Feds Flunk School Meals 101

Feds Flunk School Meals 101

Michael F. Jacobson, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Centre for Science in the Public Interest

It’s an embarrassment. Canada is one of the few countries, rich or poor, without a national, publicly subsidized school meal program. The federal government is perennially playing hooky when it comes time to cough up cash to fund school meals.
Instead, provincial governments and the private sector have stepped in to feed our children. But together, their annual funding per child (ages 5 – 14) ranges from a low of $0.14 in booming Alberta to about $29 in British Columbia, according to the non-profit organization Breakfast for Learning (BFL) and Statistics Canada.

Even BC’s contribution is miserly compared to the US federal government’s annual subsidy of the equivalent of some $275 Cdn per child. The US school lunch and breakfast programs are far from perfect (they serve too much white flour and sodium, for starters). But at least the government picks up a hefty part of the cheque. Even Brazil’s struggling economy manages to feed every one of its 37 million students every day.

In comparison, Canada is downright stingy. For every dollar spent by governments and raised by BFL for school meals, for example, grown-ups spend $274 on beer. Publicly funded meals could ensure that students get healthy foods—like low-fat milk and fresh fruits and vegetables—and could help counter the barrage of ads that convince our kids that the best lunch is a burger, fries and a pop.
To make matters worse, as governments across the country tightened the screws on education budgets in recent years, some school officials picked up the slack by selling sugary soft drinks, chips and chocolate bars in school vending machines. Some school fundraisers even enlisted students as a miniature sales force to hawk chocolate confections to pay for school trips, library books, and even sports equipment.

Health Canada should help establish national model nutrition standards for school meals, vending machines and fundraising activities. In the classroom, we don’t allow comic books to compete with Shakespeare. Yet in our school cafeterias and hallways, milkshakes and cookies rake in the dollars and undermine our kids’ health.

BFL’s tens of thousands of volunteers should be doing what they love to do: serving kids meals and even teaching them how to cook and grow vegetables. Instead, they are constantly beating the bushes for corporate sponsors and scrounging up (often less-than-healthy) foods just to fill empty tummies.

Federal and provincial governments should step up to the plate. Feeding children well is a recipe for improving academic performance, attendance, socialization, and behaviour. Last year, Unicef noted that the Canadian Parliament’s now famous 16-year-old all-party pledge to end child poverty amounted to nothing.

Launching a nutritionally sound school meal program could help get the feds out of detention.

First printed in the December 2006 issue of Nutrition Action Healthletter by The Centre for Science in the Public Interest. www.cspinet.org/canada

CSPI is a non-profit health advocacy organization specializing in nutrition and food safety issues with offices in Ottawa and Washington, D.C. CSPI’s Ottawa health advocacy office is primarily funded by more than 100,000 subscribers to the Canadian edition of Nutrition Action Healthletter. CSPI does not accept funding from industry or government and Nutrition Action does not carry advertisements.

To join the ActionAlert list, visit: http://www.cspinet.org/canada/e_activists.html