Collaborative on Global Children's Issues

Steamed enoki mushrooms and pork belly with rich pan sauce, a daikon radish seafood broth, stir-fried tomato with egg, purple rice, fresh guava, and unsweetened soy milk. For less than one U.S. dollar a day, this from-scratch school lunch at the rural Taiwanese elementary school where I served as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant was a far cry from the school lunches I was served as a child in the United States, which regularly featured infamously bouncy chicken nuggets and fruit bits swimming in high fructose corn syrup.

During my years as an elementary and middle school educator at home and abroad, school feeding programs were understood as a foundational aspect of child well-being. These programs are often treated as nutrition safety nets, but when understood through resilience frameworks—a child’s ability to “bounce back” from challenges and positively regulate—they can become powerful structural interventions that reduce risk, strengthen belonging, and generate economic returns vis-à-vis long-term human capital development.

Breaking Bread, Building Community

How does Qianhua Elementary School, a rural public school in Taiwan’s Shihmen District, approach school feeding? Taiwanese public schools implement a “Little Chef” system in which students take turns serving lunch to their classmates. Coupled with the fact that dining environments are in the classroom rather than in large, chaotic cafeteria settings, peer camaraderie is effectively integrated into school mealtime. Furthermore, school routines foster healthy life habits: after lunch, the students brush their teeth and take a 30-minute afternoon nap before classes resume. Outside of these daily rituals, students’ understanding of their local food supply chains is fostered through enriching field trips to nearby farms and rural livelihood centers. From planting rice to picking tea, students become well-integrated into their communities while gaining further knowledge of what their school lunches consist of and deepening relationships with caring adults, like Qianhua Elementary’s lunch secretary, Song Ying Chieh, who made their meals possible.

In Taiwan, rural schools receive lunch subsidies to provide diverse, otherwise expensive ingredients such as fresh milk, seafood, and nuts. Additionally, they are bound by government school-feeding certification systems such as the “Three Stamps and One Q” (sān zhāng yī Q), which ensure food safety and pesticide-free agricultural products, while supporting local industries and providing consumers with a QR code for traceability. This level of transparency and accountability makes it possible for schools like Qianhua to curate their from-scratch lunch meals without worry.

Consequently, the school lunches are straightforward and community-based. The school is not only well-known for its robust bilingual education, Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) focus in lesson plans, and unique tea curriculum, but also for its delicious and high-quality school lunches. Indeed, by combining these four components, it isn’t surprising that Qianhua Elementary is highlighting school feeding as a nutritionally sound channel for teaching sustainability and global citizenship, while being a consistent form of care for its students.

An array of community members undertake the shared responsibility of the students’ well-being. Ying Chieh contributes through careful meal planning, working in tandem with the talented cook to create interesting meals for the school. There is a fundamental community aspect of the school feeding ecosystem: she is also the students’ art teacher, interfacing with and noting their needs and feedback every day. In this way, children are stakeholders in school feeding programs, not only as the primary recipients but also by providing insight throughout the monitoring processes.

Qianhua Elementary School operationalized school feeding as an integrated and multidimensional developmental intervention. When planning a school meal, Ying Chieh considers the following:

• Basic understanding of children’s preferences to avoid excessive food waste.​
• Incorporation of international cuisines into familiar flavors to diversify taste experiences and kindle students’ curiosity about different cultures.
• At least one vegetarian meal per week to support climate action, raise awareness among students, and pay heed to the budget.
• Nutritional balance, which includes at least one dark leafy green and frequent replacement of rice with multigrain rice.

Breaking bread is also a way for students to learn about foreign teachers and classmates of Southeast Asian and indigenous origin. DIY pizzas and coconut chicken curries were on the menu during my first weeks, as the school took lunchtime as an additional opportunity to organically introduce their newest foreign teacher (me, a Malaysian-Chinese-American) to the children. Later on, a parent volunteer taught the students how to make Vietnamese spring rolls, celebrating the region's ethnic diaspora and further promoting a sense of belonging among Vietnamese students.

