doors, any façade of egalitarianism fades. No one expects a math teacher to collect childrenâs fees at the classroom door. Cafeteria workers, on the other hand, must sort children according to their eligibility for free, reduced-price, or paid lunches and charge them accordingly.
In many ways, the history of school lunch in America reflects the gender, racial, urban, and class politics of the twentieth century. Any strategy for reforming school lunch will necessarily be limited if we do not take the time to first understand the intersectionality of social problems that allowed the NSLPâs cheap-food economy to arise in the first place. Learning about the history of school lunch activismâand what the labor of lunch looked like at various points in school lunch historyâcan help todayâs generation of school lunch activists identify the root causes of injustice within the NSLP and organize for a better future.
THE PROGRESSIVE ORIGINS OF THE NSLP
While not always recognized as such, the NSLP is the product of generations of womenâs activism. It didnât spontaneously arise in 1946, with the passage of the National School Lunch Act, as a beneficent social service for American schoolchildren. It has a historyâand a feminist one at that. For over a hundred years, reformersâmost of them womenâhave fought to decommercialize childhood and establish new forms of public caregiving as an alternative to the for-profit vendors and private households that would otherwise supply the labor of lunch.5 In many ways, the school lunch debates of the Progressive Era were an ideological battleground over the appropriate role of government in family life and, relatedly, the position of women in society vis-Ă -vis their responsibility for performing unpaid care work in the home.
Early school lunch reformers like Emma Smedley did not always self-identify as feminists or conceptualize themselves as belonging to a larger ânonprofit school lunch movement,â as I refer to it, but thatâs what their efforts amounted to. They worked for the greater good in a spirit of shared enterprise to reimagine the labor of lunchâand care more broadlyânot as a private, gendered responsibility, but as a public necessity. The movement began in the 1890s, when reformers created charitable lunch programs for the extremely poor. The âpenny lunchâ programs that followed served even more children, and by the end of World War I, nonprofit lunch programs were flourishing across the nation. This expansion of public care was a concrete result of Progressive Era activism that historians call âmaternalist,â because it was led by women and focused on traditionally female spheres of influence: home and family.6 Shrouded in the respectability of maternalism, these same reformers led bold campaigns for a more caring state, calling on governments at all levels to protect workers, families, and the environment from the destructive forces of unregulated capitalism.7
Feeding children was but one piece of a much larger economy of care that they aimed to renegotiate by altering and innovating the material infrastructure involved in satisfying real and concrete caring tasks. Public kitchens and laundries, cooperative housekeeping, kindergartens, and public school lunch programs were, for these reformers, tactics for addressing the economic and spatial issues that made homes, neighborhoods, and cities oppressive for women and unhealthy for everyone. Urban historian Dolores Hayden situates this activism within a longer lineage of material feminist activism stretching from the end of the Civil War to the onset of the Great Depression.8 Key to the material feministsâ theory of social change was the belief that housewives should be recognized as workers within the capitalist systemâjust like the many working-class women who toiled in sweatshops, canneries, and slaughterhousesâeven though their labor happens to be unpaid and in the home. The women who put in long hours caring for their familiesâtending to the needs of children and husbands, regenerating their bodies, minds, and souls for a new day at school or workâshould be the ones to decide how concrete activities of care are organized. In making such a claim, material feminists brought the language and goals of labor organizing and trade unionism to individual womenâs homes.
They organized together to build a more just, caring, and healthy society. Their stories offer not only a history of the presentâteaching us how the âstatus quoâ came into beingâbut also a warning to never lose sight of the feminist potential of school lunch. Take Ellen Swallow Richards, the first woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example. Her many claims to fame include founding the field of home economics in the early 1900s and earning a place in 1951 as a âWonder Woman of Historyâ in the DC Comics franchise. She was the brains behind Americaâs first nonprofit school lunch program. In 1894, the Boston School Committee hired Richards and her nutritionist-friend Mary Hinman Abel to supply school lunches for several of the cityâs neediest schools. They oversaw production at the New England Kitchen, which theyâd founded in 1890 as a public laboratory kitchen and takeaway shop designed to use the latest technology and scientific knowledge to provide healthy, safe, affordable meals for the masses. They met those goals. Thrifty purchasing, streamlined menu planning, energy-efficient cooking, and centralized production kept costs low. But simply making food affordable and available doesnât mean everyone will actually want to eat it. By all accounts, the New England Kitchenâs bland, institutional meals were a tough sell.
Even âWonder Womenâ stumble. The patronizing, ethnocentric undertone of âbringing good food to othersâ that haunts the contemporary food movement has roots extending at least as far as Richards and Abelâs community kitchen.9 The working-class immigrants they had originally hoped to feed didnât have much appetite for the âYankeeâ foods served at the New England Kitchen.10 So Richards and Abel jumped at the opportunity to serve a new, younger, and perhaps more impressionable group of eaters in the local schools. If they could get immigrant children to like these foods, new attitudes toward their âscientificâ way of eating might just trickle up to their parents. And if not, at least they would be protecting kids from profit-seeking street vendors who sold goods laden with copious amounts of salt, fat, sugar, and germs.
In an early precursor to the type of school wellness policies now mandated by the federal government, Richards and other members of the Boston School Committee crafted a policy in 1894 stipulating that âonly such food as was approved by them should be sold in the city school houses.â11 Scientifically nutritious, sanitary, affordable foods that could be eaten quickly and digested easilyâthe New England Kitchenâs specialtyâwere precisely what the committee was looking for. Best of all, the city wouldnât need to build kitchens in the schools since all the food could be prepared offsite in the New England Kitchen and transported to the schools. And since the whole operation was run as a not-for-profit, the kids could get higher quality food at a cheaper price.
This phenomenon of educated women inserting themselves in city politics to fight for new forms of public provisioning had a name: âmunicipal housekeeping.â Drawing on maternalist political discourse, so-called municipal housekeepers argued that the ability for mothers to protect their homes and care well for their families required them to exercise their moral authority in the public sphere.12 Universal education, pure food, clean water, fresh air, and sanitary streets were necessary for their ability to survive well, and they should not be viewed as somehow disconnected from the home or the âwomenâs sphere,â the thinking went.13 Whatâs more, they turned womenâs status as caretakers for children, husbands, and the elderly into a badge of honor that rendered them uniquely suited for âkeeping houseâ at the city scale.
For womenâeven the relatively privileged white women from the upper and middle classesâsuch a political undertaking would be doomed at the onset unless they built collective power. They didnât yet have the right to vote, yet there they were, making demands on the city and state officials in charge of public works.14 Luckily, they knew better than to go it alone. Tens of thousands of women joined clubs, aid societies, and parent-teacher associations. Together they experimented with new forms of care infrastructure that would make homes, neighborhoods, and cities healthier and more enjoyable for everyone. The public parks, public libraries, community kitchens, public baths, public laundries, nonprofit public school lunch programs, cooperative purchasing clubs, kindergartens, and settlement houses that opened their doors in American cities were the result of their efforts.
At the same time, Progressive Era activists pursued legal protections for women and child workers who toiled on farms and in factories. Their efforts to secure childrenâs access to free public education worked: from 1890 to 1920, while the number of school-aged children in the United States increased by 49 percent, school enrollments increased by 70 percent.15 Compulsory education promised not only to protect children from the grit and vice of city life but also to mold them into adults capable of participating in a socie...