School Lunch Politics by Levine Susan

Author:Levine, Susan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2011-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

THE FREE LUNCH MANDATE

Although the 1966 Child Nutrition Act promised federal funds for free school lunches, for the next six years community activists, teachers, and local administrators fought with the Department of Agriculture to translate those funds into actual meals for poor children. By the department’s own reckoning, through either “intent, ineptness, or inadequate resources” it was slow to feed the nation’s poor children.2 The USDA preferred, of course, to blame local communities for not taking advantage of the available resources, but the Secretary of Agriculture as well as school lunch administrators acknowledged that Washington needed to do more. The American School Food Service Association, the school lunch program’s major national professional association, estimated in 1968 that at least six and a half million poor children, mostly in cities or isolated rural areas, still had no access to free lunches.3 While over two-thirds of America’s public schools by then participated in the National School Lunch Program, fewer than 10 percent of children in poor, urban neighborhoods could expect to find a noon meal at school.4 Most urban schools still had no cafeteria or kitchen facilities and few had budgets that could encompass a free meal program. Philadelphia, for example, fed only 8 percent of its poor children, while in St. Louis only 4 percent of all lunches served were free. Examples of hungry school children came from all parts of the country. A teacher in Green Bay, Wisconsin, told a Senate Committee in 1968 that in her class, “five out of six children are getting no lunch.”5 In Sumter County, Alabama, the principal of the black high school admitted, “We know there are fifty or more children who cannot afford to buy lunch but we don’t have enough money to feed them all.”6 On the Marysville, Washington, Indian reservation, the local school lunch director said that out of almost four thousand children, “only 40 receive free or reduced price lunches.”7

The evident failure of the American welfare system to feed poor children fueled the increasing sense of social crisis that characterized the late 1960s. While the civil rights movement’s early faith in integration gave way to militant calls for “black power,” and the student anti-war movement adopted ever more revolutionary rhetoric, the anti-hunger/antipoverty movement also found itself questioning whether American institutions could meet the challenge of reform. For liberal Americans, however, poverty and hunger loomed as the most curable of the nation’s woes. Surely, the plentiful supplies of food could be better distributed. The hunger lobby found ready congressional allies in liberal legislators. Most notably, for the first time, urban Democrats, who were in the midst of challenging their party’s intransigent southern wing, began to focus on food policy.

The mounting calls to end poverty and hunger spurred a series congressional hearings and media reports. In April 1967, New York senator Robert Kennedy, along with Pennsylvania senator Joseph Clark, led a highly publicized congressional visit to the Mississippi Delta. The senators’ description of rural poverty and hunger among that region’s mostly black population shocked mainstream America.

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