Insights into the movement to keep children fed, one week after the National School Food Program announcement.
What's on the minds of Canada’s food activists and advocates now?
We're nine days out since celebrating the federal government’s announcement of a historic $1 billion investment into a National School Food Program. Below, we’ve compiled 8 key insights to help you make sense of this announcement, featuring emerging discourse from food activists, advocates, journalists.
1. The Government’s implementation plan remains unclear.
All of us are keeping our eyes peeled for details when the federal Budget 2024 is released on Tuesday, April 16. How much of the $1 billion investment will be frontloaded in 2024? Will the federal government themselves administer any aspect of the program? Will they transfer the new money to the provinces and territories? Or will they directly fund the school food programs already operating? We anticipate a whole lot more clarity on these questions (and more) to come next week when Budget 2024 is officially rolled out.
2. It's not universal, it’s not a new program. It’s just new money.
In The Globe and Mail, Health columnist Andre Picard offers clarity on this announcement: “While the investment is welcome, let’s be clear: This is not a program, and it’s not national, nor universal. It’s an offer to pump some money into an existing hodgepodge of local, regional and provincial programs that feed about one million children daily. The new federal cash, allocated properly, should feed about 400,000 more kids, about the same number who are on ever-growing wait lists.” Imagine if our schools fed not only 400,000 additional children but all 7 million children in Canada - or at least all 2 million food insecure children? Food activists know that this would mean richer nutrition for kids, fewer hungry students, financially stable families and communities, a healthier next generation, and a much, much healthier society
3. Food quality and culturally/nutritionally specific food are contested issues.
Professor Rachel Engler-Stringer discusses in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix how “ideally, programs should seek to provide meals consistent with Canada’s food guide… and [these meals] must not become an opportunity for the food industry to market products to children.” She also stresses the need to adapt school food to each local environment. For example, “in Saskatoon, many schools have large newcomer populations who may require vegetarian or halal options”. Other scholars have emphasized the need to prioritize locally grown foods and sustainable food systems. In Indigenous communities, food sourcing policy should be flexible enough to enable the use of traditional hunting and harvesting networks.
4. Canada has a lot to learn from our predecessors as the last G7 country to implement a National School Food Program:
Postdoctoral fellow Amberley T. Ruetz and Professor Rachel Engler-Stringer write in The Conversation that “As a late-comer to establishing a National School Food Program, Canada has a unique opportunity to learn from the missteps of other countries”. The relative impact of universal and pay-what-you-can models is not an unknowable hypothetical question, nor is the effect of school food programs on health, education, and financial security of children and their families over time. For example, pay-what-you-can may be unsustainable in less affluent areas, whereas universal programs can reduce stigma and increase program acceptance.
Ruetz and Engler-Stringer continue by stressing the need for improving (or building when appropriate) school kitchen infrastructure, training of school food staff, and ensuring school food jobs are paid living wages to ensure these expanded programs are building on sturdy foundations. They suggest that most effective and efficient approach might be “fresh, whole food meals made in local centralized production kitchens where feasible and made in individual schools where centralization is not practical.”
5. Existing school food programs will likely be the main beneficiaries.
In an interview with the CBC, Coalition for Healthy School Food advocate Debbie Field predicts that the federal government will transfer these funds into existing provincial and territorial programs without creating a new bureaucracy or any programs themselves, allowing the 400,000 children on school food program waitlists to now get access.
6. Implementing this investment will require buy-in from all levels of government.
Is there political will from each of the provincial and territorial governments to execute on this program’s opportunity to its fullest possible extent? Judith Barry, co-founder of the Breakfast Club of Canada, writes in the Edmonton Journal: “The funding is essential, but it will take political will to establish a framework, and countless hours to distribute food to children in our schools”. Barry also stresses the need for the program’s dynamism vis-a-vis the diversity of Canada’s vast population and geography, along rural/urban, cultural, social, economic, and health differences.
7. The program will fall short without continued and deepened financial support from municipalities, provinces, territories, individual philanthropists, and corporate partners.
In the CBC online, Catherine Parsonage, CEO of the Toronto Foundation for Student Success, says there is much more financing needed to address student hunger than just the amount of funds announced by Ottawa: “Municipal and provincial support, as well as support from donors, parents and corporate partners, will be needed to adequately sustain student nutrition programs”.
8. Successful implementation will require governments to trust the experts: communities.
Postdoctoral Fellow Emily Doyle writes in The Conversation about what the National School Food Program might learn from the school food system in Newfoundland and Labrador, stressing that school food programs are a platform on which connections to the people and place can be formed. She asks and answers on the importance of community-informed, community-engaged, and community-led programs: “Who can best make the decision on what food can and cannot be served in a school? The quality of school food will be better if communities are informed and given resources to learn about how to offer the best possible food for the greatest number of people.”
Regarding how program design can adapt to local school and municipal infrastructure, Doyle names the following questions as particularly important: “How is the water? Is there land for school gardens? How close is the ocean? Are there bylaws in place that make unhealthy food accessible or inaccessible? How close do families live to the school? Where is the best place to invest to be responsive to a stable physical infrastructure and a dynamic human one? My research suggests that school food programs need to invest in human connections close to the infrastructure of schools. Members of communities care about and are invested in the spaces where they live.”
Special thanks to Mazon Canada's Allocations Committee member Charna Gord for her support and sharing of articles and resources on this issue! We're always here to read any articles or listen to any podcasts you want to send our way!
What considerations, questions, and conversations are coming up for you regarding the National School Food Program? Please be in touch at robbie@mazoncanada.ca with your thoughts!