September 16, 2024
Mikala Compton/American-Statesman / USA TODAY NETWORK
The Science History Institute will open a new exhibit on school lunches on Friday, Sept. 27. The collection will examine nutrition, chemistry and the government effort to implement meal programs.
The mystery meat in school cafeterias is finally getting the rigorous investigation it deserves.
An exhibit opening at the Science History Institute will consider the history of the school lunch. "Lunchtime: The History of Science on the School Food Tray" will delve into evolving ideas on nutrition and explore the social forces that brought compulsory chicken tenders to public schools in America.
"We hope it will surprise our visitors to learn how so many of the ideas taken for granted today — like the fact that vitamins are a group of food compounds necessary for health — are in fact relatively recent scientific discoveries and shape the way we feed the country’s schoolchildren," Jesse Smith, the exhibit curator and director of curatorial affairs for the museum, said in a release.
Items on display include scientific relics like a hand-crank milk tester, a contraption used to measure dilution, and a Beckman DU ultraviolet spectrophotometer, which determined vitamin A concentrations in minutes. (Previous instruments took weeks.) Another curiosity is the fireless cooker. This device was essentially an insulated cooking apparatus that boiled food and then keep it warm until mealtime; the actual cooker was often stored in a wooden box with a lid.
Visitors will also see vintage World War II posters and other materials promoting subsidized school lunch programs. The campaign for healthy, widely available meals extended into comic books. A 1943 issue of "Real Life Comics" depicted Dr. Joseph Goldberger, who identified niacin deficiency as the cause of disease pellagra, as a superhero. An odder comic strip produced by the National Fertilizer Association showed children running hand-in-hand with a giant loaf of bread.
"Lunchtime" launches Friday, Sept. 27, with a free opening event featuring a school lunch-inspired tasting and samples of Rebel Crumbles, a healthy breakfast cake developed by local high school and college students and served throughout the School District of Philadelphia. The exhibit will be on view through January 2026.
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