School Lunches Essay

While most people take school lunch services for granted, not many people know that schools did not originally offer food service. In 1894 some schools in Philadelphia began to offer what was known as penny lunches, which began food services within schools, thanks to local charities. Soon nine other schools in the philadelphia area began to offer penny lunches and other services. In 1909 Dr. Cheesman opened a school or girls that is given credit for taking food services out of the hands of charities and into the hands of schools. He asked the philadelphia school board to ensure that schools would provide food services that provided adequate nutrition for children, and his experiment proved successful. Soon the program spread to many other schools helping many children across philly.
In 1912 the school board created the Department of High School Lunches, which directed all schools to offer food services. Philadelphia was not the only city getting involved with school lunches, in fact according to union records suggest that Bostan beat them by one year. It is on record that bostan started serving hot lunches in 1908. In order to do this a central kitchen system was used and lunches were taken to the
Students at these schools often came from long distances to get to school, meaning bringing hot lunches was almost impossible. On top of that these schools were often to small to accommodate kitchen’s or cafeterias. In addition public funds for food were not common, some teachers made soups or stews with donations brought to class this was later replaced with the pint jar method. Students were encouraged to bring such items as soups or macaroni in a pint jar. The pint jars were set into a bucket of water on top of the room heater or stove, and by lunch time such foods would be hot! Schools placed a lot of stress on this method insisting that hot food was key to the children’s