Schools in England warn of crisis of ‘heartbreaking’ rise in hungry children
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This applies on society, government, municipality, village, family - so many levels.
It's the cheapest & easy way to help these kids get nutrition. It benefits society more than the cost.
It also prevents the need to waste money on lunch cards, payment systems & some poor lady having to manage & collect payments.
A universal benefit guarantees 100% utilization. If you put in bureaucracy and/or a token payment, people will fail to navigate it (and downstream bureaucracies with their own budgets can make it more difficult to navigate), so like magic the program becomes a lot cheaper (by leaving children hungry.)
Not necessarily, I know a lot of progress has been made since I left school but back in my day there were some seriously low grade meals served at the cafeteria. It was not uncommon for other kids to bring lunchables and homemade meals to eat instead and we'd throw out the tray of food provided to us. I'm not anti-free school meals for all, however. I just wanted to add the caveat that the 100% utilization metric is not quite as it seems.
The government have just cut taxes so they're heading in the opposite direction.
With that said, it doesn't address the underlying problem of kids being allowed to go hungry. If free school meals were universal (and they should be), that's still only 5 / 21 weekly meals provided for.
It's not the best food but it's calories with some nutrition & easy for kids to make.
During my time volunteering I learned that the challenges are not getting enough funding or food but getting the food to the people who need it. From elderly to babies.
The public schools here don't even seem to operate real kitchens anymore like they did when I was a kid, and aren't equipped to actually cook at all, but just to heat up frozen stuff. Instead of even assembling sandwiches from ingredients, they serve those might-as-well-be-a-candy-bar "uncrustables". That's the degree to which they don't function as a real kitchen anymore. Not-coincidentally, I expect, I'm pretty sure most "kitchen" staff isn't even employed by the schools anymore, but by companies they contract to handle lunch for them.
In England, the cost of a school lunch is about ~£2.35. In the US, it's about ~$3.80.
When I go out to eat in the US for lunch, a typical take-away place to get something like a sandwich is maybe around $12. In the US, if we increased school lunch funding equivalent to that, the increase would be something like $8 per student per day. There are 50 million K-12 students in the US, so that would cost $400 million per day.
The per-pupil cost would be $1,472 per year. In a classroom of 20 students, that would be nearly $30,000/year -- enough to substantially increase teacher salaries, and nearly enough to pay for a teaching assistant in every classroom.
Obviously, there's nothing saying we couldn't increase funding by $1 or $2. But my point is simply that there are indeed trade-offs.
I really love a library near me that has near the door a load of nice paper shopping bags, labelled up - that anyone can take. Each will have different things in but contain stuff like wash kits and deodorant, tampons and sanitary towels, socks, gloves and even warm jumpers in winter. Anyone who needs one can just grab one. It is sad that we have to give out stuff like this, but equally, if we need to provide these things for people, let's do it in the lowest drama way of doing it, and that doesn't cause stigma or shame.
The key is that you can help 99.9% and then existing services will be able to help the few remaining. The alternative is to help nobody.
But it also can be harmful if you cancel some great good because some small fraction of the population can't avail themselves of it.
Something like this would need an accessibility plan to be available where needed. It would be a little more expensive at first but then workflows can be improved.
The military and schools already provide food for large groups. As do private companies like Aramark (although to be fair Aramark reported often provides _spoiled_ food to prisons). The point is, these logistics are all well established with most of the hangups worked out in general principle.
Now if everyone did avail themselves of the free lunch slop each day, we'd clearly see a downturn in lunch business at many restaurants, so there would be other effects, but it does not seem entirely impossible.
And certainly not impossible to start with the students at schools, then expand to all children, and then to the children and elderly, and then to all.
So low quality places, like McDonalds (consistent, but low, quality -- I'll not concede this point) would be impacted. But better quality food providers would not. So you would have crowding out on the low end. Does that make society as a whole worse off? Maybe not completely first-order pareto improving (people would pay taxes), but imagine how much better society is if kids can get fed and then focus on their educations? I think the second order knock-on effects are huge.
Now apply that world-wide. I am getting the Kurzgesagt warm fuzzies.
On the other hand, in prison I would want there to be an option that satisfy each religions requirements, because I don't want the state to dictate peoples belief.
