Whether kids love or hate the food served there, the American school
lunchroom is the stage for one of the most popular yet flawed social
welfare programs in our nation's history. School Lunch Politics covers
this complex and fascinating part of American culture, from its origins
in early twentieth-century nutrition science, through the establishment
of the National School Lunch Program in 1946, to the transformation of
school meals into a poverty program during the 1970s and 1980s. Susan
Levine investigates the politics and culture of food; most specifically,
who decides what American children should be eating, what policies
develop from those decisions, and how these policies might be better
implemented.
Even now, the school lunch program remains problematic, a juggling act
between modern beliefs about food, nutrition science, and public
welfare. Levine points to the program menus' dependence on agricultural
surplus commodities more than on children's nutritional needs, and she
discusses the political policy barriers that have limited the number of
children receiving meals and which children were served. But she also
shows why the school lunch program has outlasted almost every other
twentieth-century federal welfare initiative. In the midst of
privatization, federal budget cuts, and suspect nutritional guidelines
where even ketchup might be categorized as a vegetable, the program
remains popular and feeds children who would otherwise go hungry.
As politicians and the media talk about a national obesity epidemic,
School Lunch Politics is a timely arrival to the food policy debates
shaping American health, welfare, and equality.
