A Year of School Lunch for $28?

What if I told you that there is a school lunch program that provides kids with free, healthy, local lunches for 1.2 million kids at the cost of $28 per child, per year? Not in this country, right?

Right.

Akshaya Patra (AP), an Indian NGO, is doing exactly that. AP was founded in 2000 with the intention of using a guaranteed mid-day meal to entice kids who otherwise were not being adequately fed to come to school. In the year of its inception, AP provided lunches for 1,500 kids in five schools in Bangalore. Now, according to AP's Web site, it is "the world's largest NGO-run mid-day meal program", serving thousands of schools in eight different states.

AP has been able to so considerably broaden its reach in such a relatively short period of time in part because it is subsidized by various state governments of India. The governments partner with AP and other school-lunch NGOs to help them set up the basic infrastructures for implementing their programs. Those subsidies allow the NGOs enough breathing room to solicit charitable donations in order to cover the rest of their operating expenses, kitchen construction and equipment, cooks, transportation, etc. Together, AP along with all the other NGOs in the country provide school lunches for 120 million kids.

What the government subsidies and private donations (AP's funding is roughly split between the two) are paying for is a system of centralized, highly mechanized kitchens that source food from local markets and have the capacity to produce between 50,000 and 100,000 meals every day. Industrial steamers cook food quickly while preserving nutrients, custom-made roti machines churn out beautiful bread (without any side-servings of foodborne illness), and transport trucks are designed specifically for safety, maximum storage, and minimal spillage. The technologically intensive model cuts down on overhead by reducing labor costs while increasing speed and efficiency. The kitchens cook a different three-component menu every day of the week and deliver it hot, never frozen, to the schools by lunch time. In the right hands, $28 can go quite a long way. Watch the video; it might make you want to enroll in grade school in Jaipur.

This seems like a particularly appropriate time to highlight AP's program, given that the question of whether or not to reauthorize the Child Nutrition Act is currently sitting before the U.S. Congress. The bill now being debated before the House Education and Labor Committee is the Improving Nutrition for America's Children Act, legislation that would, among other things, increase enrollment in school meals programs, improve the quality and safety of the food, and provide marginally higher federal reimbursement to schools for the meals that they provide. The bill is a step in the right direction and certainly worth supporting. But after learning about AP's program, I can't help but think that Congress isn't thinking far enough outside the lunch box.

A few extra cents per meal could probably secure America's schoolchildren a little more mystery in their meat, another squirt of chocolate in their milk, or maybe even a few gleaming florets of organic broccoli every week. But if the current structure of the school lunch system (along with our ever-present fiscal constraints) can only leave room for tiny, incremental improvements, then why not try rethinking the system entirely? The federal government currently reimburses schools $2.68 for each lunch that they give away for free, an amount that sometimes doesn't even cover the total cost of producing the meal. That's almost as much in two weeks as AP spends in an entire year on one child's lunches. We have access to the same efficient technology, fertile regional agriculture, and even plentiful government subsidies (if Congress is willing to reallocate them away from major agribusiness, that is). We just need to start connecting the dots.

The fact that American lawmakers are seriously thinking about the problem of gross school lunches is progress indeed, but we need to push them further. Whether or not government-NGO cooperation would work in the U.S., I don't know, but it seems foolish not to explore as many options as we can. We know the solutions aren't simple; nobody expects (or wants) roti and dal to float from the sky into cafeterias all across America. But we need healthy kids, and that goal is worth considering all the possible options on the lunch table.

Photo Credit: eliazar via Flickr