Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States by A. R. Ruis (review)

In May 2017, USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue announced a number of changes to school lunch legislation, which overturned important provisions of the Obama-era "Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act" on whole grains, salt consumption, and the fat content of flavored milk. The National School Administration, a food service industry lobbying group, welcomed the changes as relaxing "overly prescriptive regulations," while opponents feared a setback of demonstrated improvements in the nutritional quality of school meals. As the regulation of school lunch is once again on the table, A. R. Ruis's book is an important, well-researched, and welcome addition to the discussion.

Ruis argues that while the historical contexts in which school lunch policy is discussed have changed, the challenges facing policy makers, and the arguments employed by them, are not new. Existing scholarship has largely focused on New Deal era policies and the creation of the National School Lunch Act in 1946, which Ruis analyzes in the final section of the book (chapters five and six). The bulk of his account is focused on local municipal and rural efforts to establish meal services in schools in the early decades of the twentieth century (chapters one through four). Illuminating these early efforts, Ruis suggests, can help us understand "how and why school meal programs came to have the form ultimately codified by the National School Lunch Act" (5).

Chapter one examines the social and political developments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as urbanization, industrialization, the expansion of public health, and most importantly, the introduction of compulsory school education. In chapters two and three, Ruis explores local programs in Chicago and New York, which are contrasted in chapter four with efforts to establish school lunches in rural areas. The final two chapters trace the gradual involvement of the federal government in school lunch provision, discussing New Deal emergency relief (chapter five, which closely follows Janet Poppendieck's classic 1986 account) and the National School Lunch Act of 1946 (chapter six).

Ruis's engaging language and clear structure (and, to an extent, the lack of a bibliography) might perhaps lead hurried readers to underestimate the gargantuan task accomplished by this book in bringing together a highly fragmented set of archival sources, and through them, painstakingly recreating local efforts in such vivid detail. Particularly effective is Ruis's reconstruction of rural efforts to improvise feasible cooking methods (such as the "pint-jar method") in chapter four and his nuanced analysis of legal documents in chapter two.

The book makes a convincing case that negotiations over whether and how to provide meals to school children were at heart debates about the role of the state in the education and healthcare of its citizens. Ruis demonstrates how arguments for and against providing school meals reflected broader anxieties about the relationship between public and private, about what kind of institution the school should be, and about how much responsibility parents should have in the education of their children. The case studies of Chicago and New York demonstrate how variably the battle lines were drawn. Whereas in Chicago, the Board of Education supported the provision of school meals, and tried to circumvent legal restrictions, the New York Board of Education was reluctant to take over responsibility for a private initiative.

Despite this heterogeneity, fears of turning schools into institutions of "social welfare" dominated early efforts to create school meal services, and significantly shaped their form. Ruis demonstrates how even the language used in legal cases about the permissibility to provide school meals reflected anxieties over producing dependency on the state and overstepping the boundaries of the school's educational functions in the case of Chicago. In New York, similar concerns hindered the continued success of an existing private program as it...