Article contents
“The Penny Lunch has Spread Faster than the Measles”: Children's Health and the Debate over School Lunches in New York City, 1908–1930
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017
Extract
A few days before Thanksgiving in 1908, the home economist Mabel Hyde Kittredge initiated a school lunch program at an elementary school in Hell's Kitchen, serving soup and bread to hungry children in the infamous Manhattan neighborhood. The following year, she founded the School Lunch Committee (SLC), a voluntary organization composed of home economists, educators, physicians, and philanthropists dedicated to improving the nutritional health and educational prospects of schoolchildren. By 1915, just seven years after the initiative began, the SLC was serving 80,000 free or low-price lunches a year to children at nearly a quarter of the elementary schools in Manhattan and the Bronx. Most of the schools were located in the city's poorest districts, and experience showed that the lunches were reaching those most in need at minimal cost to the organization. All the food served was inspected by the Health Department, and the meals were nutritionally balanced and tailored to the ethnic tastes and religious requirements of different school populations. Sparse but compelling evidence indicated that the program had reduced malnourishment among the children who partook, and teachers and principals at participating schools reported reductions in behavioral problems, dyspepsia, inattentiveness, and lethargy.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2015 History of Education Society
References
1 For a more detailed discussion of school lunches in the United States in this time period, see Ruis, A. R., Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: School Meals and Nutrition Policy in the United States, 1900–1946 (PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 2011), Reese, William J., “After Bread, Education: Nutrition and Urban School Children, 1890–1920,” Teachers College Record 81, no. 4 (1980): 496–525, Meckel, Richard A., Classrooms and Clinics: Urban Schools and the Protection and Promotion of Child Health, 1870–1930 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 114–27.Google Scholar
2 At least forty-one cities had lunch programs in 1913: Albany (NY), Amherst (MA), Boston (MA), Buffalo (NY), Chicago (IL), Cincinnati (OH), Cleveland (OH), Columbus (OH), Dallas (TX), Denver (CO), Eau Claire (WI), Erie (PA), Greenfield (MA), Hartford (CT), Houston (TX), Indianapolis (IN), Kansas City (MO), Logansville (PA), Los Angeles (CA), Louisville (KY), Manayunk (PA), McKeesport (PA), Memphis (TN), Mill Valley (NY), Milwaukee (WI), Montpelier (VT), Muskegon (MI), New Haven (CT), New Orleans (LA), New York City (NY), Philadelphia (PA), Pittsburgh (PA), Rochester (NY), St. Louis (MO), St. Paul (MN), Seattle (WA), Toledo (OH), Utica (NY), Washington, D.C., Wayne (PA), and Westford (MA).Google Scholar
3 Bechmann, Albertina, “The first Penny Lunch,” Journal of Home Economics no. 9 (1933): 760–62.Google Scholar
4 The School Lunch (Columbus, OH: Agricultural Extension Service, Ohio State University, 1922), 3.Google Scholar
5 Ayres, Leonard P., The Cleveland School Survey, Summary Volume (Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Foundation, 1917), 234.Google Scholar
6 For a recent discussion of the ambiguity between public and private in responsibility for municipal services, see Jessica Wang, “Dogs and the Making of the American State: Voluntary Association, State Power, and the Politics of Animal Control in New York City, 1850–1920,” Journal of American History 98, no. 4 (2012): 998–1024.Google Scholar
7 Levine, Susan, School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America's Favorite Welfare Program (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 See, for example, Hoy, Suellen M., Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Tomes, Nancy J., The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
9 Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, Inc., 1961). On the expansion of public health police powers, see, for example, Hilts, Philip J., Protecting America's Health: The FDA, Business, and One Hundred Years of Regulation (New York: Knopf, Alfred A., 2003), Leavitt, Judith Walzer, Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public's Health (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996), Nayari Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001).Google Scholar
10 On the history of “baby saving” campaigns and scientific motherhood, see Apple, Rima D., Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), Ladd-Taylor, Molly, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), Meckel, Richard A., Save the Babies: American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850–1929 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), Wolf, Jacqueline H., Don't Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breastfeeding in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2001).Google Scholar
