"Hot Lunches in the Cold War" lecture, Fri, 1/15, Evanston

Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern University wrote:"Hot Lunches in the Cold War: School Lunches and the Construction of a Gendered Labor Ideology in the German Democratic Republic"

Alice Weinreb, History

My paper traces the history of the school lunch program in the GDR from its origins as emergency food aid immediately after the war to becoming one of the country's most successful and widespread social policies. I analyze the specific reasons for the German socialist state's unwavering commitment to school lunches, particularly in the context of extensive popular resistance to school meals during the 1950s. Ultimately, I argue that the debate over how, where and what schoolchildren ate was at the heart of an East German project to redefine the meaning of labor in the postwar era.

Alice Weinreb, visiting assistant professor of history, received her PhD in history in 2009 from the University of Michigan with a dissertation on the politics of food and hunger in Nazi and Cold War divided Germany. Previously, she received a MA in cultural studies from Berlin’s Humboldt University. At Northwestern she is teaching courses on modern Germany, gender and socialism, and the history of food and famine. Her most recent publication is “The Socialist School Lunch: Children, Mothers, and the Meaning of Work in the GDR” in Hunger, Nutrition and Rationing under State Socialism, 1917-2006 (Middell and Wemheuer eds.), forthcoming in 2010.