That said, I think if you were creative with the menu - serving food staples known for low cost and decent nutrition it would be comparable. But this is beans and rice, lentils, PB&J sandwiches, etc. But I personally think this is fine. For me, the goal is to ensure no one starves it's not to provide a complete nutrition for every single person. Since the offerings are slim and not exactly desirable, the impact to McDonald's lunch business would likely be small. Pretty much anyone with the means to do so would rather eat something they paid for. It depends on if you view it as a general public service or if you view it as a safety net I suppose.
All that said, I think this has no chance of actually gaining momentum. Not in the US anyway. It sounds like something a Nordic country could pull off.
Something like this: https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2013/11/17/in-pictures-kit...
That said, it is ridiculous to have hungry children in a country that also has national health care. It is much, much cheaper to feed a child than to deal with health issues from hunger.
Pretty cheap for our company to run - helped out parents who needed it, was fun for the kids that got to come in and then zero waste as it all went out to other local families if we didn't use it all.
I believe the arguments against it are more or less: 1) I don't want to pay more taxes 2) Won't this make their parents less desperate and thus more able to choose their working conditions? 3) Will this encourage poor people to have too many kids? 4) I just don't like the idea of anyone getting anything without working for it.
Just the good old-school conservative mindset - that it shouldn't be the government's responsibility to feed your child. You had a kid, you should make sure they are fed. Why burden the taxpayer with this?
>> I'd gladly pay more taxes even though my children aren't at risk.
A lot of conservatives would have a heart attack at just the thought of paying more taxes, even if it would benefit them or their kids.
Edit: Since this is getting downvoted for some reason - I just want to categorically point out that I'm not supporting this viewpoint. Just explaining it.
> People who complain about taxes going to feed children are social darwinists.
Other programs could be a better use of resources and provide more support to parents. Like minimum income programs that make paying for lunch a non-issue.
Hypothetically, parents might want their children to follow certain diets for legitimate reasons, so letting them provide meals provides more support in those situations.
If there are flaws in the overall system, then Mayne we should focus on treating those. Again, treat the causes, not the symptoms.
If the parents have the money (or access to programs that provide resources) and still choose to not properly feed or care for their kid, then perhaps the things you mention do fit. There's clearly case law that supports anyways.
I'm not interested in debating politics on HN.
If the parents have the money to feed their children and choose not to, there are bigger problems. Addressing the root of that problem would be better than just providing a meal (likely other abuse exists).
Thing is, you can't learn if you're hungry. You can't even sit still in class - you disrupt the education of other kids, and you make life hell for the teacher.
If schools are required to educate kids, and the kids are hungry, then the schools will fail to educate those kids. That is, if they're not ensuring they're fed, then they're doing it wrong.
Being forced to fall back on a food bank is considered demeaning here. From what I've read upthread, a lot of food banks in the USA are church-run. Many people will be ultra-reluctant to essentially beg for help from churchy people, however careful those people are are to keep their churchiness out of their aid provision.
Why is it a problem that asking for free food is "demeaning"? Seems like that's more of a perspective or attitude issue than a functional one.
The simple fact is that there's enough food in the world for everyone. So if people are going hungry, that can only be because either (a) the system is broken; or (b) the system is fine, and it's fine for people to go hungry. You seem to be a proponent of (b).
If I'm going to give poor people money I'd much rather just give them money. There's a ton of literature on this producing better results.
The issue at hand isn't what is the best way to allocate resources. The issue is that we legally force children to spend all day at school 5 days a week, but we do not provide them food. If the government is mandating that, they are responsible for the children's safety and well being. One of the most basic parts of well being is being fed. There's a ton of studies that show that providing free meals improves test scores and behavior. It should be an option by default. And who cares if you don't use something directly, you benefit indirectly by having happier well fed children in your community
"Better results" here revolves entirely around what outcome you're trying to achieve. The better results you're referring to are that the easiest way to provide a better lifestyle for poor people is to give them money. I'd submit that the best way to feed children is to give them food.
You're right; that's how taxation is used to provide public services. So ban all public services, and reduce taxation to zero.
That's what the new UK government seems bent on, and over just a weekend they've crashed into a lampost and written-off the car.
- We don't want to use tax payer funds to give free lunch to children of rich people
- These types of issues should be handled by charities (by which they typically mean churches) not the government
- We already have food stamps, etc
Why stop at meals? Why not have the government just raise your kids? Then X, then X2, then socialism.
There's also a broader school funding issue, at least in the US. I think that just breaks down to people don't want to pay to educate other peoples kids. It's really short sighted and selfish.
It might be that they don't agree with how the money is currently spent. I see a lot of waste in my area. There are also some odd or overly restrictive policies. One can agree with the goal of funding of education while disagreeing on whether the current money is promoting that goal or being wasted.
