On the latest Last Week Tonight, John Oliver looked into the availability and quality of school lunches in US public school through the National School Lunch Program. Since 1946, the federally assisted program has provided meals to most public school students – over 90% of public schools participate in the program and last year alone, it provided 4.6bn lunches.
“I’m not here tonight to shit on school lunches, because the very fact they happen at all is remarkable,” said Oliver, noting that many school nutrition directors accurately say they are running “the biggest restaurant in town”.
“School lunch programs are such a massive undertaking, even being referred to as a ‘daily miracle’,” said Oliver. And for many children, school lunch is their most reliable source of nutrition each day. “Which is why it’s so important the program work as well as it can for as many kids as it can. Unfortunately, in too many places, that is just not the case.”
First, on the point of quality, most school districts are making do with far too small a budget. Though the federal government does subsidize lunches, their ceiling is set “way too low” – $4 per meal, to cover everything from food costs to equipment to staff salaries, leaving about just $1.25 for the food itself.
And the government only reimburses the school for meals that students take. “So you need an appealing meal that comes at rock-bottom prices,” said Oliver. “That’s a key reason why many schools just opt to heat and serve pre-made meals.”
The Obama administration expanded school lunch access and nutrition in 2010 with the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, though some students hated the new healthy lunch options, sharing photos with the caption #ThanksMichelleObama. “Which, to their credit, is funny,” said Oliver. “When the nutrition went high, the kids went low.”
The act took some retooling – for instance, it required that bread had to be “whole grain-rich”, though many families in the south-west did not accept whole grain tortillas. Another school in Mississippi was allowed to go to 80% whole grain after students rejected a whole grain biscuit. “That does feel like a good compromise,” said Oliver, “because a whole grain biscuit is not a biscuit. At that point, let’s just make ice cream sandwiches where the cookies are celery and the ice cream is children’s Motrin, because words don’t matter any more.
“The fact is, school nutrition directors have to strike a delicate balance between the perfect and the achievable,” Oliver noted. “It’s all very well for Jamie Oliver,” among other celebrity chefs, “to want schools to cook from scratch with fresh ingredients all the time, but it’s a lot harder to be idealistic when you’re slinging a thousand portions of hot lunch to kids in a hot kitchen all in 15-20 minutes. Reality is a helluva sous chef.”
All nutrition and prep issues aside, school lunches are still not reaching all the kids that need it. In order to get a free or reduced price lunch, families have to fill out eligibility paperwork, which alone could be prohibitive for language barriers or social stigma. The thresholds are also so low that they exclude some families who need it. Oliver cited the story of one Minnesota mother who made just more than the $57,000-a-year cutoff, whose son refused to eat lunch so as not to make her pay for it. “Kids clearly should not be refraining from eating for financial reasons,” he said. “They should be refusing to eat for one of the multitude of standard kid reasons, such as: the food looks weird, it’s too hot outside, it’s too cold outside or I saw a bird.”
And because many districts use “lunch shaming” tactics to reclaim debt, even kids who are eligible sometimes choose to not participate in lunch. In 2019, nearly 30 million students were eligible for free or reduced lunch, but only 22 million received them.
But Oliver did have some good news, in the policy known as universal free meals, which allows every kid at every school to have breakfast or lunch at school if they want it. “And while I know that might sound like a utopian dream, the thing is: we actually already did it for two years during the pandemic,” said Oliver. Average daily participation in lunch increased by 1.4 million kids during the pandemic waiver program, with 95% of districts reporting it reduced child hunger, and 82% reporting it supported academic achievement.
“In short, way more kids were eating every day, and it was helping them in school,” said Oliver. “The waiver program worked.” But it expired in June 2022, though eight states refused to go back, passing universal free meal programs over the opposition of Republican lawmakers.
“I’m not saying there aren’t complications here,” said Oliver. “Of course there are, and deep down you probably already knew that, after all you’re watching It’s Always Something With White Urkel. Making that many meals consistently is difficult.”
But Oliver argued that school lunch should be considered an essential school supply like books or desks, and called on the federal government to reinstate universal free meals. “We have the power to ensure that no kid in this country is hungry when school gets dismissed,” he concluded, “and we should be exercising that power.”
