As stated, all the investigations described were confined to the
breakfast meal. There has been practically no effort made, so far as I
am aware, to determine how many children there are who go without
lunches back to their lessons, or, what is quite as important, how many
there are to whom are given small sums of money to procure lunches for
themselves; and what kind of lunches they buy. Even in Europe most of
the investigations made have been confined to the morning meal. Yet this
lunch question is probably even more important than the other. There are
doubtless many more children who go without lunch than without
breakfast. Thousands of children who get some sort of breakfast, even if
it is only coffee and bread, get nothing at all for lunch, and a still
larger number—in some schools I have found as many as 20 per cent—get
small sums of money, ranging from one to five cents, to buy lunches for
themselves. And in most cases the condition of these is just as
deplorable as if they had nothing at all, if not much worse. Their
tragedy lies in the fact that in most cases the money they spend would
be quite sufficient to provide decent, nourishing meals if it were
wisely spent, instead of which they get what is positively injurious.
When a child of eight or nine years of age whose breakfast consists of
tea and bread lunches day after day upon pickles, its digestive system
must of necessity be impaired. Wise discrimination cannot be expected
from young children, and the temptation of the candy stores and of the
push carts laden with ice cream or fruit is great. Often the fact that
children in the very poorest districts spend so many pence is urged as
evidence that no serious problem of poverty exists, but that is a wholly
unwarranted assumption. There may not be absolute destitution; the
family income may be sufficient to keep its members above the line of
primary poverty, but the conditions under which it is earned,
necessitating the employment of the mother, involve the suffering of the
children. The mother is taken away from her legitimate work, the care of
her home and children, and they are left to their own resources. In the
course of these investigations I have found hundreds of children going
back to their lessons without having had any lunch, and hundreds more of
the class just described. In one class of 40 in an East Side school I
found 11 with pennies to buy their own lunches. These children were all
between the ages of eight and ten years. In another school the principal
said that there were 50 such children known to her out of a total of
less than 500. In 4 other schools, with an attendance of 4500, the
principals’ estimates of the number of such children aggregated 521, or
11.51 per cent.
This phase of the problem of child hunger is not peculiar to New York.
The reports of teachers in many cities and towns and my own observations
show that this evil is invariably associated with poverty; and European
investigations all support that view.[53] It is probable that in some of
the smaller manufacturing towns it prevails to a larger proportional
extent than in cities like New York, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, and St.
Louis, but of that matter there are no data. The answers of teachers and
others to inquiries as to what such children buy have been monotonously
alike. They buy candy, cream puffs, ice cream, fruit (very often
damaged, decayed, or unripe), pickles, and other unwholesome things. One
cold day last winter I visited the neighborhood of a large school with
an idea that it might be possible to ascertain just exactly what a
number of children would buy for lunch. Any one who has ever watched the
outpouring of children from a large school will realize how utterly
impossible it is to keep any considerable number of them under
observation. Like a great river that has broken its banks the human
torrent rushes through the streets and crowds them awhile, then spreads
far and wide. I found 14 children in a delicatessen store, 8 boys and 6
girls. Seven of them bought pickles and bread; 4 bought pickles only; 2
bought bologna sausage and rye bread, and 1 bought pickled fish and
bread. In a neighboring street I made similar observations one day
during the summer. Out of 19 children 8 bought pickles, 2 of them with
bread, the others without; 6 bought ice cream, 2 bought bananas, and 3
others bought candy. For the children of the poor there seems to be some
strange fascination about pickles. One lad of ten said that he always
bought pickles with his three cents. “I must have pickles,” he said. It
would seem that the chronic underfeeding creates a nervous craving for
some kind of a stimulant which the child finds in pickles. The adult
resorts to whiskey very often for much the same reason. There is every
reason to believe that this malnutrition lays the foundation for
inebriety in later years. The custom of giving the children money
instead of prepared lunches is also responsible for a good deal of
gambling, especially among the boys. Little Tony plays “craps” and loses
his lunch, and the boy who wins gets a particularly big unwholesome
“blow out,” or adds a packet of cigarettes to his meal of pickles or
cream puffs.
In one large school on the West Side the principal confidently declared
that 10 per cent would be altogether too low an estimate of the number
of badly underfed children in that school. “If you mean only the
breakfastless ones,” she said, “why, it is too high, but if you include
those whose breakfasts are totally inadequate, and those who have no
lunches, those whose lunches at home are as inadequate as their
breakfasts, and those who get only the bad things they buy for lunch—in
a word, if you include all who suffer on account of defective, low
nutrition, the estimate of 10 per cent is too low for this school. There
are whole blocks in this district from which we scarcely get a child who
is not, at some time or other in the course of a year, in want of food.
