The Food They Served: Hawaii-Based American Food
The civic achievement of school lunch may not have been a conscious adminis- trative decision to serve American food (or its interpretation). Rather, cooking and serving American food in large quantities was part of the training of cafe- teria workers and heads, as well as an expectation of the public. Moreover, even as I interpret school lunch during this time period as a form of “tasting Amer- ica,” I recognize the polyglot, sometimes haphazard, nature of what was actually served. Thus, this is not strictly a top-down, governmentally designed plate but one shaped by available ingredients (including an assortment of U.S. Depart- ment of Agriculture surpluses), federal nutritional requirements, cafeteria ladies’ interpretation of local menus and tastes, and the children’s ephemeral palate. In his discussion of national culture and food in Belize, Richard Wilks provides a useful table entitled “Polarities of Food Culture.”14 He contrasts two interactive, interdependent polarities of Lived Practice and Public Performance as cooking versus cuisine, meals at home versus public banquet, working class versus elite class, and local versus cosmopolitan. The case of school lunch in postwar Hawai‘i may be positioned between these two, existing as everyday food (cooking, not cuisine), eaten publicly in institutionalized settings (school cafeteria), and serv- ing primarily non-elite working-class foods but with aspirational connotations (assimilation to a local version of American national culture). Wilks makes the point that national cuisine typically emerges through a dynamic interaction between polarities like these. So, too, a Hawai‘i version of American national cuisine emerged through such an interaction.
An examination of school lunch menus from that period reveals the pre- dominance of Western food and the relative scarcity of Asian-based dishes.15 Even though there may not have been Asian dishes, there typically was rice— that is, white, short grain, Japanese-style steamed rice16—served with a vari- ety of foods. As was common during that period, there was less emphasis on fresh foods and more emphasis on industrial food, from canned fruit cocktail to pudding mixes. And there always was white whole milk, even if a signifi- cant portion of the population may not have been able to digest this properly because of lactose intolerance.17 Just as the cafeteria trays had convenient com- partments for each of the dishes, so, too, the menus reflected such divisions so that each meal comprised a protein, a starch, a vegetable, a fruit, and milk.
What is relatively absent from the school lunch menus in Hawai‘i is what might be considered a staple of lunches elsewhere in the United States: sand- wiches. I argue that at this time, lunch planners—whether dietitians, cafeteria ladies, or managers—held a particular notion of the food that constituted a
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meal and would satisfy eaters. The emphasis in Hawai‘i rests on rice (short grain, steamed, Japanese style) and its constitutive role in the idea and place of a “hot meal.” According to food historian Rachel Laudan, in the state of Hawai‘i, the amount of rice consumed every year averages sixty pounds per person (including children), in contrast to the average of nine pounds a year for persons in the continental United States. Clearly, rice makes the meal. The taxonomic contrasts between a sandwich (cold, dry, light, old) and a hot meal (warm, moist, filling, fresh) suggest the relative lack of appeal of the former and the great, even emotional, appeal of the latter. I base this not so much on surveys and hard data but on informal conversations over the years with par- ents and children in Hawai‘i. According to them, one of the best things about the school lunch was that it was a hot, filling, and thus satisfying meal.
People remember the cafeteria experience and food well. On August 4, 1996, the Honolulu Advertiser, then the largest newspaper in the state, ran a long fea- ture based on responses of readers to the question of “You Know You’re Local If. . . .” At least half the entries concerned food, many of which can be traced in some form to school lunch, from the dishes they ate to the cafeteria ladies who served them. Most notably, readers expressed their preference for eating rice (short grain, Japanese style) with everything, including Western starches—rice with spaghetti, rice with macaroni or potato salads, rice with tuna casserole. Although this kind of rice-based meal can be found throughout Hawai‘i, the school lunch experience and the rice that goes with it became emblazoned as identifiers of being local. Accordingly, what was served at schools subtly helped develop the style and taste known today as “local food.”
Throughout her tenure as the Honolulu Advertiser’s food editor, Wanda Adams’s “Food for Thought” column was besieged with pleas for school lunch recipes. Some requests were easy to satisfy: Spanish rice (by far the recipe most often sought), shortbread cookies, beef niblets (a corn-and-beef brown stew), peanut butter crisscross cookies, sweet-sour spare ribs or sweet-sour pork (see the appendix to this chapter). Others—baked lemon chicken from Ka’ahumanu Elementary, date bars with crumbly topping from Kamiloiki School, malted-top brownies from Likelike School, crispy morning toast from Ka’iulani Elementary, peanut butter bread (coffee cake) from Kapalama Ele- mentary—were never located. Researching the files of the School Food Ser- vices office in Kaimuki in the early 2000s, Adams quickly learned that these recipes were likely to remain lost unless they happened to be handed down within the cafeteria managers’ families.
Before schools began to share their central kitchens in the 1970s, there was only a sketchy central repository for recipes. Adams was told by Food Services
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personnel that cafeterias were operated independently, recipes were created by cafeteria workers from whatever ingredients were available, and many were never recorded or the records were destroyed or lost. Furthermore, many of the recipes would be impossible to replicate exactly even if they existed, as the cafeterias used surplus foods provided by the U.S. government and some of these were quite odd. The cheese, butter, and nut butters one might expect, but maybe not the dehydrated wheat flakes or rolled wheat, powdered milk and eggs, and canned stewed beef chunks. And even common foods might be altered in texture and flavor: chicken, fruit, potatoes, and sweet potatoes arrived flavored and canned. “Horrible stuff!” recalled one former cafeteria manager.
