I Think We Can Do Better Than School Lunch

Can we do better than school lunches?

I said in my last video that I think there's a good case against school lunch, that school lunch is not actually a very good solution to the problem because it's only two meals a day at most, you know, breakfast and lunch, and only on the days that school is in session.

And kids get hungry every single day of the year.

So I think as a society, We've got to think about how we can actually solve this problem and not just use schools as a kind of a feel-good band-aid for it.

And certainly, I'm not saying get rid of school lunch.

There's no, you know, what I'm saying is probably not going to happen anytime soon.

So I do think we should keep school lunch as it is.

But I think we should also push for something better as a society.

You know, students are...

only getting at most 32% of their meals at school.

And if we say, well, this might be the only hot meal they have, well, what about all those other meals that they actually need?

I think this is a problem as a society that we have to not sweep under the rug and kind of put all of that on schools to say, oh, well, they get food at school, so I guess that's good enough.

Well, it's really not good enough.

And I think if we look at the programs that are out there, it's not hard to imagine expanding those programs or modifying them in some way to meet more of those needs.

For example, we already have food stamps.

We already have WIC.

So there could be grocery store based solutions.

You know, most kids take their lunch if they have the choice, right?

Like probably most of the people watching this video pack lunch for their kids and their kids would rather have it that way.

Like if you make your kids eat school lunch, they're going to be kind of mad at you in most cases.

So I think people would actually prefer this.

It would cost less money.

We could feed kids more of the meals that they need.

So grocery store-based solutions are one.

You can also look at programs like Meals on Wheels, which serves seniors.

I mean, that program could be expanded so that if kids are hungry at home, maybe they have a way that they could kind of, no questions asked, get food delivered to them, which would, you know, not like Domino's, but, you know, groceries that they could prepare at home.

And people said, well, it could...

Could, you know, students actually prepare food at home?

Like, yeah, kids who are food insecure absolutely can prepare food.

And it doesn't have to be complicated.

It could be ramen.

It could be mac and cheese.

It could be stuff, you know, that's fairly easy to eat.

And I just think we have to keep imagining as a society what kind of world we want to create and how we can actually produce outcomes that not only look good, but that feel good, right?

Like when we feed a child at school, we feel good.

And again, I think we should keep doing that.

But it's easy to let that...

feel-good visibility of feeding a child at school make us overlook the fact that there are kids hungry at home every single day.

And for the amount of money that we're spending on school lunch programs, I'm saying like, couldn't we do something better as a society to feed kids every single day?

Now, would it cost more realistically?

Yeah, I think it would cost more than we're spending on school lunch.

to feed kids every single meal, every single day of the year.

And I think that would be worth it.

So this is not a budget cutting thing.

I'm just saying, I don't think that money is being particularly well used on school lunches, which nobody particularly seems to like.

So let me know what you have other questions about related to this.

I've got more details over on Twitter at Eduleadership.

Let me know what you think here or there.