Other than lunchtime being a platform showcasing a tapestry of cultures, Qianhua integrates various programs and projects that piqued my interest as an educator and development practitioner. Locally sourced agricultural ingredients play a big role in meal planning, the support of local livelihoods, and economic and environmental sustainability. Ying Chieh highlighted, “On the North Coast, common local produce includes water bamboo, sweet potatoes, bamboo shoots, and taro. We try to plan menus according to seasonal availability.” She also pointed out that as part of the children’s curriculum, students participate in tea harvesting on the campus farm. This tea is brewed, gifted as welcome gifts to visitors, used to reduce greasiness and increase the flavor depth of braised fish dishes that were a school lunch staple, and incorporated into students’ baking lessons as tea-flavored muffins and cookies. Students become active agents in prioritizing their own well-being as mealtime becomes a tool for sustainability and citizenship.

Why Food and Nutrition Security for Children Matters (Beyond Taiwan)

What I witnessed at Qianhua Elementary raises a broader question: what if school meals were designed not just to feed children, but to support their resilience, sense of belonging, and long-term well-being?

Food is not just about calories. It is intertwined with the environments in which children grow, cope, and learn. School feeding programs are effective at increasing school enrollment, attendance, and retention, especially in low-income countries. They can also support economic growth at the community level when food is locally sourced and sustained through local labor, as was observed in Shihmen District (the school's talented cook is a grandmother to several students) and other rural communities.

In the United States, nearly 30 million children depend on the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), and, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 13.5% of households are considered food-insecure.

In many policy conversations—especially in the United States—school feeding programs are still framed primarily as social safety nets. While this function is essential, it is also incomplete: school meals must be reimagined as a child well-being-based, culturally grounded continuum-of-care mechanism. The case study in Taiwan can be used as a reframing tool, since meals in Qianhua Elementary are not isolated interventions, but are embedded in a broader ecosystem of care.

By contrast, policy debates in the US, such as the “Make America Healthy Again” initiatives, often focus on what children are eating (for example, recommendations on reducing ultra-processed foods), without equal attention to how meals are experienced. Today, the debate continues as to whether school lunches constitute a public good or an excessive subsidy that creates government dependence. This debate often does not include child resilience concepts that seemed so intentionally centered in the school feeding commitment and execution I witnessed in rural Taiwan. The reality is that policy volatility can hinder stability in the systems that innately serve children. Considerations of dignity, routine, participation, and cultural relevance become less visible.

From Safety Net to System of Care

Studies have demonstrated a strong linkage between a child’s exposure to adversity and household food insecurity. A stable, stigma-free daily routine of a shared meal can help build children’s stress management and coping strategies while fostering social environments.

Rather than depending on a child’s individual resilience, integrating school meals as a ritual can help address some of the systemic inequities and root causes of poverty. Centering the family in a continuum-of-care approach is vital in addressing poverty; approximately 40% of households in the United States struggle with meeting immediate needs. A warm meal at school can shift this priority to multiple adult caretakers as they adequately and holistically nourish children. Comprehensive caregiving support and practices focus on the family as a core, sustainable, and structurally resilient solution.

School meals are more than simply assistance, as they are part of a broader continuum of care that supports children and their families. The Taiwan case study highlights that the necessary ingredients for this care are not inherently resource-intensive. However, they require a shift in understanding school meals as social infrastructure:

• Meals connect to local economies through an intentional regional sourcing of ingredients and labor​
• Students engage directly with food systems through education and participation
• Daily routines reinforce health, hygiene, and rest
• Cultural inclusion is built into how and what students eat
  

What Could This Look Like in Practice?

There are three meals a day: each serves as an opportunity to be a vehicle for child health, a foundational component of care, guaranteeing that children are adequately and consistently nourished. For policymakers and practitioners, this reframing opens the door to new possibilities:

1. Integrate food into learning to help children understand where their food comes from (and why it matters)
2. Invest in local food systems, making meals more culturally and environmentally relevant
3. Design for dignity and participation to transform the lunchtime experience and improve systems with students’ feedback
4. Think beyond nutrition metrics: beyond calories and dietary compliance, how can we improve outcomes like well-being and sense of belonging?

Reframing meals as resilience-based social infrastructure, school feeding programs go beyond their traditional definition as a form of social safety net or assistance. They are integral to ensuring that the care ecosystems (families and schools) are well-equipped to meet the needs of children as they become well-adjusted, contributing members of society. Nourishment, in all senses of the word, can be fortified through a reliable, nutritious, and culturally relevant school lunch system that integrates mindfulness, curiosity, social inclusion, and routine.

Samantha Chai (G’27) is a master’s student in the Global Human Development program at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.