11 Steffes, Tracy L., School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890–1940 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 3. For a discussion of these issues in the context of medicine and public health, see Stephen Woolworth, “A Radical Proposition: The Brief but Exceptional History of the Seattle School Clinic, 1914–21,” Journal of the History of Medicine & Allied Sciences 68, no. 2 (2013): 227–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
12 Devine, Edward T., “The Underfed Child in the Schools,” Charities & The Commons 20 (1908): 413–16. See also Ayres, Leonard P., The Relation of Physical Defects to School Progress (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, Division of Education, 1909), 8.Google Scholar
13 Annual Report of the Board of Health for the City of New York for the years 1909–1912 (inclusive), Sill, E. Mather, “Malnutrition in School Children in New York City,” Journal of Home Economics 1 (October 1909): 370.Google Scholar
14 “Say School Children Are Not Starving,” New York Times, June 11, 1908, 4.Google Scholar
15 For a discussion of the emergence of malnutrition as a public health problem, see Brosco, Jeffrey P., “Weight Charts and Well Child Care: When the Pediatrician Became the Expert in Child Health,” in Formative Years: Children's Health in the United States, 1880–2000, eds. Stern, Alexandra Minna and Markel, Howard (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 91–120, Meckel, Richard A., “Politics, Policy, and the Measuring of Child Health: Child Malnutrition in the Great Depression,” in Healing the World's Children: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Child Health in the Twentieth Century, eds. Golden, Janet, Commachio, Cynthia R., and Weisz, George (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008), 235–52, Ruis, A. R., “‘Children with Half-Starved Bodies’ and the Assessment of Malnutrition in the United States, 1890–1950,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87, no. 3 (2013): 380–408.Google Scholar
16 Kittredge, Mabel Hyde, “School Lunch Problem, Solved, Now Strikes a Snag,” New York Times, January 12, 1913, SM6.Google Scholar
17 Three cents was inexpensive, but even that would have been a lot for some of the city's poorest children. A room in a tenement house, the cheapest form of housing, cost between three and six dollars per week in rent, and an unskilled laborer could expect to make around seven dollars per week.Google Scholar
18 Kittredge, Mabel Hyde, “Experiments with School Lunches in New York City,” Journal of Home Economics 2, no. 2 (1910): 174–75.Google Scholar
19 Dunbar, Olivia Howard, “Three-Cent Luncheons for School-Children,” Outlook 97 (1911): 34–35, Kittredge, , “Experiments with School Lunches,” 177.Google Scholar
20 Brown, Edward F., The School Lunch Service in New York City (New York: New York City Department of Education, Division of Reference and Research, 1914), 6.Google Scholar
21 See, for example, Edward Beecher Hooker, “The Malnutrition of School Children and Its Physical and Social Consequences,” The Clinique 27, no. 10 (1906): 577–86, Hollopeter, W. C., “The School Child's Breakfast,” Journal of the American Medical Association 53, no. 21 (November 20, 1909): 1727–30, Sill, E. Mather, “Malnutrition in School Children in New York City,” Journal of Home Economics 1 (1909): 369–74.Google Scholar
22 Makechnie, Horace P., “Problems in Feeding School Children,” Journal of the American Medical Association 30, no. 2 (January 8, 1898): 56–57.Google Scholar
23 Kantor, John L., “Experience with a Class in Malnutrition: Work of the Malnutrition Clinic, Bowling Green Neighborhood Association, New York City,” New York Medical Journal 108 (August 10, 1918): 241–243.Google Scholar
24 Kittredge, , “Experiments with School Lunches,” 176. “Postu” is likely a misspelling of postum, a toasted grain beverage marketed as an alternative to coffee.Google Scholar
25 By the first decade of the twentieth century, England, France, Holland, and Switzerland had passed national legislation authorizing school authorities to provide meals in schools, and local initiatives were common in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Italy, and Norway. These school meal programs were publicly funded, with meals sold to children who could afford them and given free to those who could not. As in the United States, this school meal development resulted from the high rates of malnutrition reported by medical inspectors in the military and in schools, the passage of compulsory education laws, and urbanization combined with the consolidation of schooling.Google Scholar
26 Winslow, Emma, as quoted in Zelizer, Viviana A., The Social Meaning of Money (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 122.Google Scholar
27 Golden, Harry, Ess, Ess, Mein Kindt (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1963), 86.Google Scholar
28 Kittredge, , “Experiments with School Lunches,” 176.Google Scholar
