Primary benefits of providing meals at school should be social, not nutritional
Ahighlight of my day is sitting down with my wife, and anyone else who happens to be at our place, to have our evening dinner at the table. It’s a time to eat, talk about the day, and plan the agenda for tomorrow. For dessert we do the 10-minute quiz from The Standard.
I cook dinner a couple of nights per week, my wife more, then on a couple of nights it’s leftovers.
When it’s my turn I generally make an effort to produce a healthy and attractive meal. But when my wife goes away, and I’m on my own, I’ll just have something basic like eggs on toast.
Nothing fancy and not attractive, and not as enjoyable because there’s no-one there to share the meal with.
You see, eating is not just about getting some nutrients into your body. If it were as simple as that we’d be all just drinking vegetable juice and protein shakes. Nor would we bother meeting friends for a special night out at a restaurant. Or go for a picnic.
Eating is one of the pleasures of life and it’s much more enjoyable when you do it with someone else. This is all because the social context of having a meal is as important as the food itself.
Which brings me to the peppery subject of school lunches.
The new government is winding back some aspects of the previous government’s initiative to provide lunch for schoolchildren.
Schools in lower socio-demographic areas are able to get government money so they can supply free lunches to their students. The rationale being that a hungry kid doesn’t learn as well.
But it’s been expensive and anecdotally results in large amounts of food waste.
I’ve not seen specific research investigating whether learning outcomes are improved by specifically providing lunch, but it sounds somewhat sensible to me. Personally, when my stomach is really rumbling all I think about is food, not calculus.
However, NZ research does show that the lower the socio-demographic of the school, the more likely the attendees at the school are to be overweight or obese.
In fact, the NZ Health Survey (2015) revealed: “After adjusting for age, sex and ethnic differences, children living in the most deprived areas are four times as likely to be morbidly obese as those living in the least deprived areas.”
Body fat only accrues when energy intake from the diet exceeds energy expenditure. Research also shows that kids from lower socio-demographic areas on average do less physical activity, but that does not explain all the increased obesity.
It means that kids in lower sociodemographic areas are ingesting more energy in food than they need.
The idea, therefore, that we need to provide lunch to all the kids at low sociodemographic schools because they don’t have access to food elsewhere simply does not hold water.
It might be they don’t have access to food which is replete with all the essential nutrients, but they certainly have access to enough food.
For any data set though, there are always outliers, who in this case are the very few who don’t get enough energy from the food their home caregivers provide.
It’s not ethical to just provide lunch to a couple of those kids in a school because they’ll stand out, so you enable anyone who wants it to have it. I fully get that. But feeding a school of kids rather than just the few needy costs a lot of money and creates a lot of waste.
That money might be better targeting the families of those few or on improving educational outcomes at the whole school level.
Before all the university-trained nutritionists contact me on Linked-In telling me I’m wrong, I’d like to posit this. The primary benefits of providing meals at schools are not and should not be nutritional, they should be primarily social. In other words, go ahead, provide a meal – ideally breakfast – but linked in with teaching them how to sit down and have a meal in a safe and enjoyable social setting. Teach them to converse over ‘’bix’’, milk, and an apple in preparation for the day ahead. Show them what a cheap, yummy, and healthy diet can look like.
Then, if a child didn’t have lunch they could take an extra bit of fruit or pot of yoghurt to keep their belly full until 3pm.
The taxpayer would save millions because some ‘’bix’’ manufacturer would be falling over themselves to hook the kids on their brand. And our biggest company would surely provide their nutritious white liquid at a subsidised rate. If our allegedly business-friendly government can’t organise that they are in the wrong job.
Despite what some academics will tell you, good nutrition is not rocket-science and should not be obstructively costly. Acceptable social behaviour is a much harder thing to embed.
Steve Stannard is a small-business owner in Palmerston North and former professor of exercise physiology at Massey University. He writes a regular column for Manawatū Standard, and holds degrees in agricultural science and human nutrition.