The USDA reports that in 2024, 20.5 million children received free lunches and 900,000 children received reduced-price lunches. While the square pizza in the American Public Education system seems omnipresent, it’s a relatively recent phenomenon.
School lunches were born out of the postwar era, when President Truman signed the National School Lunch Act of 1946. The policy aimed to stabilize the agricultural labor force and reduce chronic child malnutrition. The number of people engaged in farming dropped 67% in 20 years, from 17 percent of the total workforce in 1940 to six percent in 1960. The National School Lunch Act supported farmers by creating a guaranteed market for agricultural goods. In addition, policymakers saw school lunches as a way to address child malnutrition.
The school lunch program has been a convenient partnership for agricultural surpluses, especially dairy. As post-war agricultural production ramped up, the federal government often found itself with too much milk, cheese, and butter on hand. To prevent these goods from going to waste and allowing prices to tank, the USDA bought the excess and distributed it through schools.
By the 1980s, this relationship with the dairy industry became so significant that critics referred to government stores as “the cheese caves” due to the massive stockpiles of processed cheese. School lunches became a way to stabilize agricultural markets while feeding children, making items like milk and cheese fixtures in cafeterias nationwide.
While school lunches were federally supported by the mid-20th century, school breakfasts were not institutionalized until later. The National School Lunch Program expanded steadily after its initial rollout. The Child Nutrition Act passed in 1966 which laid the groundwork for school breakfasts. Support for these programs, however, often reflected the political will of the moment. Grassroots organizations filled the gaps of the school meal program.
One of the earliest large-scale, community-led efforts to solve child hunger came from the Black Panther Party. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party in 1966 and they served their first free school breakfast in January of 1969 within an Episcopal church. Without government funding, Panther members solicited local grocery stores for donations, consulted with nutritionists to determine what would make a good breakfast, and then got to work serving it up. The children received chocolate milk, eggs, meat, cereal, and fresh oranges.
School officials immediately reported results in kids who had free breakfast before school. “The school principal came down and told us how different the children were,” Ruth Beckford, a parishioner who helped with the program, said later. “They weren’t falling asleep in class, they weren’t crying with stomach cramps.”
In 2010, President Obama signed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. This policy introduced more nutritious food into school lunches and aimed to reduce the number of children diagnosed with obesity within one generation. A study conducted on children who ate the reimbursed meals before and after the introduction of the policy found that their Healthy Eating Index scores increased by 30% for low-income students, 31% for low- to middle-income students, and 19% for middle- to high-income students.
In more recent years, attention has turned to the impact of school meals on students’ academic performance. In 2017, the Brookings Institution published research on how the quality of school lunches affects test scores. Among students enrolled in 9,700 California schools, access to healthier school lunches was associated with improvements in test scores of 0.03 to 0.04 standard deviations, or roughly four percentiles.
Reducing class size is another strategy aimed at improving test scores. The same Brookings study compared the relative cost of healthier school lunches—around $80 per student per year—to the gains achieved through smaller class sizes. Reducing class size by one-third cost about $2,000 per student in 1999. While reducing class sizes requires hiring more teachers and thus comes with higher labor costs, this approach is about five times more expensive than improving school lunch quality for a comparable increase in test performance.
In response to the instability wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government picked up the tab for universal free school lunches provided to every public school student in the country. For most states, this policy expired in 2022, revealing the unmet need of many school children. Six states—California, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Vermont—opted to bolster their school lunch programs with state dollars immediately following the federal withdrawal of support in 2022. As a result, food insufficiency among school-aged children was 1.5 percent higher in states that did not extend universal free meals into the 2022–2023 school year compared to those that did.
What began as a way to deal with agricultural surpluses and reduce child hunger has become a significant social safety net element for American children. The presence of milk and cheese in American lunches is more than a dietary choice, it's the legacy of economic policy. With more than 20 million children reliant on the school lunch program, Harry Truman’s words still ring clear: "In the long view, no nation is any healthier than its children or more prosperous than its farmers."