There's an obsession (around here at least) that the schools need more money for fancier stuff, and that somehow this will produce better grades.
Not sure what specific waste you're referring to.
My state pays well. However, increasing pay is not going to get many more or much better teachers. The teachers I know would rather work for less money at a private school because there's less bureaucracy and better policies. I have a friend who completed his student teaching and decided not teach because the school policies sucked and the kids were terrible. He took a lower paying non-teaching job instead.
We can't make parents care about educating their kids. But some districts have teachers barely getting by, or struggle to hire due to low pay. It doesn't sound like the area where your friend works doesn't have this problem, but generally teachers should be able to live on their salaries.
Well, that's the entire universe of public spending.
In a properly socialized society, there's a shared understanding that some goods are going to be paid for collectively. We might not all agree that they're all "goods", for example vegan parents might object to paying for some other kid's meatburger; but perhaps they should set up their own vegan school, if they can find enough good vegan teachers.
So there's waste in public expenditure. A lot of that waste occurs in private expenditure too; bear in mid that most UK schools contract-out the provision of meals. If those schools are wasting food, that's private waste. Some of the waste will be corruption; so some proportion of the cost of a public expenditure programme has to be audit and monitoring.
In general, in the UK, public money is handled pretty carefully. I suspect that in the USA, it's handled even more carefully; there seems to be a long-standing view that public expentiture is identical with waste, and should be stopped.
It seems to me the SNAP, WIC and food bank route is more compressive, provides better freedom, and can offer better quality.
And why should they?
"SNAP, WIC, food banks all depend on parents. I am asking why can't the schools provide regardless of parents."
If the parents are neglecting their kids, the proper fix is to remove them from the abusive environment, not treat just one of the symptoms of a free lunch.
"If the kids don't need it they can simply not take it."
What about the kids who don't need it and take it anyways, leading to waste, obesity, or other issues? Some parents may need to control what their child eats.
Kids who don't need it and take it anyways is a much smaller problem than kids who need food and are going hungry. That's just a problem in teaching a child how to have a healthy relationship with food, which is much easier to build when the child doesn't experience food insecurity.
Unless it leads to obesity and life long medical issues.
"There are an infinite number of reasons parents are unable to feed their children that don't involve removal from household."
Again, let's fix the root causes instead of creating duplicated effort on solving something thay should be fixed under existing systems. If youre saying the exising systems are failing so badly that we need a new system, then how can I trust this one will be different and better? I don't think infinite is a acceptable description.
Taking too much of that responsibility out of parents hands makes it less consequential for them to have children, and puts the public on the hook for individual choices. Inevitably that will lead to rising costs and I would put money down on someone somewhere coming up with really inane ideas like one-child policies or licensing down the line, either because of the rising costs or using them as a fig leaf to cover up their real political stance against population growth (because we’ve socialized one of the largest costs of having children and made it cheaper for would-be parents who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford the responsibility to have more children).
I’m still in the camp of holding parents responsible for their choices, and I’ve suffered the consequences of my mother’s choices. Not every child’s upbringing is going to be happy or occur under ideal circumstances but that’s part of life too.
EDIT: I should also add, none of this is commentary on the UK’s political scene. I don’t have a stance on their domestic societal concerns which is what the original story was concerned with. Just addressing the parent’s question.
If you are a parent you would know this is BS. Sending them to school and feeding them at school is hardly a significant consequence. Its not like if free school meals come along everyone is going to start having more children.
Also children are required by law to be in school. I am not opting out of my parental responsibilities by sending them there.
Further, your whole point is that it may make it easier for people to have more kids so we should not do that, even if the cost is children (who had no say in their birth) having to be hungry and suffer through choices of their parents (who birthed them) and the government (who require them to be in school). Sounds to me like you want to punish the children for the mistakes of their parents.
Children will always suffer the consequences of their parents including the choice to have them; and the choice to have children (or not), like pretty much all human actions is an economic one. Sometimes a poorly thought out economic choice, and sometimes not really thought through. Right now it is expensive to have children, and a large part of that expense is just food and shelter. Parents that can’t provide that tend to have their children taken away by the State, and the children have no say in that. Does that suck? Yes it does, I have been in my State’s foster care system, and I got out of it lightly when my mother figured out how to take some responsibility. This does not mean it is the public’s duty to insure against all the poor life choices people may make including having children they ultimately cannot afford. I’m basically okay with school lunch systems, because of the mandatory schooling requirement, but remember, what I addressed was an extension of that.
