National School Lunch Act
The National School Lunch Act is a 1946 United States federal law that created the National School Lunch Program to provide low-cost or free school lunch meals to qualified students through subsidies to schools. Prior to the passage of the Act, direct support of school lunches were done on the state level, or it was provided through federal aid that was not specifically designed for school lunches.
The program was established as a way to prop up food prices by absorbing farm surpluses, while at the same time providing food to school-age children. The Act was signed into law by President Harry S. Truman in 1946 and entered the federal government into schools' dietary programs on June 4, 1946. In 1999, the act's name was changed to honor Richard Russell Jr., senator from Georgia, who championed its passage.
Since its passage, it has received many amendments and updates due to price, safety, and health concerns; it has been a subject of heavy debate within academia since the early 2000s, and the debate has continued to evolve as statistical tests and the NSLP have both improved.
The majority of the support provided to schools participating in the program comes in the form of a cash reimbursement for each meal served. Schools are also entitled to receive commodity foods and additional commodities as they are available from surplus agricultural stocks. The National School Lunch Program served nearly 29.4 million students as of the 2023-2024 school year, with 21.1 million receiving free or reduced-price lunches.
Early programs
School feeding in the United States underwent the same evolution as in Europe, beginning with sporadic food services undertaken by private societies and associations interested in child welfare and education.New York City
The Children's Aid Society of New York initiated a program in 1853, serving meals to students attending the vocational school.At the end of 1914, more than 24,000 children were offered a homemade lunch. There was also a morning snack of crackers and hot milk offered for three cents to children who were considered weak or crippled.
Philadelphia
In 1894, the Starr Center Association in Philadelphia began serving penny lunches in one school, later expanding the service to another. Soon a lunch committee was established within the Home and School League, and lunches were extended to include nine schools in the city.In 1909, Dr. Cheesman A. Herrick, who was principal of the William Penn High School for Girls was credited with accomplishing the transfer of responsibilities for the operation and support of the lunch program from charitable organizations to the Philadelphia School Board. He requested that a system be established to ensure that the lunches served would be based upon sound principles of nutrition and required that the program be under the direction of a home economics graduate. The Board granted his request on an experimental basis and on the condition that the program would be self-supporting. The experiment proved successful, and the following year lunch services were extended to the Southern Manual Training School and later to three additional units.
In the spring of 1912, the School Board established a Department of High School Lunches and directed that the food services be inaugurated in all the high schools of the city. During all this time the Home and School League had continued operating the feeding program in the nine elementary schools and continued to do so until May 1915, when it reported to the Board that the need for a lunch system had been clearly demonstrated and that it could not be successfully operated by an organization outside the school system. As a result, the School Board placed the operation of both high school and elementary lunch programs under the supervision of the Department of High School Lunches and authorized the extension of the program to other elementary schools.
Boston
The New England Kitchen began offering school lunches in Boston as early as the 1890s, despite opposition from school janitors who supplemented their income with snack tables.In September 1908, the Women's Educational and Industrial Union in Boston began to supply hot lunches to high schools that were under the supervision of the Boston School Committee. A central kitchen system was used and lunches were transported to the participating schools.
In January 1910, an experimental program for elementary schools took the form of a mid-morning lunch prepared by the class in Home Economics three days each week. On two days of each week, sandwiches and milk were served. The children ate their meals at their desks, there being no lunchroom in the building. Before the end of the school year five additional schools were benefiting from the program, and a total of 2,000 pupils were being served each day, according to a report submitted by Ellen H. Richards in the "Journal of Home Economics" for December 1910.
Federal Support Prior to Passage
As schools began to expand their food services, school lunch funding, which was primarily done through local means, was no longer enough. Governments, school boards, and outside institutions could no longer support school cafeterias; it was evident that Federal support was necessary if schools wanted to continue the progression of their lunch programs. The first instance of broader support came from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in 1932 and 1933, which provided loans to towns in Southwestern Missouri to cover the cost of labor involved in school lunches. Similar aid was provided elsewhere in 1933 and 1934 by the Civil Works Administration and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which covered labor costs in 39 states.At the same time, the United States was suffering from the Great Depression. There was a lack of markets for farmers to sell in, and when they did, their profit margins were barely enough to sustain them. Families struggled to provide food at home, and many children could not afford school lunches, leading to child malnutrition. Section 32 of Public Law 320, or the Agricultural Adjustment Act Amendment of 1935, passed by the 74th congress allowed the Secretary of Agriculture to allocate funds from customs receipts; a majority of the funds were used to purchase agricultural products from farmers in order to limit market supply and thus increase prices and income. The purchased products were then given to schools to use to provide children with lunches.
