It’s about time to hang up the swimsuit and draft your list of back-to-school supplies. If you were like other kids headed back to the classroom, that also meant picking out your new lunchbox – or even looking forward to some of your favorite school-provided lunch items, served by women in hairnets (sometimes kindly, sometimes surly) who wielded ice cream scoops

A while back, we covered vintage school lunch boxes, but I’ve always enjoyed those meals supplied to hungry kids thanks to school lunch programs. These programs are likely older than you’d expect – we can trace their beginnings to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when they were organized and executed by school-affiliated volunteers. Since this was a volunteer effort, the offerings in those days were humble, cost-effective, and produced in large enough quantities that they could feed many, with soups and stews with rolls often on the menu.

School administrators and teachers alike began to take notice that students who ate their midday meal tended to learn better, so they ramped up their efforts and incorporated more variety, with larger cities like Boston and Philadelphia taking the lead. 

These school lunches didn’t just feed hungry stomachs and thus boost brain power; they also were an effective way to introduce staples of the American diet to the growing number of the nation’s children from immigrant communities.

During the Great Depression, schools were able to feed hungry students with the help of the federal government, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal offering to pay workers to cook and serve food at schools. This helped local farmers, too, since they often had a surplus of crops but fewer buyers. Roosevelt’s New Deal ensured much-needed income to these farmers by buying their crops and also created jobs in school districts nationwide.

The school lunch program, only possible in previous decades thanks to the time, resources, and generosity of myriad communities, became permanent when President Harry S Truman signed the National School Lunch Act into law in 1946. For the next 40 years, the quality, variety, and nutritional value of school lunches entered a golden age. Well-funded school lunch programs had finally become the standard for the American education system, not just an act of charity. Schools began to offer breakfast, too, in 1966, an initiative born of the reality of food insecurity in poorer urban areas.