Mystery Meat

NOTE: The following transcript corresponds to an earlier version of this show. Some passages may not match the rebroadcast audio above.

ED AYERS: We’re talking today about the history of mealtime in America. And now we’re going to take the show to school.

BRIAN: Last year, the National School Lunch Program served more than 31 million children a day. But looking at the program’s origins, it’s clear that children’s interests haven’t always been what’s driving the program. During the Great Depression, farm prices plummeted. Corn, hogs, wheat– the prices just kept going down, down, down. So one of the things the government did was take crops and livestock off the market. It was called buying surplus.

ED: But what do you do if you’re the government and you have all this extra food? Well, as we know, in the Great Depression there were also a lot of hungry kids in America, so why don’t you just send the food to their schools? And it sounds like a great idea, but historian Susan Levine told me that, from the children’s perspective, there was a small glitch in this wonderful plan.

SUSAN LEVINE: Part of the glitch is that only certain foods are declared to be surplus. And so you got, in the ’30s, a real imbalance in what kinds of foods were available. So for example, one year schools might get a ton of apricots or almonds, and the next year they might get a lot of eggs or olives. And there are really very entertaining stories from the school lunch coordinators about how there’s so many apples, they wouldn’t eat them, and they’d end up in the toilet. And the kids won’t eat these olives, and kids won’t eat certain kinds of food.

ED: What’s the matter with kids today? They won’t eat olives? Who wouldn’t want to have, like, five hard boiled eggs every day?

SUSAN LEVINE: One of the things that the Department of Agriculture did– at that time there was, within the Department of Agriculture, a section called the Bureau of Home Economics. And this was the bureau that developed all the recipes for the school lunch programs, and they would develop eight kinds of different egg dishes that you could serve to 300 kids. And they worked very hard at figuring out the menus and the recipes to use a lot of these commodities.

ED: So after World War II you have this and sort of newly born system, with a huge bureaucracy behind it, an expectation that the federal government’s going to help supply the foods for our children. But what happens the decades after World War II?

SUSAN LEVINE: Well, let’s back up a little bit, because the school lunch becomes a federal program in 1946. But really, before the war was over, there began to be a debate in Congress about what to do after the war, what to do with these programs. There’s several different plans that come forward. One is to run it through the Commissioner of Education. There wasn’t a Department of Education.

The Department of Agriculture, of course, didn’t want that. They wanted to keep control of the program, as did a lot of Congressional representatives, especially from the South. And the guy in Congress, Richard Russell, who I’m sure you’re familiar with.

ED: Yeah, from Georgia.

SUSAN LEVINE: From Georgia, a senator from Georgia, considered himself to be the father of the school lunch program. He was a conservative Democrat. He was a segregationist. And one of the things about him that was interesting was that he actually understood poverty, and he understood the plight of farmers, in a certain sense, both black and white. And so it didn’t bother him that the federal government should aid in the farm economy.

But if you start to get into the schools, then you really go to the heart of Southern segregation. And this is where the states really drew the line, and they didn’t want the federal government to come anywhere near the schools, because they really feared, and I think rightly so, that the federal government would begin to dismantle their system of segregation. It would begin to demand some kind of equality.

ED: So The USDA would have been seen as a relatively benign force by the advocates of states’ rights, because it was basically agriculture?

SUSAN LEVINE: Right, exactly.

ED: And the Southern conservatives were right, that this was a kind of an entree, in a way, of the federal government to have leverage over the schools of the South.

SUSAN LEVINE: Right, exactly.

ED: So in the late ’60s or early ’70s, things began to change, is my understanding.

SUSAN LEVINE: Right. Under Nixon, the school lunch program expanded, and there was a federal mandate that all poor kids had to get free lunch. And that meant that the local school districts had to supply free lunches. Now, they still got federal free food, but the food was not the only cost of the lunch. You have to cook it, and you have to have kitchens, and people to cook it. And this caused them considerable problems, because the way that they had been financing free lunches up until then was to basically charge kids who could afford it, and use that with the federal subsidies.

But they couldn’t raise the prices too much, or kids would stop buying the lunch. The kids who could afford it would stop buying, and then their whole budget would collapse. So there was a big debate in the ’70s about how to pay for the free lunches. And the states were supposed to put in matching funds. That was part of the original legislation. But now the states actually had to kick in their own matching funds.

ED: And so how did people respond to that tension? I mean, if it’s a federal mandate, you have to do it. You can’t say there’s no such thing is a free lunch. There has to be, right?

SUSAN LEVINE: Right. it’s not free. And one of the interesting things is that then the school lunch reformers start to think about, well, maybe we should bring in a private food service companies to fix lunches, because they’re offering to do it for less. And in fact that’s largely what happens, is that these major national food service corporations, which are just beginning to expand in those years, they begin to operate school lunch programs.

ED: Is that kind of where we are today?

SUSAN LEVINE: That’s pretty much where we are now, yeah. And now you’ve got an even newer– the food movement, which is questioning a lot of the infrastructure of the school lunch programs, and whether these food service corporations can really serve healthy meals. Are the McNuggets really healthy, and so forth. But one of the things that I think a lot of food critics now don’t question is how the whole system is funded, and who pays for it. So that if you decide you want to get it out of the Department of Agriculture, say you think the Department of Agriculture really only has farmers’ interests at heart, not kids’ interests, where are you going to put it? Who has the political clout to really keep this program going? And that’s a serious question.

ED: Susan Levine is a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She’s the author of “School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program.”