The Surprising Lack of Lunch

Abstract

Unlike its Nordic peers, Norway has never created a national school meals program. This paper explores the non-emergence of this policy using insights from historical institutionalism and the literature on gender ideology to consider how ideas and institutions interact in the creation of policy. The paper argues that both the ideational factor of gender ideology that saw women as caregivers and not earners, and the institutional factor of an agricultural policy that did not produce surpluses, interacted in such a way as to remove school lunches from the policy agenda in the 1930s and 1940s.