Who could possibly question the government’s recently introduced free hot meals programme for schools?
Speaking recently about the expansion of the programme, Minister for Education Helen McEntee commented: ‘More children having hot meals will help with school attendance, help with educational outcomes for students, and above all ensure that children can learn, play and make friends without concerns about hunger.’
Of course, what jumps out from that ministerial puff piece is the suggestion that without a taxpayer-funded hot school meals programme, hunger would stalk the classrooms of Ireland. The good news, as everyone already knows, is that most children in Irish schools don’t go hungry for the simple reason that their parents are more than happy to provide them with a packed lunch.
And yes, there is a small cohort of children whose parents, for whatever reason, aren’t in a position to do that. The real question, therefore, is whether a universal meal programme for all children is the right solution for a problem affecting perhaps less than 10% of children in schools.
That question answers itself when you see photos of smiling politicians pictured with school children about to tuck into one of those same free hot school meals. The subliminal message here might well be that even eight year old children are not too young to be the objects of a political giveaway aimed at enhancing the popularity of the politicians doling out the free hot food.
But this isn’t just about money although with an estimated price tag of nearly €300m a year when the scheme is fully rolled out the cost is not insignificant. Given the state’s lamentable track record on spending controls there is little to suggest that the Hot School Meals programme will stay within the hefty one third of a billion annual budget projected by its political masters.
Let’s examine the nuts and bolts of the scheme in more detail. With a budget of €3.20 per meal, the scheme has sparked a mini boom in the industrial catering sector with numerous companies competing for school contracts. Bear in mind that we’re talking here about a programme providing a hot meal to more than half a million pupils across Ireland each day.
Most of these meals are prepared off-site in industrial catering settings before being transported to schools across the country. But the food miles don’t end there as many schools insist on pupils taking home the single use packaging (and their uneaten contents) in order to save on refuse charges. Accordingly, the fantastical food journey of that same hot school meal frequently ends in the household bin of the child it was supposed to feed.
There are also concerns about the nutritional value of these meals. It will hardly surprise anyone that these meals rely heavily on ultra-processed foods as could be expected in an industrial catering environment.
While most parents will strive to use the best ingredients when feeding their own children, the same is unlikely to be the case for the catering companies operating in a competitive commercial setting. For example, it’s no secret that you’re more likely to consume chicken sourced from somewhere in Asia than its free range Irish counterpart in such a meal.
Given health and safety requirements, that same meal is also more likely to be loaded with additives and preservatives in order to facilitate its safe production and transport. Again, no blame here on the catering companies – these are just some of the compromises that come with industrial scale catering.
The awkward truth may well be that when it comes to nutritional content, quality of ingredients, food miles and food wastage, the humble home prepared school lunch probably beats its industrial catering counterpart hands down.
But there are also other factors militating against those same free school hot lunches. Dieticians will tell you that food and the culture around food is best nurtured in the home. The family dinner table is not just about the consumption of food, it is also about inculcating values around food and so much more.
So where does that leave the child arriving home having already polished off a chicken curry or spaghetti bolognese in school? With 20% of Irish children now categorised as obese, is the expectation that this child will sit down and eat another meal with the family? At the very least, the hot school meals programme is going to seriously disrupt family eating patterns.
Running parallel to all of this is the question of the ongoing cost of the scheme. Most readers will be aware that schools receive capitation funding from the state in order to run the school. Readers may not be aware that this funding is widely viewed as insufficient to cover these costs.
This gives rise to the somewhat ridiculous situation whereby schools, who are administering school meal budgets running into thousands of euro every month, are themselves often required to run cake sales in order to pay their gas and electricity bills! Not surprisingly, such fund raising events rarely feature in ministerial photo ops.
So why has the state decided to spend about €300m a year on a hot school meals programme?
Surely, it’s not because of a belief that most parents resent having to feed their own children? Either way, the Hot School Meals programme appears to be a classic example of state overreach with government addressing a problem that affects a tiny minority of pupils by introducing a universal solution which can hardly be said to improve health, nutritional or environmental outcomes.
One of the remarkable things about the introduction of the Hot School Meals programme is the lack of debate about it. Neither did Ireland’s political opposition subject it to any serious scrutiny – they seemed more peeved that they were not the ones in the press photos of what looks more like an old fashioned political giveaway aimed at school children and their parents.
According to the old maxim, there is no such thing as a free lunch. It might well be the case that for today’s school children and their parents neither is there any such thing as a free hot school lunch.