If good nutrition is a limiting factor to educational success and thus national performance, it makes sense to increase access to good nutrition.
Your education system, health system and prison system are a multi-billion pound cruise ship with a broken engine. The problem is a nail that needs a hammer. Once it is hit, the engine will come back to life, your ship will sail. What is that nail? Free school meals provided with love and emotional support. You're welcome! Where do I send my invoice?
Cohesive society and culture comes from healthy individuals who are able to act in empathic and cooperative ways. The macro-level is always built from the micro-level (as in chemistry, as in biology and ecosystems). Measures that seek to contain macro level society and cultural issues without focus on the micro level are playing with symptoms rather than cause. Or put simply, free school meals are more effective for societal healing than riot police - though as a society transitions it will need both attention to symptoms and cause.
The brain is a machine that runs on glucose, you need to put something in the tank before you ask it to run. Free school meals put that fuel in the tank. This is basic stuff, c'mon.
Give kids their "daily bread" and they will feel that they belong in the heaven we are trying to build for them. Free school means for all is the right thing to do. That way we build community and not stigma.
Teachers are being asked to teach kids who have eaten nothing, or sometimes breakfast was sugary pop. How can we justify expense for classrooms and specialist teachers and overlook the most basic thing kids need to thrive - food. Free school meals makes sense from every perspective - morality, health outcomes, education outcomes and building a sense of community kids can believe in.
The money-nexus was constructed to centralise money in order to guarantee the flow of goods and services to the rich. It was also constructed to guarantee a large pool of labour that would be so hungry that they's work for next to nothing, thus maximising profits. The rise and fall of the financial system was supposed to regulate the population of the poor - via starvation. So, it is beneath our collective dignity to whine about free school meals. It just is.
Eating is such a basic right of all animals. You couldn't have a pet without feeding them. To not have food is so stressful and humans are the same. Free school meals says to kids, "You are one of us." That's a powerful message they all need. Human tribes shared food, no food meant you were out, that's about as stressful as it gets for animals. Let's choose kindness. Let's choose to give free meals at school.
I got free school meals most of my childhood and they were good. They were the best food of the day, especially in secondary school years. I can't imagine not having them, not having that card in my pocket that said I was permitted to eat. There was a hot lunch and a pudding. I ate it all and was still a skinny kid. It gave me the energy to learn, to play, to be a kid.
At home we'd eat baked beans, white pasta and burger five days a week and we were glad to have it. When your parent is that frugal for good reason you sense it. You say thank you and eat. That's the reality of being aware that your parents are struggling to feed you. Thank God we got free school meals; I can't imagine growing up this healthy without them.
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