> Sounds to me like you want to punish the children for the mistakes of their parents.
It's more that I don't expect governments to be little gods and solve all problems for their people. Sometimes life is hard, and that's unfortunate, but it's not a given that we can really move the needle on suffering through large organizational action.
Often it's most impactful for individuals and small communities to step in and care for the most vulnerable. It will be more personal, holistic, and coherent.
Big organizations can sometimes get in the way of that kind of personal compassion. For example, public schools have less patience to let compassionate individuals interact with kids on school grounds these days. Even parents are often excluded from the school grounds.
The kids shouldn’t know anything about it. Who’s really paying and who is not. It also needs to work as a large network so that 100% paid schools subsidize 100% free schools.
Food is really, really far from being one of the highest costs of having children. I guess maybe it's the highest-cost thing that isn't one of the high-cost things, if that makes sense.
Housing, healthcare, and childcare (= lost wages & benefits if a parent stays home, so still incredibly expensive) are so far ahead of everything else that most of the other typical expenses barely matter as far as the "have a kid or don't" decision. Healthcare in particular is the one you're taking out a reverse-lottery-ticket on every time you have a kid. They come out with serious chronic health problems, congrats, your annual spending is now 20+% higher indefinitely. And a decent chance you'll be declaring bankruptcy pretty soon.
We could have fed each of our kids for several years just from the medical costs of their entirely uncomplicated pregnancies and births. And we had insurance. Above-average insurance for our area, for a couple of them, even.
[EDIT] US perspective, of course. Some or all of these three very-expensive categories are taken care of by the public, to one degree or another, in ~all other developed states.
The after school program was effectively my “daycare” through the end of 4th grade post-Foster care and what I did after school after that was basically on me. The City was my oyster. I also went without medical care as a teenager. In this simplified environment, childcare and medical care (at least pre-Obamacare) are luxuries you do without, so shelter and food take precedence as the preeminent costs at that point (for some extra irony, we were just past the cutoff point for school lunch from my Middle School years onwards).
Life is tougher that way, but it’s survivable.
It's not free, someone has to pay for it. The method is taxes, backed up by government violence if you don't pay. The government never pays for anything, in fact. You do. And I do. So if 'government' pays for kids meals, OTHER PEOPLE who may have decided to not even have kids are now partly responsible for your decision to have kids. In what universe is this even remotely ethical OR rational?
Good on you for deciding to 'help others', but not everyone wants to or necessarily can do that, and why should you be the arbiter of what is right wrt someone else's money? Forcefully taking someone's money through government taxation is theft through threat of violence. This kind of program would be incentivizing people who apparently already can't care for the children they have to have more children.
My life will directly benefit by the wellbeing of the humans around me. Less children stealing for food means less criminals on my streets and in my neighbourhood. Kids who aren't hungry will act out less and can learn better. Well-educated next generation will pay for me when I'm retired. It's a simple investment in my opinion.
I have to pay taxes for the maintenance of the road network. I don't own a car.
I have to pay taxes to bail out corrupt bankers, to rescue the economy they crashed. I have no mortgage.
I have to pay taxes to subsidize farmers. I am not a farmer.
I have to pay taxes for expensive cancer treatments. I don't have cancer.
You seem to be arguing that there should be no public provision of anything, that should be private companies, and taxes should be abolished. That's some kind of insane Ayn Rand-style philosophy.
It's obvious to me that any kind of public expenditure paid for from taxes is going to annoy someone; and some of the expenditure is either going to benefit me, or will be expenditure that I approve of. You win some, you lose some.
Don't you want to spend a little now for a better society tomorrow?
This is definitely a fallacy. Everyone will agree, but it's vague. Of course we would pay more if it meant a better society. How much is "more"? What is "better"? Is the money actually going to the cause or just supporting the administrative bureaucracy around it? Are there better alternatives?
This is common in politics - make a commonsense or emotional statement that is vague. Yes, people agree with the sentiment or idea, but the implementations can vary wildly and find only partisan support.
> Forcefully taking someone's money through government taxation is theft through threat of violence.
> but not everyone wants to or necessarily can do that, and why should you be the arbiter of what is right wrt someone else's money?
The society has a moral obligation to feed it's poor, but government should have nothing to do with it.
1 - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/free-lunch-doesnt-sp...