The worst cases are in the primary grades, for many of the older
children drop out. The boys find odd jobs to do, and the girls are
needed at home to care for the smaller children.” The population of this
district is largely Irish and most of the men belong to that class of
unskilled laborers which, more than any other industrial class, suffers
from irregularity of employment. Many are longshoremen, others are
truck-men, builders’ laborers, and so on. No other class of workers
suffers so much from what may be called accidental causes as this. A war
in some far-away land may for a while seriously divert the stream of
commerce, and the longshoreman of New York suffers unemployment and its
attendant poverty; a strike of bricklayers or carpenters will throw the
laborers and their families into the maws of all-devouring misery, or a
week of bad weather may cause inexpressible hardship. When employment is
steady the wages they receive are in most cases only sufficient to keep
their families just above the line of poverty; when there is sickness or
unemployment, even for a couple of weeks, there is privation and the
growth of a burden of debt which remains to crush them downward when
wages begin to come in again. Want actually continues in such cases
through what, judged by the wage standard, appears to be a time of
normal prosperity. It is hardly to be wondered at that there is a good
deal of intemperance and improvidence. These conditions are the economic
soil in which intemperance, thriftlessness, and irresponsibility
flourish.
In this district, with the coöperation of a well-trained and experienced
woman investigator, a careful investigation of the condition of 50
families represented in the school was made. The number of children
attending school from the 50 families was 79. Of that number there were
24 who had no breakfast of any kind on the days they were visited, while
of the 55 more fortunate ones no less than 30 had only bread with tea or
coffee. Only 35 of the children had any lunch, or money with which to
procure any, 44 missing that meal entirely. Terrible as they are, these
figures do not tell the whole story. It is impossible to appreciate what
going without lunch means to these children unless we take into account
the fact that those who go without lunch, and those who eat only the
deleterious things they buy, are in most cases the same children who
either go breakfastless or have only bread and coffee day after day. And
their evening meal is very often a repetition of the morning meal, bread
and coffee or tea. From the schedule showing the actual dietary of the
children in question contained in the report of my co-investigator I
give, in the following table, the particulars relating to 6 families.
They are perfectly typical cases and demonstrate very clearly the woful
inadequacy of diet common to children of the poor.
════════╤════════╤═════════════════╤═════════════════╤═════════════════
Family │ No. of │ Breakfast │ Lunch │ Supper
│ School │ │ │
│Children│ │ │
────────┼────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────
1 │ 2 │Bread and tea │None. │Bread and tea.
│ │ only. │ │
2 │ 1 │None. │Soup from │Coffee and bread.
│ │ │ charity. │
3 │ 1 │Coffee and rolls │Coffee and bread.│Tea and bread.
│ │ (no butter or │ │
│ │ jam). │ │
4 │ 3 │Bread and tea │None. │Bread and tea
│ │ only. │ │ only.
5 │ 2 │None. │Soup with the │Piece of bread.
│ │ │ soup-meat. │
6 │ 1 │Bread and jam │None. │Tea and bread
│ │ with coffee. │ │ with jam.
════════╧════════╧═════════════════╧═════════════════╧═════════════════
It is a horrible fact that many of these children whose diet is so
unwholesome cannot eat decent food, even when they are most hungry. It
is not merely a question of appetite, but of stomachs too weak by reason
of chronic hunger and malnutrition to stand good and nutritious food.
This has been frequently observed in connection with Fresh Air Outings
for poor children in the tenement districts. I have known scores of
instances. Very often these children have to be patiently taught to eat.
Sometimes it takes several days to induce them to take milk and eggs.
They crave for their accustomed food—coffee and bread, or pickles. The
same fact has been observed in connection with adults in the hospitals.
When the Salvation Army started its free breakfast stations in New York,
the newspapers made a good deal of the fact that the children refused to
eat the good soup and milk porridge at first provided. That was regarded
as conclusive evidence that they were not hungry, for a hungry child is
supposed to eat almost anything. That is true in a measure of children
who are merely hungry, but these children are more than hungry. They are
weak and unhealthy as the result of chronic underfeeding. I myself saw
many children at the Salvation Army free breakfast depots whose hunger
was only too apparent try bravely to eat the soup until they actually
vomited. They would beg for a piece of bread, and when it was given them
eat it ravenously. In an uptown school a little English boy fainted one
morning while at his lessons. He had fainted the day before in the
school yard, but the teacher thought that it was due to overexertion
while at play. When he fainted the second time she took him to the
principal’s office, and they discovered that he had not eaten anything
that day, and only a piece of bread the day before. The principal sent
for some milk, and when it was warmed in the school kitchen she gave it
to the lad with a couple of dainty chicken sandwiches from her own
lunch, expecting him to enjoy a rare treat. But he didn’t. He took only
a bite or two and a sup of milk, then began to vomit. He could not be
induced to eat any more nor even to drink the milk. Presently, however,
he said to the teacher, “I think I could eat some bread, teacher,” and
when they sent out for some rolls and coffee he ate as though he had
seen no food for a week. Very few people, it may be added, incidentally,
realize how much the teachers and principals of schools in the poorest
districts give out of their slender incomes to provide children with
food, clothing, and shoes. But how little it all amounts to in the way
of solving the problem is best expressed in the words of one principal,
“What I can give in that way to the worst cases only lessens the evil in
just the same degree as a handful of sands taken from the seashore
lessens the number of grains.”
[Illustration:
A COSMOPOLITAN GROUP OF “FRESH AIR FUND” CHILDREN
]