Researcher says Hawke's Bay uniquely poised to do free school lunches right

Pippa McKelvie-Sebileau is the project coordinator of Nourishing Hawke's Bay: He wairua tō te kai. Photo / Warren Buckland

A researcher looking into food deprivation for Hawke's Bay children says the region has a unique opportunity to show how the pilot programme can be done right.

Pippa McKelvie-Sebileau is the project co-ordinator of Nourishing Hawke's Bay: He wairua tō te kai - a collaborative project between EIT and the University of Auckland which aims to improve food environments for children in Hawke's Bay.

While there is no specific regional data, McKelvie-Sebileau said national food security data indicated that 35 per cent of children in the highest deprivation households regularly run out of food.

There are currently 21 Hawke's Bay schools' part of the Government's free and healthy school lunch programme and an additional 44 have been signed up.

The programme is targeted at schools where students are facing the 25 per cent highest level of disadvantage and socio-economic barriers.

With the additional schools there will be approximately $80k a day coming into the region from the school lunch programme so there is an opportunity to provide local jobs.

She also said there is the opportunity for councils or community groups to prepare a Hawke's Bay response throughout the whole food chain.

"At the moment it is being like an economic situation and an operational, logistical system.

"It is such an opportunity to imagine another system, to say we could have fields [of food] growing just for school lunches."

But she fears with the programme being rapidly rolled out this may not be happening.

For schools that began the programme at the start of the year they were told during the Christmas holidays which meant it "was a real struggle in that period to start something up in the right conditions."

Now she said the same thing is happening again with schools starting the programme in term four were told and agreed to participate in term three she says.

Principals are given a list of suppliers to choose from and with a short period of time to have lunches ready by and existing workloads, she said established providers from outside the region could be selected.

"The timing of this roll out has meant that people are taking solutions which are practical and feasible.

Providing a free school lunch isn't just about providing food but should be about creating a "'values-based system' where children's hauora (health and wellbeing) is a priority."

The schools which have done this right have internal food providers, involve the children in the growing and preparation of food and work the lunches into the curriculum with teaching around food and nutrition she said.

She said Kimi Ora School in Flaxmere had been doing school lunches for a long time and have specially made bread, source food locally, have two staff employed and have built it into the curriculum teaching the children about nutrition and the value of good food.

"The real risk here is that no one will have time or the support to do that so we won't create local jobs we will just take people who can do it which may be based in those bigger centres."

She believed there should be more time given for schools to consider their food provider.