OPINION:
School is back and, this year, kids attending the 25 per cent highest-need schools will get free lunches through the Government's Ka Ora Ka Ako (Live Well Learn Well) programme. This is an oasis of action in a desert of neglect of children's nutrition. A decade ago, Tony Ryall set a new low for a Health Minister by pulling the plug on the healthy school-food guidelines and the national Healthy Eating Healthy Action initiative. Subsequent Health Ministers have fiddled with mirages since.
But will this $220 million new programme deliver? And deliver on what? Pre-Covid, PM Jacinda Ardern and Education Minister Chris Hipkins started a pilot in 42 primary schools aiming to feed hungry kids. When the Ministry of Health became engaged, it insisted on healthy lunches — it wanted the children to be nourished, not just fed.
Then as part of the post-Covid economic recovery package, the programme was hugely ramped up with an aim to provide lunches to more than 200,000 students by the end of 2021. Additional expectations aim to not only reduce the number of hungry kids and improve nutritional health, but reduce family hardship and food insecurity, increase local employment, improve child well-being, promote school attendance and lift educational attainment.
They could also have added greenhouse gas reduction, if the lunches were designed to be sustainable as well as healthy. However, Government thinking has not gone that far. The actions announced with the declaration of a climate emergency late last year and in the newly released report of the Climate Change Commission did not even mention sustainable diets. Amazing oversights given food systems, including our diets, contribute more than half New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions.