“It Happens Every Noon” functioned as both promotion and a step-by-step guidebook for the National School Lunch Program, encouraging its audience to start a lunch program at their school. The film shows multiple school contexts: a suburban, mostly-white school where nutritious meals help students grow up to be doctors, lawyers, and “tomorrow’s spacemen”; a mostly-Black “city school” with a kitchen delivering bagged lunches; and a remote, country school where teachers distribute the “only meal [students] will receive all day.” Rather than pointing to systemic barriers to participation or flaws in the program’s structure, the film presents lack of participation as a result of the failures of local school communities.