Title: The History of School Lunches - Pacific Standard
Headings: The History of School Lunches
The History of School Lunches
American school-lunch policy has always been at the mercy of broader ideological trends, from patriotic militarism to corporate neoliberalism.
The First Free Lunches
Feeding Kids to Fight Communists
An Ethical Imperative
Expansion of School Lunches Ends
Enter the Corporate Suppliers
Solving Lunch Debt

Content: Expansion of School Lunches Ends
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A version of this story originally appeared in the October 2017 issue of Pacific Standard. (Illustration: Lola Dupré)
After World War II—and more concern about nutrition-related war-readiness—Congress passed the National School Lunch Act, which made the program permanent for the first time. Twenty years later, as a sally in the War on Poverty, Congress passed the Child Nutrition Act, which introduced breakfast programs and put the whole school-food system under the purview of the Department of Agriculture. American school lunches had been continually expanded for nearly a century when, in 1981, the Reagan administration cut school-food spending by $1.5 billion, raised eligibility standards, reduced portions, and, most famously, changed nutritional standards so that items like ketchup and pickle relish would qualify as vegetables. All of a sudden—and with little cause—money became the central school-lunch concern. Enter the Corporate Suppliers
The cuts under President Ronald Reagan pushed districts to look for ways to economize, and corporate contractors saw a new market. Large multinational food service companies took over cafeterias to provide bland, colorless Mead meals—which happened to be a specialty of giant catering firms. Similarly, national fast food and soda brands offered districts lucrative deals for access to captive kids, returning the nation to what public-health researchers called a two-tiered school-food system, with the generic, free/cheap/subsidized pizza and pricey, name-brand premium pizza all in the same lunchroom. " For American agriculture," Susan Levine writes in her comprehensive history School Lunch Politics: