A01=Susan Levine
Activism
Agricultural policy
Agricultural subsidy
Agriculture
Amendment
American Association of University Women
Americans
Author_Susan Levine
Cafeteria
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Child nutrition programs
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Farm Security Administration
Fast food
Feminist movement
Food and Nutrition Service
Food choice
Food group
Food industry
Food policy
Food security
Funding
George McGovern
Guideline
Healthy diet
Home economics
Housewife
Income
Jean Mayer
Junk food
Legislation
Legislator
Lunch
Lyndon B. Johnson
Malnutrition
Meal
Middle class
National School Lunch Act
Nutrition
Nutrition Education
Nutritionist
Obesity
Physician
Pizza Hut
Poverty
Poverty reduction
Princeton University Press
Progressive Era
Racial segregation
Recipe
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Ronald Reagan
School Breakfast Program
School district
School meal
Social policy
Social science
Southern Democrats
Subsidy
Surplus product
Taco Bell
Tax
United States Department of Agriculture
Vegetable
Vitamin
War on Poverty
Welfare
Welfare state
World War II
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Product details
- ISBN 9780691146195
- Weight: 397g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 28 Mar 2010
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Whether kids love or hate the food served there, the American school lunchroom is the stage for one of the most popular yet flawed social welfare programs in our nation's history. School Lunch Politics covers this complex and fascinating part of American culture, from its origins in early twentieth-century nutrition science, through the establishment of the National School Lunch Program in 1946, to the transformation of school meals into a poverty program during the 1970s and 1980s. Susan Levine investigates the politics and culture of food; most specifically, who decides what American children should be eating, what policies develop from those decisions, and how these policies might be better implemented. Even now, the school lunch program remains problematic, a juggling act between modern beliefs about food, nutrition science, and public welfare. Levine points to the program menus' dependence on agricultural surplus commodities more than on children's nutritional needs, and she discusses the political policy barriers that have limited the number of children receiving meals and which children were served.
But she also shows why the school lunch program has outlasted almost every other twentieth-century federal welfare initiative. In the midst of privatization, federal budget cuts, and suspect nutritional guidelines where even ketchup might be categorized as a vegetable, the program remains popular and feeds children who would otherwise go hungry. As politicians and the media talk about a national obesity epidemic, School Lunch Politics is a timely arrival to the food policy debates shaping American health, welfare, and equality.
Susan Levine is professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of "Labor's True Woman" and "Degrees of Equality".
