“Why can’t we provide a free school meal scheme as good as Brazil’s?” asked Waiheke Islander Dr Kelly Garton in national media last week.
It’s a reasonable question, given extra urgency by looming price hikes.
Dr Garton is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Population Health at the University of Auckland.
If her Newsroom article had an undercurrent of frustration, it no doubt came from watching the decimation of New Zealand’s free school lunch programme while studying its benefits.
If anyone understands the potential benefits of school lunch programmes, it is someone who studies international school lunch programmes.
The coalition government turned, in Garton’s words, “a high-performing education initiative with economic, health and environmental co-benefits into… a tick-box exercise.”
When every child receives a square meal at school, she explains, the benefits ripple further than many of us realise.
Study after study shows that a decent lunch helps children do better in class, improves their health metrics, mental health and chronic disease risk in later life. And children who eat well at school influence their families’ food choices. The list of benefits is too long to list in a Gulf News editorial.
“Children share meals with peers, learn manners and how to eat healthily and try new things. Right now, fewer than six percent of Kiwi kids are getting the recommended daily servings of vegetables,” she says. Not to mention the social and environmental benefits from schemes with local workers and food providers.
Reviews of the original programme, Garton writes, “found that all kids in schools receiving the daily healthy lunches were benefiting from it – not just those who were most hungry.”
As the programme was gutted, the number of hungry New Zealand children grew.
In the year to June 2025, Stats NZ figures show one in seven New Zealand children living in hardship. While this did not at first glance show a “statistically significant difference” compared to 2024, it did show a statistically significant increase compared to 2022. And Radio New Zealand (RNZ) noticed that the criteria for ‘material hardship’ had quietly been made tougher in 2025.
Children’s Commissioner Claire Achmad was blunt. “Over the last year,” she told RNZ last month, “there has been an increase of about 10,000 more children living in material hardship. If we look back to 2022, since that time 47,500 more children are now in material hardship.”
If wrecking school lunches seemed like a dumb idea in 2024, it seems terrifying in 2026, as Trump’s war hits family food budgets stretched to breaking point.
When oil prices rise, the price of everything climbs.
The first New Zealanders to feel the effects of these price rises will be families suffering from food insecurity.
For many children, school lunch is their main meal of the day. This is no reflection on parents whose income hasn’t a hope of keeping pace with rising bills.
Late last year, The Salvation Army’s food security manager, Sonya Cameron told RNZ: “We’ve currently got 27 percent of children who are food insecure, including one in three tamariki Māori and one in two Pacific children.”
No child should be forced to learn when they are starving. An uncontroversial view you might think, and one shared, as Dr Garton points out, by 140 other nations.
The gold standard in school lunch programmes can be found in Brazil, a developing country which now boasts lower food insecurity rates than New Zealand. Garton’s group compared their system to our own.
An important difference? The Brazilian government treats feeding children as an investment, and not a cost.
“Every child at a [Brazilian] public school, from pre-school, to primary, intermediate, high school and vocational school is entitled to a free nutritious hot meal. The programme is provided to more than 40 million students up to 18.”
Meanwhile, our school lunch programme covers only a quarter of schools. More than half of the children who need it most miss out.
Anyone who has ever tried to learn while they were hungry, really hungry, will know that it makes everything harder. Research supports this. Data from the Programme for International Student Assessment in 2024 showed that New Zealand students who go hungry even once a week lagged two to four years behind the students with full lunch tins.
In Brazil, school lunches are carefully assessed for nutritional content, while New Zealand’s school meals fail basic nutrition standards. A study involving Auckland Uni Professor of Population Nutrition Boyd Swinburn showed that the major provider supplying 51 percent of students in Ka Ora, Ka Ako lunches “provided only about half the energy expected for a school lunch and less than a fifth of the daily energy requirements for growing teens”.
Feeding hungry children is an investment. Even the most cynical bean counter should agree that it helps prevent the money we spend on education from being wasted. Properly run school lunch programmes offer a smorgasbord of long-term environmental, economic, health and social benefits. And it’s simply the right thing to do. Because every child deserves a fair chance.
So, why can’t New Zealand provide a free school meal scheme as good as Brazil’s?
• Jenny Nicholls
