Free School Lunch Politics by Susan Levine

States Congress, Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, Hearings on the School Lunch Program, 92nd Cong., 1st Sess., September 16, 1971 (hereafter, Senate Agriculture Committee, 1971), 2.
    62. Committee on School Lunch Participation, Their Daily Bread, 24. Also see United States Congress, House Committee on Education and Labor, Hearings, 91st Cong., 1st Sess. March 6, 1969 (hereafter, House Committee on Education and Labor, 1969), 100; and Senate Select Committee, Part 11, July 9–11, 1969, p. 3431. Some principals took into consideration whether the child could go home for lunch or could bring “a suitable lunch from home.” Ibid., 3413.
    63. See Brauer, “Kennedy, Johnson”; Leamann, Promised Land; and Wadden, Politics ofSocial Welfare.
    64. “Many in Appalachia Hungry Despite U.S. Aid,” NYT, June 18, 1971.
    65. Senate Select Committee, Part 11, July 9–11, 1969, p. 3463.
    66. United States Congress House Select Committee on Education, Committee on Education and Labor, Hearings, National School Lunch Act, 89th Cong., 2nd Sess., July 21, 1966 (hereafter, House Select Committee, 1966), 28.
    67. See Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
    68. Sanford F. Schram, Words of Welfare: The Poverty of Social Science and the Social Science of Poverty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). The 1955 Agriculture Department study found that families at every income level spent about one-third of their incomes on food. According to one account, Orshansky intended to measure family need, but her figures came to be used to measure destitution instead. Still, her figures linked poverty to income and the cost of food. The later switch to the consumer-price index unlinked poverty from food and established a line that no longer referred to income and nutrition at all. See ibid. Also see Gordon F. Bloom, “Distribution of Food,” in Jean Mayer, ed., U.S. Nutrition Policies in the Seventies (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1973), 128; Michael Morris and John B. Williamson, Poverty and Public Policy: An Analysis of Federal Intervention Efforts (New York: Greenwood Press, 1984), 14; S. M. Miller and Pamela Roby, “Poverty: Changing Social Stratification,” in Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ed., On Understanding Poverty: Perspectives from the Social Sciences (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 77; and John Cassidy, “Relatively Deprived: How Poor Is Poor?,” The New Yorker, April 3, 2006.
    69. Mollie Orshansky, “Counting the Poor: Another Look at the Poverty Profile,” in Ferman et al., eds., Poverty in America, 45. Also see Orshansky, “The Shape of Poverty in 1966,” Social Science Research, March 1968. She told the Senate Select Committee that her formula was “a far from generous measure… it is a minimum for a household.” Senate Select Committee, Part 2, January 810, 1969, p. 639. Thanks to Jan Rosenberg for first introducing me to Mollie Orshansky.
    70. Harrington, The Other America, 183. The government began to use the Consumer Price Index rather than the actual cost of food. This, according to Schram, meant that “the food-income relation which was the basis for the original poverty measure was no longer the current rationale.” Schram, Words ofWelfare, 207, nn. 22 and 81.
    71. Shram, Words of Welfare, 78–81 and 208, n. 35. According to Shram, Orshansky intended her formula to be an “overall research tool, not as a means for determining eligibility for anti-poverty programs.” See 206, n. 19. Arnold E Schaefer, Chief Nutrition Program, Health Services and Mental Health Administration, Public Health Service, testified in 1969 that the “O’Shanky Index” was adopted “primarily … due to our urgent need to make a quick screen.” See House Hearings, Education Committee, 26.
    72. Wadden argues that liberals aimed to cure