Free school meals are the bedrock of a better society “Food insecurity may be less acute, but it’s more insidious because it can hide in plain sight, certainly from those of us in our food-secure bubbles”
Unhealthy children tend to become unhealthy adults. But there’s a simple way to reduce the chances of that happening
On a cold and sunny November morning in 2021, my wife and I, both dressed to the nines and clutching our negative lateral flow COVID tests, drove south along the M11 motorway heading to Windsor Castle.
I was hugely honoured, and more than a little surprised, to have been appointed an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2020 for services to ‘Research and Communication and Engagement’, and we were very excited to be attending the COVIDdelayed ceremony.
The presentation takes place alphabetically, so, given my surname is ‘Yeo’, I was in the last group, ‘R to Z’. There must have been around 30 of us R to Z folk, introducing ourselves and making small talk, when who should walk into the room but Manchester United and England footballer Marcus Rashford.
Rashford was also receiving an MBE that day. Not for his prowess on the football pitch, but rather for his services to vulnerable children in the UK during the pandemic.
The Education Act of 1996 requires state schools to provide free school meals to disadvantaged pupils who are aged between 5 and 16 years old, and for many, these may be the only proper, hot meals they have during the day.
When the schools were shuttered during the pandemic, this precious nutritional resource was suddenly ripped away. So the Food Foundation campaigned, with Marcus Rashford, to secure holiday food vouchers for children receiving free school meals during the pandemic. This led to the
UK government supporting families on low incomes with the cost of food and household bills over 12 months. It ended up benefitting at least 1.7 million children who would have otherwise missed out on these meals.
But COVID simply shone a light on a problem that was present before the pandemic and persists today. In spite of being the sixth wealthiest country in the world, the UK suffers from an unconscionably high level of food insecurity.
You may think that we’re not in the heart of a major famine, but food insecurity is different from starvation. It’s defined as a ‘limited access to food due to lack of money or other resources’.
It may be less acute, but it’s more insidious because it can hide in plain sight, certainly from those of us living in our food-secure bubbles. One of the most important drivers of inequality emerging from deprivation is access to a healthy diet. And the people that are hit hardest of all by malnutrition are, and have always been, children.
But here’s the thing: in the UK, those in the bottom 20 per cent of the socioeconomic strata are almost twice as likely to end up living with obesity. What this tells us is that if a person is genetically susceptible to obesity, being exposed to a less healthy environment maximises their genetic burden, while a healthier environment more than halves the risk.
For many, the ‘healthy’ option is simply not affordable or convenient. If you have less money and haven’t the time or any idea how to quickly assemble a meal from scratch to feed the kids, you’re going to have to make a difficult choice.
But people aren’t deprived because they make poor choices. Deprivation leads to poor choices or, more often than not, no choices.
The greatest tragedy of all is not that diet-related illnesses persist, but that so much of the suffering they inflict is shouldered by children and young people from the poorest and most marginalised communities. It creates a vicious cycle that perpetuates poverty across generations and should be unacceptable to all of us in the 21st century.
I think part of the solution is to have free school meals universally available to children. This is currently the case in London and certain other local authority areas. It’s true that where not provided universally, a child will still qualify for free school meals when their family receives certain benefits or asylum support, or meets an income threshold. But it isn’t automatic. And the moment you put a label on someone, you risk introducing stigma. If it’s universal, then it’s equitable.
Quite simply, everyone should have access to nutritious food. Improving the health of children – all children – must be a priority, if only because unhealthy children tend to become unhealthy adults.