Science, taste, and the development of school meals in World War Two Britain

Historians of the British school meals service (SMS) have spent much time probing the politicisation of the nutritional sciences at the Board of Education (BoE). They point to the selective uptake of experimental knowledge on vitamins and malnutrition by the BoE as evidence of institutional inertia, which in turn limited the effectiveness of the SMS in the fight against childhood hunger. This paper instead centres an underexplored scientific tool – that of taste – and the role it played in the development of school meals at both the BoE and beyond. It poses questions such as: how were the tastes of children both accommodated and marginalised by nutritional experts invested in the expansion of the SMS? What different kinds of methodologies were in place to explore the sensory preferences and needs of children during a much larger nationwide experiment in communal eating? By answering these and other questions, this paper proposes the need for multi-sensory histories of childhood feeding that recognise the complex iterations of children’s agency within different geographies of food and feeding.