29 Annual Report of the City Superintendent of Schools (New York, 1912), 186.Google Scholar
30 Bryant, Louise Stevens, School Feeding: Its History and Practice at Home and Abroad (Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1913), 150, Dunbar, , “Three-Cent Luncheons,” 36.Google Scholar
31 Kittredge, , “Experiments with School Lunches,” 176–77.Google Scholar
32 True, Ruth S., Boyhood and Lawlessness (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1914), 75.Google Scholar
33 Bryant, , School Feeding, 248.Google Scholar
34 True, , Boyhood and Lawlessness, 75.Google Scholar
35 Kittredge, , “School Lunch Problem,” SM6. See also Armstrong, Donald B., “The Hygienic Features of School Lunches,” New York Medical Journal (September 18, 1915): 604.Google Scholar
36 “Two-Cent Luncheon Delights Roosevelt,” New York Times, April 16, 1913, 1.Google Scholar
37 Kittredge, , “School Lunch Problem,” SM6, Kittredge, , “Experiments with School Lunches,” 177.Google Scholar
38 Kittredge, Mabel Hyde, “Relation of Menus to Standard Dietaries,” Fourth International Congress on School Hygiene vol. V (Buffalo, NY, 1913), 313.Google Scholar
39 Wile, Ira S., “The Relative Physical Advantages of School Lunches in Elementary and Secondary Schools,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Medicine 14 (1913): 145–154.Google Scholar
40 Kittredge, , “Relation of Menus to Standard Dietaries,” 313.Google Scholar
41 Kittredge, , “School Lunch Problem,” SM6.Google Scholar
42 Letter from Poole, Margaret Anne to Ingram, Mrs., November 27, 1912, “Community Service Society Archives,” MS 0273, box 49, folder 325.2, Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Collection, New York, NY. See also Shall the Schools Serve Lunches? (New York: New York City Public Education Association, 1913), 1.Google Scholar
43 The superintendent was the highest administrative position in the Education Department, but the superintendent's role was to manage personnel and enforce (not establish) policy. Only the Board of Education, city hall, or the state legislature could effect permanent change in school policy.Google Scholar
44 Annual Report of the City Superintendent of Schools (New York, 1912), 186–89.Google Scholar
45 Prior to the passage of the National School Lunch Act in 1946, only Wisconsin and Vermont specifically authorized school boards to supplement the cost of meals for poor children using public funds. See Preston, Everett C., Principles and Statutory Provisions Relating to the Recreational, Medical, and Social Welfare Services of the Public Schools (New York: Teachers College Press, 1935), Southworth, H. M. and Klayman, M. I., The School Lunch Program and Agricultural Surplus Disposal (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1941).Google Scholar
46 Reports on Underfed Children (Chicago, IL: Board of Education of the City of Chicago, 1908), 3.Google Scholar
47 Printed Record of the Board of Education of the City of St. Louis January 12, 1904), 286.Google Scholar
48 On the history of the AICP, see Becker, Dorothy G., The Visitor to the New York City Poor, 1843–1920: The Role and Contributions of Volunteer Visitors of the New York Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, State Charities Aid Association, and New York Charity Organization Society (DSW Thesis, Columbia University, 1960), Brandt, Lilian, Growth and Development of AICP and COS (New York, 1942), Duffy, John, A History of Public Health in New York City, 1866–1966 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1974), Chapter 17.Google Scholar
49 Brown, , “The School Lunch Service in New York City,” 13.Google Scholar
50 Annual Report of the City Superintendent of Schools (New York, 1912), 187.Google Scholar
51 “Lunches for School-Children,” Outlook 112 (1916): 361.Google Scholar
52 Letter from Emerson, Haven to Kittredge, Mabel Hyde, June 4, 1917, “Community Service Society Archives,” MS 0273, box 49, folder 325.2, Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Collection, New York, NY.Google Scholar
53 On the transition of control of school health services from boards of health to boards of education, see Luther Halsey Gulick and Ayres, Leonard P., Medical Inspection of Schools (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1908), 142 ff.Google Scholar
54 Brown, , “The School Lunch Service in New York City,” 9.Google Scholar
55 Annual Report of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (New York, 1914), 106.Google Scholar
56 “Two-Cent Luncheon,” 1.Google Scholar
57 Annual Report of the City Superintendent of Schools (New York, 1914), 174–76.Google Scholar
58 Journal of the Board of Education of the City of New York (February 1, 1915), 233 and (April 14, 1915), 649.Google Scholar
59 Ibid. (August 11, 1915), 1396–98.Google Scholar
60 Baker, S. Josephine, “The Relation of the War to the Nourishment of Children,” New York Medical Journal 107, no. 7 (February 16, 1918): 289–92.Google Scholar
