Having seen school meals’ value during the war, many in Congress pushed to make a permanent program after. The culmination was the National School Lunch Act, which Harry Truman signed in 1946. The creation of the Act, though, highlighted an under-discussed but powerful dynamic in school meals: race. As Susan Levine recounts in School Lunch Politics, Georgia senator Richard Russell, whose name the law now bears, and Louisiana senator Allen Ellender explicitly advocated segregated schooling and white supremacy, and they held off all attempts at direct federal oversight of the program. They insisted that passage would depend on establishing a state-based system that kept federal officials from interfering with “local custom”—a euphemism for segregation, Jim Crow laws, and institutionalized white supremacy. Thus our federally funded but state-run program today.
After initial creation, the NSLP’s expansion was slow and poverty amelioration was clearly a low priority. Not until the mid-to-late 1960s was attention paid to the program’s hunger relief effects, or lack thereof. Subsequently the 1970s saw dramatic expansion of both funding and programs, including the National School Breakfast Program (inspired by, or perhaps to counteract the successes of, the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program); Women, Infants, and Children (WIC); elderly programs; and summer meals for children. Indeed, the federal investment in feeding programs grew tenfold during the 1970s. Such efforts, ironically, began connecting in the public’s mind school feeding with poverty reduction—welfare—rather than a public good for all.
The 1980s cemented this welfare image, largely through concerted efforts by Ronald Reagan and other conservatives. They blamed the nation’s late-70s economic difficulties on federal social program spending, portraying the programs as wasteful, fraud-prone (his “welfare queen” image), and encouraging of dependency. The Reagan Administration annually but unsuccessfully pushed to end federal oversight of school food, and perhaps would have without the infamous “ketchup as a vegetable” debacle. Still, Reagan successfully reduced subsidies, hiked reduced-price meal charges, ended equipment grants, and increased paperwork for free and reduced-price meals. The result was a devastating dropout of nearly one-fourth of the programs’ participants—in real terms, millions of children had to stop eating school meals.