School children breaking for lunch at a local café in Floyd County, Kentucky, September 1946. Russell Lee

The Bitter Cry of the Children - John Spargo

Early Time line of School lunch in the United States

• 1894     Philadelphia starts a penny school lunch program in 1894.
• A Boston Women’s Educational and Industrial Union also begins serving hot lunches to local high schools around the same time.
• 1906   John Spargo releases the book The Bitter Cry of the Children. This  book addressed the problem with children from low- income families receiving inadequate nutrition, further pushing society to see a need for a school lunch program.
• 1910   Boston experiments with serving lunches to local elementary school kids three times a week. Five schools benefited from this program by the end of 1910.
• 1912   School Board establishes a Department of High School Lunches in Philadelphia
• 1936   Federal government sets up a program to help agriculture and the school lunch program during the Great Depression. The USDA used 30% of funds collected from customs duties to purchase surplus food from domestic producers. The USDA would then sell this food at a lower price to needy families in the school lunch program.
• 1937   15 states had authorized local school boards to operate lunchrooms. Most states sold the lunch for the price of food, but 4 states had made provisions for low-income families.
• 1942   World War II uses many extra food surpluses and the school lunch program suffers.
• 1946   Harry S. Truman signs that National School Lunch Act that further appropriated the use of federal funds to support the school lunch program. In 1946 the program included 45,119 schools and served 6.7 million children daily.
• 1962   School lunch program was amended to appropriate funds per capita of students using the school lunch program.
• 1966   Child Nutrition Act signed in order to ensure school lunch was providing for the health needs of children receiving food. In addition to preserving the health and well-being of children, one of this act’s goals was to “encourage the domestic consumption of agricultural and other foods”.

“It is hereby declared to be the policy of Congress, as a measure of national security, to safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation’s children and to encourage the domestic consumption of nutritious agricultural commodities and other food, by assisting the States, through grants-in aid and other means, in providing an adequate supply of food and other facilities for the establishment, maintenance, operation and expansion of nonprofit school lunch programs.”

- Sec. 2 The National School Lunch Act, 1946