The difference a humble school lunch can make

By Rebekah White

School lunch programmes are known around the world for having a high return on investment, but the benefits aren’t always immediate.

While they address children’s hunger in the present, they can also improve students’ health and earning potential across their lifetimes.

Lunch programmes also offer advantages for families, local economies, and the environment, and these unfold over generations.

But New Zealand’s school lunch programme hasn’t had the chance to experience any of these benefits: it has only been judged on whether it improves school attendance or achievement, and hasn’t been running long enough to provide meaningful answers to the second goal.

But what are the other benefits that a school lunch programme could provide here?

Healthier and more successful students in the long run

Around 140 countries operate school lunch programmes – that’s how researchers know that school lunches can impact students’ lives for years to come, even in wealthy countries.

Take Sweden, says Dr Kelly Garton, a senior research fellow at the University of Auckland’s School of Population Health in the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, who studies school lunch programmes around the world.

Sweden’s universal lunch programme was rolled out in the 1960s in stages, which means that it’s possible to compare children who received lunch the whole time they were in school with kids who only received it for a few years at the end.

“First of all, there was a difference in their growth and height,” says Garton.

“Students who had meals for longer were taller than their counterparts who didn’t. It speaks to broader nutrition – getting the micronutrients you need for healthy development.”

Children who spent longer in the lunch programme also reached higher levels of educational attainment, says Garton.

“So, more years of schooling completed, and they were more likely to go to university, which then translated into lifetime earning potential.”

It begs the question, she says, why school lunch programmes are only offered to socioeconomically disadvantaged communities in New Zealand.

“I think we really have to break away from that mindset that this is social support, this is a handout for poor families, and actually look at how much this would benefit all of our kids.”

Healthier and happier students in the present day

New Zealand is new to the school lunches game.

While other countries have run their programmes for decades, New Zealand’s began as a pilot in 2019. It was rolled out to schools with the highest levels of disadvantage in 2020 and 2021.

In 2024, its funding was slashed and the Ministry of Education’s nutrition team largely dismantled.

Before the funding cut, two independent evaluations commissioned by the Ministry of Education found the lunch programme improved nutrition across the board.

“All of the kids were eating better,” says Garton.

“Like, they had more vegetables, fewer snacks. It was the ones who were least advantaged that were benefiting the most, but all the kids were benefiting.”

Early feedback on the lunch programme from school nurses said that they’d noticed students had healthier skin, with fewer rashes and infections.

Teachers spoke about how their classrooms were calmer.

“There were reported improvements in mental wellbeing, physical functioning and school functioning for the kids,” says Garton.

Other studies conducted in Hawkes Bay found that the programme reduced financial pressure on families and removed barriers to education for disadvantaged students.

In New Zealand, food insecurity is increasing, and diet-related problems account for the biggest loss of health in the country.

More than a quarter of children live in a home where food runs out sometimes or often, and 94 percent of kids don’t get the recommended servings of vegetables a day.

“We’re going to see the health impacts of that in 30 years’ time,” says Garton.

Strengthening local food systems and economies

Brazil’s acclaimed school lunch programme requires a certain percentage of ingredients to be sourced locally, which positively effects the environment, says Garton, who has studied Brazil’s lunch scheme in detail.

“Those local farms have usually much more environmentally friendly cultivating practices than the large conventional ones,” she says.

“So, it really injects a lot into those farming communities – money going into that area of the food system to develop it further.”

Brazil’s school lunch programme has been running for 70 years and is credited with dramatically reducing malnutrition in the country.

Brazil now has lower food insecurity rates than New Zealand.

Similar efforts to source ingredients locally were underway in New Zealand before the programme was cut back, and that translated into local employment, says Garton.

“A lot of the jobs were going to whānau or family members who might have been on the margins of employability in terms of, ‘Okay, it has to be in school hours’.

"So, it was giving jobs to people who really needed them, and in a way that they were then close to their kids. And there was also a living wage standard for those jobs.”

A school lunch programme is a big investment: New Zealand’s used to be $323 million a year.

“That kind of money, if it’s invested wisely, has the potential to leverage a lot of other changes in the food system.”

Educating students about nutrition and food science

In Japan, school lunches also have a learning and skill-building focus, says Garton.

“The kids make the food. They take turns where the kids do the cooking and serve their classmates.”

School lunches could be integrated into the curriculum, says Garton, in terms of promoting nutritional awareness or cultivating healthy eating habits.

“Aside from, like, home economics, we’re not really learning much about how to nourish ourselves, you know? Or even just how to feed ourselves well on a budget.”

Students could be involved in the creation of menus, as well as other practical food science skills, says Garton – and the foundations for that were already in place in New Zealand’s previous lunch programme.

“Schools could choose a supplier and work with them to get a menu that was within the health and nutrition standards but that the kids would like.

"And in high schools, there were some student work placement opportunities in the programme.”

Localised lunch programmes also allow the creation of relationships between schools and food suppliers.

In France, guaranteed demand for organic produce from school lunch programmes has incentivised organic food production and, in some cases, built connections between local farms and schools.

“There’s way less waste,” says Garton.

New Zealand’s own programme was a good investment

In 2024, before funding was cut, the lunch programme was evaluated in terms of its value for money.

“It was deemed an excellent investment on all criteria except for long-term [environmental] sustainability,” says Garton.

That’s because funding was never guaranteed for more than a year at a time, meaning that suppliers and schools didn’t have the financial certainty to invest in things like waste-minimisation infrastructure or reusable containers.

Different funding models could reduce the cost burden of the programme, observes Garton.

Some countries operate a pay-what-you-can-afford model for school lunches; meals are subsidised, and parents contribute to the programme, or not, depending on their income.

“None of the kids know whose parents pay, though. Everyone just gets the same thing, and there’s no stigma attached.”

Garton has been hoping to conduct a similar value-for-money evaluation of the new, cut-price lunch programme.

“We’ve been trying to get data from the ministry to do a follow-up, but they refuse to give us any data – and have in fact just yesterday refused our OIA request.”

What goals are we seeking with school lunches?

One challenge facing the New Zealand lunch programme: what we expect from it.

“It’s only funded through the Ministry of Education budget, and their target outcomes are very narrowly education-focused: attendance, achievement, attainment,” says Garton.

The programme hasn’t operated for long enough to trace many of the potential benefits to it, and so far, it doesn’t seem to help with overall attendance. (Principals say it did improve attendance for the small number of kids who are most vulnerable to missing school.)

Is attendance our goal, though? asks Garton. Or could there be others?

“How can we find synergies with environmental impacts, health impacts, local economic impacts?”

Instead, the focus on short-term cost-cutting forecloses the possibility of long-term gains in areas across health, learning, and environmental sustainability, concludes Garton.

“I think if the original kaupapa had been able to keep going, we would’ve seen a lot of positive change in the long run.

"Because the bare minimum is being invested into it, we’re getting the bare minimum outputs – and it could be done a lot more smartly.”

The world is facing unprecedented environmental challenges. Planetary Solutions, an initiative of the Sustainability Hub at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland, and Newsroom, explores these issues – and the practical ways we can all be part of the solution.