Why Canada needs a national school food program

Worth the price
If a food program in every Canadian school sounds like a pricey pipe dream, advocates urge the naysayers to look at what other countries are doing. In the United States, for example, more than 30 million kids participate in the National School Lunch Program; almost 10 million are also part of the School Breakfast Program. And get this: total government funding for these two U.S. programs was $8.8 billion US in 2005.

England is beefing up its school nutrition budget, spending an extra $520 million Cdn just on healthy ingredients and increasing the subsidies for these programs. (Three cheers for dishy chef Jamie Oliver, who championed nutritious school meals on the other side of the pond.) England also plans to ban ads for foods and beverages high in fat, salt and sugar in TV programs geared to kids under age 16.

Canada needs to step up
In comparison, many of our elementary school children eat lunch in crowded classrooms, cramped hallways and gyms packed to the gills – places in which most adults couldn’t digest a sandwich. There is often no time built in for snacks, or any means of properly monitoring whether kids eat the food their parents pack. “We still build new schools in this country with no facilities whatsoever for kids to eat in,” says Field, who is incredulous that the 1950s mom-will-pick-up-the-kids-for-lunch mentality still exists.

What’s more, Canada is one of the few developed countries in the world without a national food program for students or a set of standards for feeding kids in school. That’s something nutrition, education and children’s advocates are out to change.

Earlier this year, BFL, FoodShare and the Centre for Science in the Public Interest, along with Olivia Chow, an NDP member of Parliament, came together to create the Children’s Health and Nutrition Initiative (CHNI).

The group is determined to transform Canada’s patchwork of school food programs, which have no stable source of monetary support, into a nationally funded effort that would see healthy food available in schools to all children under age 18. “This is too important an issue to be left to nonprofit groups,” says Field. “Only with Ottawa can we have national standards that will benefit all kids in Canada.”

Effects of junk food
For starters, CHNI is asking for $75 million from the federal government to start the project, which amounts to less than $1 per child a day. As a second step, it wants Ottawa to prohibit junk food advertising aimed at kids.

Dr. Kellie Leitch, who is the adviser on healthy children and youth for Tony Clement, federal health minister, recently spent several months talking to parents, kids, organizations and government officials across Canada about kids’ health. She says the issues of childhood obesity and nutrition “came up all the time.”

Leitch, who is also an assistant professor in pediatric orthopedics and chair of pediatric surgery at the University of Western Ontario in London, says the federal government realizes that the state of kids’ health in Canada is an area that needs tackling. “We are now seeing adult diseases, such as type 2 diabetes and obesity in kids,” she says. “The government wants to know how to empower parents and to help children.” The folks at CHNI are hoping that this translates into cash for their initiative in the near future.

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