When healthy food for kids is ‘woke’
Last week, ACT Party leader David Seymour tried to portray the government’s cutting of $107 million from the school lunch programme as a crusade against “wokeness”.
Allegedly, foods such as hummus and sushi are an elitist extravagance, and can be tools of cultural indoctrination.
Nice try, but treating the school lunch menu as a cultural battleground looked more like an exercise in turning back the clock.
During the past 50 years, heartland New Zealand has often been leery about any broadening of the Kiwi diet via foreign foods such as quiche, lentils, hummus and yoghurt. Similar fears and suspicion have been extended to tofu, and to avocados, kale, sushi, and quinoa. At this stage, the credentials of jackfruit and kimchi are still being examined at the border.
Point being, any broadening of the Kiwi diet beyond two lamb chops, mashed spuds and cabbage has been treated as the equivalent of tossing a hand grenade into the national kitchen.
In that respect, Seymour’s depiction of a healthy food like hummus as “extravagant” was consistent with a long and ignoble Kiwi tradition.
Thankfully, most of the high school kids that Seymour is targeting now take hummus and sushi in their stride. They appear to welcome the healthy diversity that such foods bring to their diets.
Not for much longer, however. From the start of next year, the government has chosen to downgrade the quality
of school lunches for children in year seven, and upwards.
The funding needed to deliver healthy school lunches to those older children will be slashed by nearly two thirds, from $8 to $3 a meal. The menu will
shrink, and the lower quality food envisaged will be bulk purchased, rather than locally prepared.
The annoucement was not entirely bad news. Some early childhood centres will be funded to serve free lunches.
Nominally at least, the funding for healthy (and locally prepared) meals will remain in place for primary school children up to year seven.
However, as the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) has pointed out, question-marks now hover over the primary schools that currently teach years 0-8, and also over the likes of Manurewa High School, given that its kitchen prepares the food for nearby primary and intermediate schools.
As CPAG also noted, one in five children in New Zealand live in homes where food runs out each week.
That measure of need can double – to around 40% – for children who are disabled, who belong to Māori and Pasifika families, or who live in geographically deprived areas.
CPAG’s nutrition spokesperson Emeritus Professor Elaine Rush regretted Seymour’s use of the word “extravagant” when describing the current model, given that for many children their school lunch may be the only meal they get all day.
“It is unhelpful for Seymour to describe healthy food as an extravagance, when this should be the benchmark we are striving [to achieve] for all of our children.”
Ultimately, voters will get to decide what they think of making children and teenagers bear a good deal of the burden of a government austerity drive that – reportedly – is largely being pursued in order to fund tax c uts, and to deliver tax breaks to landlords.