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Comment by yongjik | Hacker News Reader

South Korea started dabbling in free school lunches around 2001 - when a few schools started it. It gained momentum, and then it became a huge debate in 2011, when Seoul's mayor somehow decided he hated free lunches so much that he arranged a referendum, and said he would quit if people didn't agree with him on the matter. He did quit.

Fast forward to 2025, and now free school lunches are nearly ubiquitous. Once people experience it, few want to go back. Because it's a much more efficient and hassle-free system.

Yes, of course the money is coming from tax: in other words, if you're a middle-class parent, nothing changed. You're still paying for your kids' lunch one way or the other. But you don't have to pay for a gratuitous system of bureaucracy that keeps track of which kids' parents are making how much money, and whether each kid is "eligible" to eat lunch today, so your money is actually being used more efficiently with less overhead.

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> Seoul's mayor somehow decided he hated free lunches so much that he arranged a referendum, and said he would quit if people didn't agree with him on the matter. He did quit.

It’s nice when things work out.

The final twist is... the mayor somehow came back from political suicide, and he's Seoul's mayor again (since 2021).

At least he stopped complaining about school lunch. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In America even if we enacted this the kids would get meals that are terrible like 10$ chicken strips, hotdogs and fake pizza

In America this has been the case since at least the 90s. School lunch budgets/prices did not keep up with inflation since the 70s, and increases in the costs of lunch cook labor means the same money does not provide like it used to. Schools have nearly universally converted to reheating the cheapest frozen foodstuffs from whichever supplier provided the best kickback to the board.

Meanwhile kids themselves have participated in the problem. It's common to have several different choices for lunch, with a daily rotating menu "hot" item/meal, or choices of cheap staples like chicken burgers, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and the worst quality "pizza" you can imagine, think if Domino's found a way to cut their supply costs in half. A shocking amount of children will insist on eating that god awful pizza every single day. I couldn't understand it when I was a kid, and I was super picky at the time!

Michelle Obama wanted to improve this, but she was called a communist and a man and a monkey, and now conservatives all belief this poor quality school lunch problem is her fault? It doesn't actually make any sense.

so the only change is that they're not paying $10 for it every time?

Huh? We have free lunch in all schools in California and they serve everything from pizza to burritos to hamburgers.

We had a 2 tier system in cali. The poor people ate state provided slop and the slightly less poor people ate fast food. We had Pizza Hut, chick fillet, chipotle. Both were unhealthy options tough and option 2 was quite expensive even back 20 years ago it was 10$ or so.

Ummm... that's not quite the retort you think it is.

>But you don't have to pay for a gratuitous system of bureaucracy

This is what's frustrating about America. There is so much bureaucracy that exists only to pay for itself, and I suppose, provide a few jobs, but you're an unreasonable socialist if you point out that it'd be cheaper just to not keep track of who needs to pay and give food to everyone for free instead.

> This is what's frustrating about America. There is so much bureaucracy that exists only to pay for itself, and I suppose, provide a few jobs,

No, it exists to prevent people from receiving public services, both by its direct operation and indirectly by making the service more painful to use so people who would be entitled to use it nevertheless avoid it.

For the first part, that will always be necessary. The people are supposed to decide through indirect democracy who is qualified to receive welfare.

But your second point is very true. It can be very painful to interact with the bureaucracy, something people shouldn’t have to deal with when they’re at the bottom of the barrel.

> For the first part, that will always be necessary.

There's no reason it has to be.

> The people are supposed to decide through indirect democracy who is qualified to receive welfare.

There's no reason the people couldn't decide, through democracy (direct or indirect, as is their pleasure; certain existing governments only embrace one, but the people can always change that, too) that the answer is "everybody gets the public service/benefit; and the payment comes through the tax system" and have one tax bureaucracy instead of a tax bureaucracy and a separate eligibility verification bureaucracy for each program.

Okay but, what about scammers who pretend to be your grandma to steal her benefits? What about people who died and their children are now stealing their benefits? What about a 16 year old child who runs away, does he qualify for benefits? What about the children of divorced people, who gets the benefits? What about non citizens? There absolutely has to be a verification system.

I guess, to steel man your argument, you could issue cryptographic IDs or have government offices with biometrics to authenticate. That would simplify some of the problem. I’m definitely not saying simplification isn’t possible—just saying that verification will always be necessary work.

And yet when someone tries to cut down bureaucracy, it's called fascism and people start burning cars.

The concept of cutting costs of things is totally orthogonal to political opinions. Fascism and bureaucracy are not really related, it's just that there are fascist ways to do things.

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