The act continued due to its success, seeing more funding being allocated as a result. Funding decreased once the United States joined the Allies' effort in World War II, and schools' access to food decreased with the military needing more supplies from farmers. School lunch program participation declined, and the 78th Congress amended the act in 1943 in order to ensure that the funding was being used to buy food, rather than pay for labor or equipment, and participation once again increased.
Passage
Modifications and Improvements
Since the Act passed, Congress has modified several aspects of the policy. Congress amended the NSLP in 1962 to adjust fund distribution. They decided that the budget allocated to each state should be influenced by the state's need for further assistance. Rather than just factoring in the number of participants, Congress took into account the state poverty level compared to the national poverty level. Then, in 1968, Congress improved the NSLP food options to accommodate students with special dietary needs.More recently, in 2012, First Lady Michelle Obama took on the issue of school lunches. Changes that she initiated primarily focused on more specific nutritional requirements. The changes include updated food group nutrition standards, such as vegetable subgroups, re-adjusted meat, and grain serving sizes to reflect different school grade ranges, an implemented requirement for whole grains, and milk-fat restrictions. Lower calorie ranges and a 10-year progressive sodium reduction plan also started in 2012. The alterations received criticism after implementation in 2014. Critics argued that the increased costs that would be a result would be a waste of resources and deter families from participating in the program if they were not eligible for free lunches. They also argued that it could lead to increased food waste because children would not enjoy the healthier options. Economic concerns faded once it was made clear that concerns arose due to a recent recession, and the changes remained primarily in order to combat rising rates of childhood obesity.
As of 2025, President Trump implemented changes to the NSLP through his Make America Healthy Again executive order; he has restricted the percentage of food that schools can purchase from other countries to ten percent. Greater sugar restrictions are also being instituted, and by 2027, the amount of calories students can consume weekly from sugar will be restricted to ten percent. Schools are also focused on eliminating artificial dyes from their menus and making food from scratch.
Nutrition, behavior, and learning
Nutrition standards for the National School Lunch Program and National School Breakfast Program were updated in 2012. This update in nutritional standards was funded through a federal statute signed into law by President Barack Obama; The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 funds free lunch programs in public schools for the next five years. The new guidelines require students to choose either a serving of fruit or vegetables every meal. Also, the portions must now be larger.Along with larger portions of fruits and vegetables, the National School Lunch Program now enforces a variety of other nutritional requirements. Food products and ingredients used to prepare school meals must contain zero grams of added trans fat per serving. Furthermore, a meal can provide no more than 30 percent of calories from fat and less than 10 percent from saturated fat.
In late 2009, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies released School Meals: Building Blocks For Healthy Children. This report reviews and provides recommendations to update the nutrition standard and the meal requirements for the National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program. School Meals also sets standards for menu planning that focus on food groups, calories, saturated fat, and sodium, and that incorporate Dietary Guidelines for Americans and the Dietary Reference Intakes.
Nutrition plays a critical role in cognitive development and academic performance for children; undernourished children are more likely to be less energetic and less able to concentrate. The day-to-day observation of teachers and administrators of the relationship between inadequate nutrition and behavior and the ability to learn is substantiated by scientific studies. Twenty Cape Town, South Africa, children were studied for 11 years, beginning in 1955. The study was based on the hypothesis "that the ill effects of under-nutrition are determined by its occurrence during the period of maximum growth and the duration of under-nutrition relative to the total period of growth... Evidence is cumulative and impressive that severe under-nutrition during the first 2 years of life, when brain growth is most active, results in a permanent reduction of brain size and restricted intellectual development." Some basic micronutrients are necessary for children to maintain a good status of learning, such as iron and vitamin B12. Iron deficiency puts a child at risk of cognitive delay and lower math scores.