From ketchup as veggies to low-sodium fare: How America’s school lunches evolved

Politicians in Washington managed to avoid a huge food fight over school lunches last week.

The Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry cast a unanimous, bipartisan vote to renew the national school lunch program while at the same time loosening up some of its stricter, more controversial requirements.

The bill scales back how much whole grains will be required to be served in meals, pushes back a deadline for cutting sodium in the food, but leaves intact requirements for fruits and vegetables.

Many schools had balked at the proposed standards, arguing that kids wouldn’t eat the healthier options, or that some foods would have to be removed from the menu.

For instance, kids in the Park Hill School District are already served pizza with whole-grain crust and low-calorie, low-sodium cheese. But food service operations officials there worried that new sodium restrictions would banish pizza altogether.

The committee’s chairman, Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, who helped broker the compromise, did some homework by visiting schools across Kansas and, yes, even eating some of the lunches.

The proposed Improving Child Nutrition Integrity and Access Act of 2016 will now go to the Senate floor for a full vote.

Before it does, here’s a quick look at the evolution of the nation’s school lunch program.

Feed the children

Before the government began serving lunches, the nation’s school kids were fed by private organizations concerned for their well-being. In 1853, for instance, the Children’s Aid Society of New York served meals to students attending a vocational school there.

Then in 1904, along came a book called “Poverty,” by Robert Hunter, considered the impetus for feeding poor, hungry children when they were at school.

“Learning is difficult because hungry stomachs and languid bodies and thin blood are not able to feed the brain,” he wrote. “The lack of learning among so many poor children is certainly due, to an important extent, to this cause.

“It is utter folly, from the point of view of learning, to have a compulsory school law which compels children, in that weak physical and mental state which results from poverty, to drag themselves to school and to sit at their desks, day in and day out, for several years, learning little or nothing.”

The mind-body connection

Big cities including New York, Philadelphia and Boston started experimenting with feeding children at school. In some schools the home economics students prepared meals for the younger children.

Wrote one home economist in December 1910: “The teachers are unanimous in the belief that the luncheons are helping the children both physically and mentally. They are more attentive and interested in the lessons during the last hour of the morning and the result in their recitations gives the proof.”

And so it begins

The movement to feed children at school exploded in the 1920s. Schools were built with lunchrooms. Schoolchildren were weighed and measured to make sure they weren’t malnourished. The lunch programs were run by philanthropic organizations, school boards and school groups, and individual volunteers.

Home economists became vocal about what the children should be eating. According to school lunch expert Susan Levine, activists begin arguing about “the right kind of food” to help immigrant children turn into “proper Americans.”

The Great Depression

Schools were overrun by hungry children during the Great Depression, and many states and cities responded by passing laws requiring schools to serve lunch.

Farmers were struggling, too. As part of the New Deal, Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act in 1933. The government agreed to pay farmers for their surplus commodities, some of which ended up in schools to be used for lunches.

Volunteers were challenged to turn surplus oddities such as onions and grapefruit into nutritious meals, according to Levine.

An anthropologist has her say

The Roosevelt administration hired famed anthropologist Margaret Mead and a team of experts to design scientific guidelines for children’s meals. They recommended “balanced” meals that included meat or beans, green and yellow vegetables, citrus fruits and milk.

Mead also recommended that ethnic foods be added to lunch menus and that children be allowed to choose what they wanted to eat.

Here comes Harry

In 1945, President Harry Truman signed the National School Lunch Act providing low-cost or free lunches to the nation’s schoolchildren. The United States Department of Agriculture was given control over the program.

Child Nutrition Act

In 1966 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Child Nutrition Act, the first federal program setting aside money for free lunches for children in need.

Thanks partly to the growing influence of fast food, school lunches also began adding items like tacos and burgers and French fries. Horrified, nutritionists started sounding the alarm about childhood obesity in America.

Is ketchup a vegetable?

The school lunch program became a target during the budget-cutting years of the Reagan administration. Who doesn’t remember that in 1981 the USDA changed its nutrition guidelines so that ketchup would count as a vegetable in school lunches, because ketchup was cheaper than real veggies?

McLunches

In the mid-90s the federal government decided to let fast-food restaurants, including McDonald’s and Taco Bell, to do business inside schools.

FLOTUS steps in

First Lady Michelle Obama, who made children’s fitness her pet project, turned her attention to school lunches and their relationship to childhood obesity.

President Obama signed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act in 2010 to improve school meal nutrition standards. It was the first major overhaul of the program in more than 30 years.

The act required schools to offer daily offerings of fruits and vegetables, increase the availability of whole-grain foods, server healthier portion sizes and reduce saturated fat, trans fats and sodium in the food.

The reaction of a lot of school kids to the changes: Bleh!

School districts, including Olathe in Johnson County, saw the number of kids participating in the lunch program drop because kids turned up their noses at the healthier fare.

Participation fell by about 4 percent nationwide, too, between 2011 and 2014, according to USDA data.

However, a University of Washington study released earlier this month showed that the new nutritional guidelines have inspired some students to make healthier food choices.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics, reviewed the meals selected by students at three middle schools and three high schools in one urban school district of Washington state.

The meals they bought after the schools implemented nutritional changes were 29 percent healthier, and less caloric, than the meals they chose before the changes.

In other words: They’re eating more fruits and vegetables.

School lunch programs continue.

Next month, the new Lake House Cafe will open at Prior Lake High School in Minnesota.

Sixty-four percent of the students at the school said they wanted an in-house coffee shop ... so they’re getting it. That follows a shift the school had already made in their lunch program, focusing on more local ingredients and “from-scratch” meals.

This story was originally published January 25, 2016 at 1:21 PM with the headline "From ketchup as veggies to low-sodium fare: How America’s school lunches evolved."