In a 2015 documentary, the film-maker Michael Moore cheekily suggested the US invade France because its school lunches are amazing.
School food culture in France is indeed enviable. Menus sometimes include beets with vinaigrette as the seasonal salad of the day, organic beef lasagne for the main course, followed by organic camembert for the cheese course and a pear for dessert.
The school community values meals and those who prepare them as contributing to students’ education. Meals are typically made from scratch using fresh ingredients. And joy is central to the experience of eating together. That said, the French system isn’t a perfect model: France doesn’t have a national school lunch program and parents are billed directly for the cost of meals.
In the near-decade since Moore’s film, there have been a lot of improvements in what the typical US student might encounter in the cafeteria. Thanks in large part to school food fights at local, state and national levels, more students have access to free school meals than ever before, schools across the country are cooking more recipes from scratch and local farmers are supplying more of the food that students eat. However, these changes remain precarious or subject to political and economic priorities. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
In our new book, Transforming School Food Politics Around the World, we discuss how to successfully challenge and transform public school food programs to emphasize care, justice and sustainability, with insights from eight countries in the global north and south. Ultimately, we argue for the importance of school food as a public good.
What the book’s contributors taught us is that rather than invade enviable school cafeterias, we should learn from them and collectively seek to apply four lessons in the US school food system.
Lesson one: school meals should be free for all students
The national Healthy School Meals for All movement took shape during the Covid-19 pandemic after the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which administers the National School Lunch Program, issued waivers that allowed schools to serve meals free of charge for all K-12 students – no more determining students’ eligibility based on their household income. Despite the popularity of this temporary program, Congress voted to end the USDA waivers in June 2022 and return to the old model.
Only eight states, including California and Vermont, provide free school meals for all K-12 students. But these state-level wins bring the US one step closer to government programs in every other region of the world that provide full funding for universal free school meal programs at the national level.
School lunch has been free for all students in Finland since the beginning of its national program in 1948. In Brazil, children’s right to food is protected in the constitution and a 2009 amendment made meals free for all students. Likewise, in 2011, South Korea changed its existing program, which began in 1953, to provide universal free school lunch to all students instead of continuing to subsidize free meals only for students from poor households (as the US continues to do).
Covering all or most of the cost of universal free school meals is smart policy: universal free school meals have a positive effect on students’ behavior and attendance, mental health, nutrition and food security, all of which improve their academic achievement.
But it’s not enough to simply provide students with free meals. Treating school meals as a public good means fighting for systems of food preparation, sourcing and education that make meals more enjoyable, healthful, environmentally sustainable and beneficial for local food and farm economies.
Lesson two: food should be cooked (not just reheated) in school kitchens
Here in the US, the prevalence of ultra-processed foods in schools is a perennial topic of school food politics. In April, the advocacy division of Consumer Reports asked the USDA to remove Lunchables from school lunch menus after their analysis revealed concerning levels of heavy metals, salt and food additives in the meal kits.
Meanwhile, some schools across the country are voluntarily screening the foods they purchase to ensure they do not contain ingredients of concern like artificial colors, preservatives and sweeteners. And in California, advocates have introduced state legislation to ban some synthetic food dyes found in school meals.
All of these advocacy efforts point to a common concern: US schools have long been tied to big food companies and the processed foods they craft to meet the USDA’s school nutrition standards. But rather than following the US model of dishing out pre-made “kid foods” like frozen chicken nuggets, countries as diverse as Brazil, Finland, India, Japan and South Korea have all prioritized scratch cooking within their national school lunch programs. Even students attending urban schools in megacities like São Paulo, Mumbai, Tokyo and Seoul are served healthy, locally prepared meals that reflect their cultures.
We can see from global examples that the logistical challenges of cooking from scratch can be overcome. Meals are typically cooked onsite in school kitchens or prepared in a large central kitchen and distributed in insulated containers right before lunchtime. And we know from research conducted in the US that scratch-cooked school meals have a host of benefits related to students’ health and academic achievement, local agriculture and the environment. We need to hold our schools and the federal government accountable for making scratch cooking the norm.
Lesson three: local and sustainable purchasing should be mandatory and strongly supported by the federal government
Since the pandemic, the USDA has ramped up financial support for local and regional food systems at the national level, including providing schools with local food-purchasing assistance funds and granting $4.8m to foster partnerships for local agriculture and nutrition transformation in schools. Then, in April, the USDA issued new school meal standards that will encourage schools to purchase more local foods.
These are promising changes. Buying local – let alone organic – food is not a requirement for schools participating in US school meal programs. Only a small fraction of the multibillion-dollar school meal budget goes to build shorter, more equitable and environmentally sustainable supply chains. This is a missed opportunity.
In Brazil, for example, schools have been required since 2009 to spend at least 30% of their budget on ingredients sourced from small-scale or family farms that use organic or agro-ecological production methods. The city of São Paulo has set an even more ambitious goal: by 2026, the municipal government aims to source all school food ingredients from such producers and serve 100% organic school lunches by 2030. This is the direct result of federal law and increased investment: in March, the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, increased federal funding for school meals by about 35%.
The Seoul metropolitan government in South Korea has moved toward this type of transformation, after several decades of activism in support of food sovereignty and against the privatization of school meals. With the enactment of South Korea’s universal free and eco-friendly school lunch policy in 2011, Seoul needed new infrastructure for sourcing and distributing ingredients that met the newly established “eco-friendly” criteria. The Seoul metropolitan government built Orbon, a publicly funded distribution hub for eco-friendly food, which supplied ingredients to 75% of the city’s schools in 2021.
Simply put, what ends up on students’ plates is the direct result of food politics and government priorities. In the fight to fix America’s broken food system, schools can meet ambitious procurement goals when legally required to do so and given strong financial support.
Lesson four: mealtimes should be joyful, care-centered educational experiences
School mealtimes in the US are too often treated as a necessary evil, crammed in between more “important” learning times and spaces. In some schools, the pressure to maximize instructional time is so intense that students are subjected to 15-minute silent lunch periods. Earlier in the Guardian’s School food fights series, April McGreger, a parent of a child who attended such a school, argued: “A school’s success should be measured not just by academic offerings and test scores, but how well it nurtures citizens of the world.”
Lunchtimes in Finland and Japan – two countries with world-renowned public education systems – are convivial. Students are given the time to prioritize themselves, care for others and care for the environment through the daily experience of eating and learning together. In both countries, food is treated as an important academic subject and a community-building experience with students, parents and community members involved in decision-making, for example, about menus.
In the Japanese school lunch system, for example, children learn communal care by serving and cleaning up after lunchtime. This “chore” helps them value the labor of the many workers who feed and educate them. Students compost their food scraps, break down their milk cartons for recycling and generally strive to minimize waste.
These activities were codified into law in 2009 when Japan’s national school lunch act was revised to include new objectives that specified school lunch should “enliven school life and encourage an active, social and considerate spirit” and “further appreciation of the gifts of nature that support us, foster respect of life and nature and encourage a spirit of environmental conservation”.
This is, perhaps, one of the most important lessons of our book: school mealtimes are not a “distraction” in the middle of the school day, but an invaluable opportunity to educate young people about how to live healthy lives and contribute to the common good.
Providing exceptional school meals for millions of US children won’t come without a collective struggle, and our analysis of school food politics around the world reminds us to raise the bar in what we’re fighting for.
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Jennifer Gaddis is an associate professor in civil society and community studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Sarah A Robert is an associate professor in the graduate school of education at the University at Buffalo.