Why School Lunch Should Be Free

On Tuesday, January 28, Rep. Rich McCormick, a Republican from Georgia, told CNN that he believes children don’t deserve free lunch. Instead, he indicated his support for the Trump administration’s proposed freeze on the federal aid that funds free school lunches by stating that he thinks kids need to get to work.

When McCormick was asked in an interview with CNN’s Pamela Brown if he believes programs like Head Start, an initiative out of the Health and Human Services department that provides nutritional assistance to low-income families in the United States, should be on the budgetary chopping block — which they briefly were until President Trump rescinded the order following widespread confusion over which government programs would lose funding —  McCormick shied away from simply saying “yes,” offering this anecdote instead: 

“I worked my way through high school. Before I was even 13 years old, I was picking berries in the field, before child labor laws that precluded that. I was a paperboy, and when I was in high school, I worked my entire way through. You’re telling me that kids who stay at home instead of going to work at Burger King, McDonald’s, during the summer, should stay at home and get their free lunch instead of going to work? I think we need to have a top-down review. Think about where kids need to actually be.” 

He added that pausing federal funding for such programs “gives us a chance to see where that money is really being spent. Who can actually go and actually produce their own income? Who can actually go out there and have value and work skills for the future… versus just giving a blanket rule that gives all kids lunches in high school who are capable of going out and getting a job and doing something that makes them have value, thinking about their future instead of thinking about how they are going to sponge off the government.” 

McCormick failed to mention that as a state representative of Georgia, he receives a $247 per diem to pay for his own lodging, lunches, and incidentals on eligible days, without being required to turn in receipts — a cost funded by taxpayer dollars.

McCormick makes it clear that he wants children to be more productive members of the American economy. However, as plentiful research shows, that begins by feeding them lunch.

According to a 2021 joint report by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Center for Good Food Purchasing, the American government’s $18.7 billion investment in free and reduced lunches gave a nearly $40 billion return, “providing at least $21 billion in net benefit to society even when we measure only their benefits to human health and economic equity.” This $21 billion net gain comes primarily from improved public health — reducing healthcare costs and boosting long-term productivity — and greater economic equity through assisting low-income families by giving them access to nutritious meals, easing financial strain, and fostering economic stability.

Want even more economic gains? As the report states, all you need to do is invest more in better nutrition for our nation’s children. It points out that “We analyze investments to maximize student participation, improve dietary composition, and optimize food purchasing policies, which together would produce an additional $10 billion worth of net-positive health, equity, environmental, and economic impacts.” 

The primary concern with losing free lunch programs is the health and wellbeing of students, not economic productivity. For people like Makailah Dowell, now a lead peer at Equip Health, a company specializing in assisting people with eating disorders, it was a lifeline taken away from her at the age of 12. 

“I was raised by my grandmother. She became an unexpected single parent at the age of 40,” Dowell shares. After a lot of upheaval, Dowell and her grandmother moved from Arizona, where she had been receiving free lunch throughout elementary school, to Idaho, where her grandmother no longer qualified for the subsidy, leaving the pre-teen without lunch. 

“There’s an embarrassment, a shame, a stigma to it,” Dowell says. To add insult to injury, she explains, in her middle school, children were separated by tables for those who received free lunch, those who received reduced lunch, and those who didn’t take a supplement at all.

“Now it became the social aspect of ‘oh, you have a box lunch. Oh, you have a cool lunchbox. Oh, you’re the kids whose parents drive you to school every single day. You don’t have to take the school bus,” she says. This, she adds, created the school lunch table social constructs we all know well, which “led all the way to high school. That’s how those social groups were formed.”

McDowell explains that missing out on lunch is part of what kickstarted her eating disorder, a common problem among adolescents experiencing food insecurity, which is why she’s made it her mission to be a peer lead and advocate for children. 

“I skipped [lunch]. That’s where the eating disorder perpetuated. Because for me, it was, ‘well, we can’t afford to bring lunch. I don’t want to stress my grandma out,'” McDowell notes. “I mean, she was already working 60-hour weeks. So, what else was I going to do about it? So I would go and just not eat.” 

That’s the power of something as simple as a sandwich, an apple, and some juice. It provides untold equity that reverberates far into the future — so much so that it’s difficult for experts like Dr. Katie Wilson, the executive director of the Urban School Food Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for the health and wellness of students across the nation, to understand why it isn’t the national norm. 

“The fact that school meals is an income-based program on the shoulders of children is literally a crime in my eyes,” says Wilson, who has dedicated her life to ensuring America’s kids have nutritious meals at school via her time as the school nutrition director in three Wisconsin public schools, five years as executive director for the Institute of Child Nutrition, and two years as USDA Deputy Under Secretary of Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services, appointed by former President Obama. 

“Why do we give kids free school buses, a free building to go to, teachers to sit in a classroom with, and then we say, ‘Oh, this tool, which we know scientifically will help you learn, we’re not going to give this to you?'” 

The science Wilson is talking about includes a systematic review of 47 studies, which explains that “Most studies examining universal free school meals that included free lunch found positive associations with diet quality, food security, and academic performance.” The researchers add, “Concerns about adverse outcomes on student BMI were not supported by the literature.”

The review also found that “providing free meals to students may be associated with improved household incomes, particularly among lower-income families with children.” This is especially important considering that in 2024, it became impossible for anyone in the U.S. earning minimum wage to afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment in any city in the nation. 

Advocating for free lunch also makes sense if you’re hoping to support the domestic economy. Wilson points out that, “We have to buy American. We are required to buy American products. So we also support the American economy by buying American agricultural products to feed our children.” This is thanks to the “Buy American” provision set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which requires school food authorities to purchase domestic commodities “to the maximum extent practicable.”

The benefits of free and reduced-cost lunches are so clear that it seems obvious what the next step should be: Give kids a free breakfast, too. 

“We know that doing breakfast after the bell, and particularly breakfast in the classroom, can go a long way in addressing timing barriers and stigma issues,” Alexis Bylander, the interim director of Child Nutrition Programs & Policy at the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), explains. “It’s such a nice way for kids and teachers and everybody to start the day — by having the opportunity to eat together.” 

This is backed by research, including a study conducted by No Kid Hungry, which shows that serving breakfast after the bell reduces absenteeism by up to six percentage points. And as one 1996 study showed, children who ate breakfast at school scored “notably higher” on most of the test modules when compared with children who ate breakfast at home or skipped the meal entirely. 

Besides directly benefiting children — the most important part — this could also impact America’s ability to compete internationally, as American students are falling woefully behind other nations with their test scores. According to 2022 data by The Program for International Student Assessment, the U.S. placed 16th out of 81 countries in science and ranked 34th in math. If we want to compete, we need to improve test results, and consistent sustenance is undoubtedly part of that. But as Bylander points out, it’s up to us to make it happen. 

“We do encourage the education community — schools, parents, and students — to also call for healthy school meals for all students,” she says, noting that FRAC has plenty of resources for learning more about key legislation for ensuring everyone has access to food on its website. All you need to do to help kids have better access to healthy meals, Bylander says, is “raise your hand.”