Literally one school-board member said this, and now a broad brush is being used to insinuate that this is a widely held conservative viewpoint. Then they decided to trot out an "expert" in order to debunk this one person's opinion.
A very specific example - I had a close relative who was adamantly opposed to subsidized housing. This was despite working in the food service/hotel industry directly with people who earned too little at work to afford housing in the area without help. This relative could easily express the idea that her employer paid very little and ruthlessly limited work hours to avoid having to pay benefits (like, you know, health insurance) but not connect how her co-workers had to live in subsidized housing because they simply didn't earn enough (ever in their lives) to afford any other choice.
I suspect some similar thinking around providing a better meal plan for kids. During the pandemic, my (relatively wealthy) school district did provide free breakfast and lunch for all students. However, that was based on COVID federal grants and has expired. Students can still apply for free and reduced price meals and even in our "wealthier" district around 17% of students qualify for those programs. This roughly tracks our state statistics which report around 20% of families with kids in schools have problems with food insecurity.
We have a deeply conservative state legislature. The state itself has very large disparities in income and poverty based on area. I am honestly not particularly well-informed on free and reduced meal plan numbers in different areas. It is unclear to me if it is "politically viable" to provide additional subsidies or financial support to those poorer districts.
I frankly don't trust the government to provide a healthy diet on a consistent basis, their track record is remarkably poor in this regard. I don't have an issue with the idea of free meals, many locales already have something like that, but the execution is quite another matter.
It's really hard to figure out how much food is needed without creating huge amounts of waste. Our school district had free-for-all lunches and dinners for the last couple of years due to covid. Take as much as you want, no questions asked.
It resulted in a huge waste of food. I was at one distribution spot daily and they'd be cheerfully pressing bags on me, "Take one! Take ten! It will all get thrown away otherwise" On taco day I'd grab a few because one kid liked them but that was it. Even with the ones I took, the apples got throw out and the chocolate milk got thrown out.
This year it is only free lunch and the kids have a lunch code, so at least they know that they don't need more than the number of students at the school. I suspect there are still a lot of leftovers at the end of the day. Most of the kids I know still bring their own - the biggest beneficiaries are working parents who don't have the energy to pack lunch every day.
There could be government agencies that hand out something like MREs I suppose. It wouldn't be very appealing and I'm sure there would be lots of complaints, but it might keep people from starving.
Not advocating for or against what you're saying but a ration of the type you're suggesting does exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitarian_daily_ration
My parents were too proud to admit they needed help, and certainly not from the government, so I had none. The school didn't have any empathy either. I stole lunch (and as much as I could eat because it would probably be all I ate) every day for almost an entire school year before they caught me. They knew how much was missing over that period of time and put it all on me (no idea if I was the only one doing this).
I hope they help these kids.
I was surprised when I found out that we’re one of the few developed countries that doesnt have any kind of lunch program. I feel like our system works fine though and since I’ve seen the garbage that American children are fed I think it’s actually better this way
Cafeterias can produce healthy meals efficiently and cheaply, compared to distributing that labor to every parent.
And then you don't need to monitor kids for parents not providing meals, which eliminates a whole cost.
And worst of all, no kids should have to not eat because their parents fucked up. It sets them so far behind. Every meal a kid misses is a failure on all of us.
I'm canadian and i'm always tired of this smug "we're better than the americans" attitude. It's quite ignorant of the facts and lazy to addressing our problems.
Why is this system better than:
Feed kids at school. If a school doesn't do it it's their fault. If it happens frequently the director is fired.
And as others have commented, there seems to be little reason not to provide at least two meals a day to kids in schools. Besides "it's socialism" from those that seem to hate other humans in need.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Breakfast_for_Children
It would just move up to the next least expensive items such as books, transportation, etc. Would schools even need to exist if everyone was the same?
It's heartbreaking that children anywhere go hungry. Children didn't make the decisions that led them to their hunger. They didn't choose to be born in situations, regimes, or societies that failed them. They didn't choose and have no power over local culture, religions, politics, policies, wars, and other drivers of stupidity. They are victims, completely, of others who have power to make things better.
So yes, it is heartbreaking that this continues to happen in first-world (US/NATO aligned) countries, second-world (formerly Soviet aligned countries), and third-world (unaligned) countries.
People who complain about taxes going to feed children are social darwinists. We should pay teachers and lunch staff much better as well.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_World
[2] https://eand.co/how-america-collapsed-and-became-a-fourth-wo...
[3] https://eand.co/britain-just-hit-the-next-level-of-self-dest...