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The Early Development of Nutrition Policy in Canada
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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dle Class: Social Experience in the American City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 38 In 1912, the U.S. Congress passed a bill authorizing funding for a federal bureau to consider the problems and welfare of American children. The United States Children’s Bureau was the first national government agency anywhere exclusively devoted to investigation of childhood and became a widely copied model used by other Western governments. At first a part of the Department of Commerce , in 1913 the bureau became an agency within the just-established Department of Labor. Kriste Lindenmeyer, A “Right to Childhood”: The U.S. Children’s Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912–1946 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). At the beginning of the century, the field of home economics was another new profession, and several Children’s Bureau dieticians and “domestic economists” were among a first generation. 39 Roberts, What Is Malnutrition? 1. 40 Roberts, What Is Malnutrition? 1. 41 Roberts, What Is Malnutrition? 2–3. Anthropometric analysis validates the importance of relationships between stature and weight as an indicator of general health, but by the late twentieth century, experts generally used height as an indication of nutritional deprivation only if used to judge aggregate populations . Few thought height/weight scales of much value in judging the health of individuals. Dora Costa and Richard Steckel, “Long Term Trends in Health, Welfare, and Economic Growth in the United States,” Working Papers Series on Historical Factors in Long Run Growth, Historical Paper 76 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 12–15. 42 Costa and Steckel, “Long Term Trends,” 5–13. For other bureau studies reporting the results of this decade’s worth of height and weight testing, see Lydia Roberts, The Nutrition and Care of Children in a Mountain County of Kentucky, Publication 110 (Washington, DC: United States Children’s Bureau, 1922); Agnes Hanna, Nutrition Work for Pre-School Children, Publication 138 (Washington, DC: United States Children’s Bureau, 1925); United States Children’s Bureau, What Builds Babies? Folder 4 (Washington, DC: United States Children’s Bureau, 1925). 43 Indeed, speeches that warned of the nation’s millions of “dangerously thin” children became common in the 1920s, in part because of public health campaigns that led to regular weighing of significant numbers of the nation’s schoolchildren , especially in urban areas with the best organized public health programs. By the end of the decade, scales and height/weight charts were standard school equipment throughout the country. Giving advice that was typical, in 1928, public health officials of Marion County, OR, counselled school principals to establish programs of weighing of all school children. Every six weeks was optimal; three times a year was minimal. W. F. Walker, Report of Survey of Public Health Activities for Marion County, Oregon, June 19–28, 1928, folder 3, box 2, series 12, Records of the Commonwealth Fund (hereafter cited as CF), Rockefeller Archive Center, Tarrytown, NY (hereafter cited as RAC). 44 Harvey Levenstein thinks “the great malnutrition scare” was exaggerated. His comments about the unreliability of height/weight ratios, if used to judge individual health, as well as his remarks about the cultural biases inherent in the early-twentieth-century testing regimes, deserve attention. However, he is wrong; the Progessive concern with child malnutrition was not largely a matter of experts’ misinformation. Levenstein pays insufficient attention to the reality that only after 1945 did a postwar boom enable the vast majority of married workers and their children to climb above poverty lines. And early-twentieth-century poverty 184 JUDITH SEALANDER brought periodic severe deprivation, including food deprivation, to millions of children. For Levenstein’s comments about early-twentieth-century malnutrition studies, see Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, 114–19. For discussions of how childhood poverty has been “counted,” see Althea Huston, ed., Children in Poverty: Child Development and Public Policy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 45 Economists have rightly attacked generalizations made from a “snapshot” approach. Counting height/weight ratios, or any other quantifiable condition, at any given moment, probably underestimates the numbers likely to experience the condition (level of nutrition, poverty, wealth) at some point during a lifetime and simultaneously also overestimates, if the assumption is that the individual caught in the “snapshot” will remain fixed in that condition (malnourished, poor, rich). No universally accepted longitudal study of childhood underfeeding exists for the years 1900–1920, only “snapshot” anecdotal case studies of groups measured with questionable techniques. However, most analysts think that it was only after 1945 that...