“Congress should provide free nutritious meals (lunch, breakfast, summer, afterschool meals) for all children in the United States, removing the income test and ensuring all children receive free meals without stigma or burdensome paperwork.”
The Task Force on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health—comprising a group of advocates, food industry executives and professors—issued a report advising the White House to reinstate universal meal programs.
Up until June 30, schools were providing free meals to students permitted by COVID-19 waivers. Recently, the House Committee on Education and Labor proposed the Healthy Meals, Healthy Kids Act, which seeks to expand children’s access to federal nutrition programs. But the bill has not yet been scheduled for action.
The proposed recommendations from the report about national school lunch and school breakfast programs include:
- Expanding eligibility for school districts to partake in the Community Eligibility Provision, which would give more students in low and middle-income districts to receive free school breakfast and lunch.
- Doing away with reduced-price meals and giving free meals to students who are eligible for reduced-price meals.
- Offering an incentive to schools by encouraging them to implement serving methods that increase School Breakfast Program (SBP) participation.
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“Achieving the White House Conference goals of ending hunger, improving nutrition, and reducing diet-related disease will require complementary efforts to address the structural drivers and social determinants of health and well-being,” the report writes.
Additionally, the report addresses a need to adopt a national policy that prohibits “lunch shaming” practices. “Establish a national policy for addressing unpaid meal debt that prohibits ‘lunch shaming,’ or alternative meals, and also lays out a pathway to forgive lunch debt,” the report states.
On September 28th, the White House is set to hold the Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health for the first time in over 50 years to discuss policies for ending hunger, improving physical activity and nutrition, decreasing diet-related diseases, and closing disparities surrounding them.
