In Philadelphia several inquiries were made, with the result that of 4589 children 189 were reported as going generally or often without breakfast of any kind, while 2504 began the day on coffee or tea and bread, a total of 58.52 per cent.[[52]] In Cleveland, Boston, and Los Angeles, among many other cities, teachers and others declare that the evil is quite as extensive.
Massing the figures given from New York, Philadelphia, Buffalo, and Chicago, we get a total of 40,746 children examined, of which number 14,121, or 34.65 per cent, either went breakfastless to school or got miserably poor breakfasts of bread and tea or coffee. At least bread and tea must prove to be a poor diet, wholly insufficient to meet the demands of a growing human body, and the difficulty of obtaining good, wholesome bread in our cities intensifies the evil. The wholesale adulteration of food is indeed a most serious menace to life and health to which the poor are constantly subjected.
These figures are not put forward as being in any sense a statistical measure of the problem. The investigations described, and others of a like nature, afford no adequate basis for scientific estimates. They are all confined to the one morning meal, and the standard adopted for judging of the adequateness of the meals given to the children is necessarily crude and lacking in scientific precision. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that it is not a question of whether so many children go without breakfast occasionally, but whether they are underfed, either through missing meals more or less frequently or through feeding day by day and week by week upon food that is poor in quality, unsuitable, and of small nutritive value, and whether in consequence the children suffer physically or mentally, or both. Only a comprehensive examination by experts of a large number of children in different parts of the country, a careful inquiry into their diet and their physical and mental development, would afford a satisfactory basis for any statistical measure of the problem which could be accepted as even approximately correct. Yet such inquiries as those described cannot be ignored; in the absence of more comprehensive and scientific investigations they are of great value, on account of the mass of observed facts which they give; and the results certainly tend to show that the estimate that fully 2,000,000 children of school age in the United States are badly underfed is not exaggerated.
VII
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 School Children | Breakfast | Lunch | Supper |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | Bread and tea only. | None. | Bread and tea. |
| 2 | 1 | None. | Soup from charity. | Coffee and bread. |
| 3 | 1 | Coffee and rolls (no butter or jam). | Coffee and bread. | Tea and bread. |
| 4 | 3 | Bread and tea only. | None. | Bread and tea only. |
| 5 | 2 | None. | Soup with the soup-meat. | Piece of bread. |
| 6 | 1 | Bread and jam with coffee. | None. | Tea and bread with jam. |