Breaking the Cycle of Ignorance One School Lunch at a Time

​Richards’s Hot Lunch Hypothesis

 

In the 1890s, Richards noticed that school children who did not eat lunch were unfocussed. She hypothesized that if schools served a nutritious noon meal, these struggling students would become blossoming academics. But, if children were guaranteed to receive one nutritious meal a day, they would become healthy enough to overcome the negative characteristics they had acquired from their “ignorant” parents. She had an opportunity to test her theory in the mid-1890s, when the Boston School Committee asked the New England Kitchen, her food lab, to provide lunch for nine local high schools (3, 9).

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Left: The Lunch Line at Boston Latin School, c. 1890s from the Rumford Kitchen Leaflets, 1899

Even though there is proof that Richards created Boston’s first school lunch program in 1895, the FDA’s website states that the city’s first lunch program was established in 1908 by the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union.

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​Richards’s Findings
Richards’s published her findings in 1895. She asserted that within the short span of time in which her school lunch program had existed, the efficient and nutritious lunch service had immediately improved students’ attention spans. She was extremely pleased with the initial results of the Boston school lunch program and hoped that other communities would look to the successful program as a model for their own schools. To make it easier to replicate her program, Richards provided a chart that listed the cost and nutritional value of various meal options (see left). By 1899, Richards reported that the public had begun to recognize that students who did not eat lunch could not be expected to perform well in school (3, 9).

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Left: Cost Effective and Healthy Meals, 1895 from The American Kitchen Magazine, 3 (May 1895): 54 (click image to enlarge)