The First School Lunch Program | New England’s Food Gifts

The country’s first school lunch program got its start in Boston during the 1890s, inspired by an attempt to provide good, cheap, and nourishing food to the poor.

The first organized attempt to change America’s eating habits took place more than 125 years ago, when some privileged Bostonians, reformers to the core, formed an enterprise called the New England Kitchen. Their goal was to educate the poor to eat food that was cheap, nourishing, and hygienic. The group included a chemist, Ellen Richards; a domestic scientist, Mary Hinman Abel; and a businessman, Edward Atkinson. When the first New England Kitchen opened at 142 Pleasant Street, Boston, on January 1, 1890, it was a takeout establishment. For 15 cents a meal, customers could carry away such fare as beef broth, cornmeal mush, pea soup, Indian pudding, and oatmeal cakes.

Then, as now, Boston’s neighborhoods had distinct ethnic identities, and the popularity of the Kitchen’s food depended on whether it was familiar to potential customers. Americans, English, and some Irish were said to like the dishes, whereas people living in the North End—mostly Jews, Portuguese, and Italians—were judged “incorrigible.” Not surprisingly, the New England Kitchen didn’t last long. As far as Ellen Richards was concerned, its “death knell was sounded by the woman who said, ‘I don’t want to eat what’s good for me; I’d ruther eat what I’d ruther.’”

Ironically, it did institute one major change in America’s way of eating: The Boston School Committee negotiated with the New England Kitchen to set up a central facility that could deliver meals to the city’s high schools. Ellen Richards and her crew managed to deliver soups, sandwiches, meat pies, scalloped dishes, cakes, and puddings. In this case, the Kitchen triumphed, establishing the first school lunch program in the nation. 

—Excerpt from “I’d Ruther Eat What I’d Ruther,” by Barbara Haber, November 1997