"They basically said that there was this war on poverty that was supposed to be feeding people, taking care of people, but it wasn't - so they were going to," says Joshua Bloom, a history professor at UCLA and co-author of Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. government's promise to provide basic needs (housing, food, safety) to its citizens. Augustine's Church in Oakland, California, the Panthers' free breakfast program was a direct response to the war on poverty, the U.S. While the USDA was starting its breakfast pilot program under the auspices of the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, the Black Panther Party was busy organizing its own Free Breakfast for Children Program. "I really do believe that the government expanded their breakfast program because of the work we were doing." For some scholars, widespread free breakfast programming didn't begin with the federal government, but rather, with radical actions from the Black Panther Party. Even less known are the more revolutionary connotations of offering free breakfast to children.
Unlike free lunch - which has existed formally since 1946 and has attracted great adulation and intense ire during its long tenure - school breakfast has usually flown under the radar of both nutritionists and public policy theorists.
In 2012, the program served breakfast to 12.9 million children before school and spent $3.3 billion on operating costs, according to the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service. government's largest welfare programs, offering free meals to children whose families are below the poverty line. After small steps and trial and error in the 1960s, the program expanded and was made permanent as we know it in 1975.įree breakfast is now one of the U.S. According to the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, Perkins was initially concerned with the plight of children in rural areas, who got up early to work the fields with their parents and arrived to school hungry after long bus rides. School breakfast programming started small and inauspiciously with a two-year pilot program conceived and championed by Kentucky congressman Carl Perkins. federal government started playing with a radical idea: serving free breakfast in schools.
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