School Food Programs Help Kids Succeed in Class—and Life
For decades, Canada has been one of the few wealthy countries without a national school food program. Instead, we have a patchwork of offerings all over the country. Many of these programs, which might offer free breakfast, snacks or lunch, are forced to rely on piecemeal funding, volunteers and NGO staff. That’s set to change. This past April, the government of Canada dedicated $1 billion over five years to create the National School Food Program, which will offer meals to hundreds of thousands of kids annually starting this year.
Poor diet is not just a problem for low-income families. Canadian kids across the socioeconomic spectrum are eating badly—not enough fruits and vegetables, and too many processed foods like granola bars and candy. Those items are easy to put in a lunch, don’t need to be heated up and can be consumed on the go. I have a Ph.D. in nutrition, but even my kids don’t eat well during the school day.
Offering kids easy access to nutritious food at school, where they spend most of their waking hours, is a great way to improve their diets and reduce health inequities. Students who use these programs do better academically and miss less school. For example, in one study of a morning meal program in the Toronto District School Board, students who ate a morning meal most days in a school week did better in areas like independent academic work, class participation and problem-solving.
Most provinces, territories and First Nations governments will soon sign on to the federal government’s plan. We’ll see new programs, as well as growth in existing ones. In Ontario, many schools already have breakfast or snack programs, but they’re run by volunteers who may not have time to prepare anything. With more funding, programs will be able to hire staff to prepare food like muffins or other baked goods containing fruit and whole grains. Eventually, they’ll offer lunches. That’s when we’ll really see an increase in the nutritional quality of what kids eat at school. In Saskatoon, where I live, we have a universal lunch pilot project. Each meal costs the program about $4.50, an amount that covers a living wage for staff, a nutritious meal with vegetables and fruit, and a vegetarian or halal alternative every day.
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Right now, school food programs are often reserved for needy kids. Some students who could benefit from school food programs may not participate because they don’t want to be seen as poor. There’s an embarrassment factor. But the evidence from the U.S. tells us that when all kids are invited to participate, the shame associated with the program vanishes. I expect we will gradually see universal programs like that roll out.
The federal government has established a fund to help with infrastructure and equipment. That’ll help us address one of our biggest challenges: in Canada, unlike in the United States, many schools do not have cafeterias. So as school food programs expand, we’ll need to get creative with food preparation. Some new schools may be able to add commercial kitchens and prepare food for several schools in their area.
Free meals won’t pull families out of poverty—they can only take some pressure off. But families with two children could save at least $150 to $200 a month on their grocery bills, depending on the kind of school food program their child uses. The World Food Programme finds return on investment to be between $3 and $10 for every dollar invested in school food. In Sweden, kids who participated in that country’s robust universal school food program went on to have lifetime earnings three to five per cent higher than those who didn’t. And one preliminary University of Guelph study indicates that, here in Canada, a national school food program could add up to 207,700 new jobs and contribute $4.8 billion to the economy by 2029.
School food programs are also the perfect place to invest in health. What children eat shapes what they’ll eat in adulthood. Ample evidence shows that adequate childhood nutrition lowers rates of various chronic diseases, like stroke, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes, in adulthood. In countries that invest in children’s nutrition, adult populations are healthier.
Even under a national policy, school food programs will continue to vary; different places have different needs.The federal government could host a meeting of international experts to help us learn from the best school food programs around the world. If we’re going to put the money in, we need to make sure that the programs are the best they can be.
Rachel Engler-Stringer is a professor of community health and epidemiology at the University of Saskatchewan.
