School meal programs produce long-term benefits

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This article was published 23/07/2021 (1556 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SCHOOL meal programs occasionally pop up on the radar screen of Manitoba politics. Last year, the provincial NDP proposed spending $30 million annually to fund school lunches throughout the province. The proposal was supported by the Manitoba Teachers’ Society, in part because of reports of increasing numbers of kids arriving at class in the morning hungry rather than nourished.

Tory MLA James Teitsma, however, panned the proposal, arguing that kids should be eating meals at home with their families, not in schools. Premier Brian Pallister supported this critique.

The premier’s seeming opposition to school meal programs does not, however, mean meals are not provided in Manitoba schools. In fact, there is a range of breakfast, snack, milk and lunch programs that schools provide. Indeed, when schools shut down because of COVID-19, the Manitoba government moved to deliver meal packages to students at home since they could no longer receive them at school.

Many of these meals are funded via grants from the Child Nutrition Council of Manitoba. The council is a charitable organization that is, incidentally, supported in part by the Manitoba School Boards Association. The Nutrition Council must raise money and schools must apply for grants for meal programs. The result is a patchwork of programs in Manitoba schools, and there are undoubtedly children falling through the cracks and attending school while hungry.

There are plenty of reasons why school lunches in Manitoba should be standardized across schools and widely available, and virtually no downside to doing so — after all, if parents want to keep their kids at home to eat breakfast, no one will stop them from doing so. We know that early disparities in nutrition can have lifelong negative consequences, and also that early interventions to provide nourishment that would otherwise be missing can have lifelong benefits.

School lunches are an effective way to intervene; it’s easy to reach the vast majority of school-age children in a cost-effective way.

This week brought new, striking evidence of the positive benefits of investing early in kids’ health. In a study published in the Review of Economic Studies, authors Petter Lundborg, Dan-Olof Rooth and Jesper Alex-Petersen explore the long-term health implications of the introduction of universal free school lunches for Swedish primary school students, which were rolled out across the country between 1959 and 1969.

Prior to the introduction of hot lunches in this period, Swedish officials worried about the nutritional content of lunches brought from home, especially in the countryside, where students travelled long distances from home to school. For most students surveyed by the government, lunch was cold and consisted of a bottle of milk and a cheese sandwich. The Swedish lunch program, in contrast, mandated minimum nutritional requirements for the meals, and provided training to employees in school lunchrooms on how to prepare healthy meals.

As a result, students received a hearty meal each day with a minimum of 800 calories, typically meat stews, vegetable soup, meals based on fish or eggs, and fruits and vegetables. Each meal came with both milk and rye bread with butter. The result, the authors show, was a “nutritional shock” as students saw a boost in iron, vitamin C, vitamin A, protein, phosphorus and vitamin B.

Using historical data concerning the timing of the rollout of the school meal programs in Sweden’s municipalities and statistical modelling techniques, the authors are able to estimate the long-term effects of exposure to healthy school lunches. The first is long-term income. Lundborg and his colleagues estimate that for each year students enjoyed the school lunch program, their adult income increased by 0.35 per cent. Exposure to nine years of school lunches boosted adult income by three per cent. As in most interventions in kids’ health, the earlier it can be done, the better.

Think about that: being provided a healthy lunch as a child had a positive and enduring effect on those students’ incomes many years later as adults. Lundborg and his colleagues do some calculations to find that the lifetime bonus in earnings for these students is roughly four times the cost of the meal program itself, demonstrating once again that sinking money into kids’ nutrition and health is a smart investment with great returns.

Being provided with a school lunch also had substantial effects on the students’ long-term educational attainment and early adult health.

Each month seems to bring a new, compelling study of the long-term benefits of nutrition programs for children. One hopes that Manitoba eventually moves beyond the patchwork and charitable approach currently taken to feeding kids, and adopts a universal school meal program with high nutritional standards. The rewards will be reaped for decades to come.

Royce Koop is an associate professor in the department of political studies and co-ordinator of the Canadian studies program at the University of Manitoba.