Professor Raps School Committee For Refusing U.S. Lunch Subsidy

Jean Mayer, associate professor of Nutrition in the Graduate School of Public Health, blasted the Boston School Committee Wednesday night for their persistent refusal to establish a government-subsidized school lunch program.

In a one hour radio interview Meyer shocked his audience by pointing out that only 30 of Boston's 197 schools have any state supported nutritional programs.

Boson is the only city in the country which has failed to take advantage of the Federal Government's hot lunch program. The School Committee has discouraged moves to improve the situation for more than a decade, Mayer claimed.

He pointed out that an operational nutritional program was "easy to arrange financially" and insisted that the city of Boston loses over one million dollars a year in potential Federal aid.

Key members of the Boston School Committee have resisted the proposed plan because they see such a move as an encroachment of the federal government into the local level. Others, according to Mayer, object on moral grounds. "Their attitudes are reminiscent of the English landlords during the Irish famine of 1847. They think feeding undernourished children would be bad for their moral fibre."

Providing free lunches is no disgrace and should not be thought of as "sending children to the poorhouse," Mayer said.

Boston is also the only major city that has refused to take advantage of President Kennedy's Emergency Food Distribution Program. Under this plan needy persons receive assistance from the Government with only a token payment. With the refusal of local authorities to cooperate with either program "kids get it in the neck twice," Mayer said. But Mayer claimed that both programs could be set up effectively within a few months. "I see no reason," he said, "why Boston school-children couldn't have some kind of lunch program by September."

Professor Mayer will testify before the Boston Finance Commission on July 14 to present specific proposals.