61 Annual Report of the Board of Health of the City of New York (New York, 1918), 126–28, “Underfed Children Problem in Schools,” New York Times, December 23, 1917, 18. On the changes in diagnostics and surveillance of malnutrition, see Ruis, “Children with Half-Starved Bodies,” 388–89.Google Scholar
62 Baker, S. Josephine, Fighting for Life (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1939), 170.Google Scholar
63 Keefer, Frank R., “Causes of Army Rejections: What Health Officers Can Do to Remedy Conditions,” American Journal of Public Health 10, no. 3 (1920): 236–39. See also Defects Found in Drafted Men (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1919), Hoffman, Frederick L., Army Anthropometry and Medical Rejection Statistics (Washington, DC: National Research Council, 1918).Google Scholar
64 Blue, Rupert, “Are We Physically Fit? United States Handicapped in Coming Period of Commercial and Industrial Competition,” American Journal of Public Health 9, no. 9 (1919): 641–45, Clark, Taliaferro, “The Need and Opportunity for Physical Education in Rural Communities,” American Physical Education Review 24, no. 9 (1919): 436–43.Google Scholar
65 Wood, Alice H., “Nutrition Classes in the Chicago Schools,” Modern Medicine 2, no. 5 (1920): 388–92.Google Scholar
66 Annual Report of the Board of Health of the City of New York (New York, 1918), 159–61, “School Luncheons before Aldermen,” New York Times, February 15, 1918, 9, “May Favor School Lunch,” New York Times, March 26, 1918, 6, “Plea for School Lunches,” New York Times, August 9, 1918, 6, “Nation's Duty to Preserve the Health of Children,” New York Times, August 11, 1918, 31.Google Scholar
67 Annual Report of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (New York, 1919) 22.Google Scholar
68 Boughton, Alice C., Suggested Program and Recommendations for an Experiment in School Feeding to Be Conducted by the Board of Education of the City of New York (New York: Child Health Organization, 1919), “Community Service Society Archives,” MS 0273, box 50, folder 325.2, Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Collection, New York, NY. As early as 1913, the SLC had presented the Board with a plan for directing school foodservice in the public schools. See Shall the Schools Serve Lunches? 5.Google Scholar
69 Letter from Burritt, Bailey B. to Albert G. Milbank, March 21, 1919, “Community Service Society Archives,” MS 0273, box 49, folder 325.2, Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Collection, New York, NY.Google Scholar
70 Ibid.Google Scholar
71 Gebhart, John C., Malnutrition and School Feeding (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, 1921), 14–18, Lewinski-Corwin, E. H. and Cunningham, Elizabeth V., Thirty Years in Community Service, 1911–1941 (New York: New York Academy of Medicine, 1942), 89, Ravitch, Diane, The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 195–96, 228–30.Google Scholar
72 Annual Report of the City Superintendent of Schools (New York, 1926), 188–89.Google Scholar
73 Gebhart, , “Malnutrition and School Feeding,” 13–14. For more such menus, see Rowena Wellman, “Feeding Ten Thousand Underweight Children,” American Food Journal 20, no. 2 (1925): 76–77.Google Scholar
74 Hornaday, James P., “School Lunch Is Important,” Bedford Gazette, October 1, 1920 3.Google Scholar
75 Health for School Children: Report of Advisory Committee on Health Education (Washington, DC: National Child Health Council, 1923), 30.Google Scholar
76 McCormick, Mary G., The Rural Hot Lunch and the Nutrition of the Rural Child (Albany, NY, 1919), 2.Google Scholar
77 On the history of immigrant foodways, see Diner, Hasia R., Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), Gabaccia, Donna R., We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
78 Fante, John, “The Odyssey of a Wop,” American Mercury 30, no. 12 (1933): 89–97.Google Scholar
79 The SLC had a separate subcommittee for Brooklyn and Queens, which was operating approximately twenty lunch programs as late as 1917, but virtually no records of its activities have survived. See Annual Report of the American Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (New York, 1915), 85, Gebhart, Malnutrition and School Feeding.Google Scholar
80 Annual Report of the City Superintendent of Schools (New York, 1925), 281.Google Scholar
81 “School Lunch Protest,” New York Times, March 23, 1927, 24, Annual Report of the New York Academy of Medicine (New York, 1926), 173.Google Scholar
82 “School Lunches are Called Unfit,” New York Times, October 31, 1927, 21.Google Scholar
83 Annual Report of the City Superintendent of Schools (New York, 1927), 351, “Moves to Reform School Lunch Plan: Situation Called Acute,” New York Times, November 23, 1927, 7.Google Scholar
84 Annual Report of the City Superintendent of Schools (New York, 1929), 213–14.Google Scholar
85 Interestingly, New York City recently reinvented this approach to school lunches. See Severson, Kim, “School's Toughest Test: Cooking,” New York Times, September 30, 2009.Google Scholar
- 2
- Cited by