Those public and private school food service programs that received the ingredients were nonetheless required to use them, so cafeteria recipe design- ers had to be very creative. “People didn’t know what we put in there: bulgur wheat in crusts, almond butter in the spaghetti sauce, peanut butter in meat- loaf,” said Teri Jean Kam-Ogawa, a former cafeteria lady and now a child nutri- tion specialist with the School Food Services program. One well-known caf- eteria lady, the late Chieko Okamoto, whose recipes are in the Food Services files, even made a cake with split peas. Kam-Ogawa said that one reason that popular crisps and cobblers were served so often was that the cafeterias were rarely given, and rarely could afford, fresh fruit. Cobblers, crisps, betties, and crunches were readily made in bulk and used up sweetened canned fruit, oat- meal, flour, and butter from the surplus stores, as well as leftover bread and rolls. Similarly, files of the American School Food Service Association’s School Lunch Journal show ingredients like sauerkraut hidden in chocolate cake, pow- dered milk as the basis of butterscotch blanc mange (a cornstarch pudding), cottage cheese in yeast rolls, and dehydrated sweet potato flakes in cookies.
Tasting this version of America thus relied heavily on the cafeteria ladies’ ingenuity and general cooking expertise, masking surplus ingredients, try- ing different recipes, and shouldering the responsibility of creating a hot meal every day for hundreds of children with as little monotony as possible. This was explicitly not home cooking. But it was comfort food that made school into a homey place through the lunch break in the middle of the day.
Cafeteria Ladies as the Domesticating Presence
A significant part of remembering school lunch in the 1996 Honolulu Adver- tiser article and through talking with people rests on what I call the domesti- cating presence of the cafeteria ladies. One “local” writes: “You know you’re
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local if . . . you remember the names of the ‘cafeteria ladies’ at your school.”18 In Wanda Adams’s food column, requests for recipes were “local,” as demon- strated by reader Arlene Almaida Santiago, who reeled off the names of the caf- eteria ladies at her school, Kalihiwaena Elementary: “Mrs. Sato, Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Santos, Mrs. Shishido.” Clearly, cafeteria ladies made an impression on the children who stood in line for their food, an impression that was gendered and, to an extent, racialized.
Although the school lunch program, like much of the rest of prestatehood and early statehood culture, was dominated by haoles (whites), almost all its workers (cooks and, later, cafeteria managers) were of Asian ancestry (Japa- nese, Okinawan, Korean, Chinese, Filipino) and almost all were women (thus the term “cafeteria ladies”). Some people of Portuguese and Hawaiian ancestry also worked in school kitchens, whose racial mix became the image of the caf- eterias. Notably, the racial mix of the kitchens was not reflected in the food, but it did offer an important civics lesson: even if one were of Japanese ancestry, one could (and should) cook and eat not necessarily the food of one’s ancestors but the food of citizenship—that is, American.
Kilihune Matsui, whose Chinese American mother studied to be a cafeteria manager, recalled that on some days, cafeteria managers were allowed to take home leftovers. Her family was thrilled to get something other than “the same old Chinese food.” “My mother learned how to ‘do haole’ and would make her own cream puff pastry shells and bake her own angel food cakes,” Matsui said. The family learned to eat dishes that Matsui’s girlfriends would not touch, such as creamed tuna or salmon loaf. Matsui’s mother, like others who attended the cafeteria manager–training programs of the time, was taught by haole home economists, many from the continental United States. Thus the cafeteria ladies brought their training in Western/American dishes to their places of work as well as their homes. In parallel with an earlier generation of Japanese (Ameri- can) maids to haole families who learned American housekeeping and cook- ing and brought these home to their own families, these cafeteria ladies them- selves became agents of assimilation.
Matsui’s mother’s story underscores the importance of home economics as an educational path that led the cafeteria ladies to their eventual careers. The course of study known as home economics was the product of an 1899 confer- ence in Lake Placid, New York, where women activists developed a curriculum whose goal was twofold: to achieve respect for and create careers in what was then defamed as “women’s work”—cooking, cleaning, and household man- agement—and to help disadvantaged families fight malnutrition and the ills associated with “uncleanliness.” The movement took on momentum, became
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a common course of study from grade school to college, and was a socially acceptable career choice for women, like that of teaching and nursing.
In the first half of the twentieth century, homey versions of the five “mother sauces” of classic French cooking dominated home economics cooking cur- ricula: béchamel (“white sauce”), espagnole (“brown Spanish sauce”), hollan- daise (“mayonnaise”), velouté (“light stock sauce”), and vinaigrette (“French dressing”). These sauces became the basis for much of the cooking by career home economists. Another influence of home economics that changed immi- grant and first-generation palates was a focus on heavy proteins—beef, pork, chicken—in larger portions than is usual in Asia and on dairy foods, particu- larly milk. This was because rickets and other nutrition-related diseases were common in some areas, so the concern was getting enough nutritious food to eat. In Hawai‘i, these recipes and Western-style approaches were taught to budding cafeteria managers who may never have experienced anything like them in their Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hawaiian, Filipino, or even Portu- guese homes.