College Dining in Colonial Time, Comparable to Today?

College Dining in Colonial Times, Intro to Public School Lunch 

From Boiled Beef and old oniony bread to oysters in the dorm room, thank God for progress, or should we? 

At Princeton back in 1773, the college steward Mr. Baldwin, had an effigy of butter made of him and hung by the neck in the dining room.    Meal times started out in the basement, graduating to a separate building.  By 1817 the fare had become acceptable in both quantity and quality although average and plain.  When the steward neglected his work to shave a few bucks of the cost, letters of complaints went home to their parents in large numbers. 

     ---Nassau Hall 1756-1956, Henry Lyttelton Savage [Princeton University:Princeton NJ] 1956 (p. 118-122) 

Go Figure! 

American public school lunch, 1894 "The first major program had started in some Boston high schools in 1894, in large part due to Ellen Richards and Edward Atkinson. The New England Kitchen ran the program as a 'private enterprise' that paid for itself many times over. Although the lunches never became effective instruments for teaching the New Nutrition the founders had envisaged, by the early twentieth century they were praised for providing nutritionally sound meals and low prices to children who would not normally have them, and this became the main justification for similar lunch programs in other cities." 

 ---Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet, Harvey Levenstein [Oxford University Press:New York] 1988 (p. 116)     

Fast-forward 2012   Almost bankrupt municipalities, freedom of choice gone by the wayside with bans on soda, snacks, and baked goods.  I ask again, isn’t progress great?   

Chef David W Baker 

God Bless the USA!