Years later, I now find myself a parent of a young child who attends a full day pre-K at a public school we love dearly. The school he attends happens to be one that already qualifies for universal school meals. Since those subway rides for oranges, our family situation has changed, and I am now able to consistently purchase a wide range of food for my child. I even have the time and flexibility in my work schedule to provide this food without much thought or special consideration. What a privilege it is to know now that food insecurity is likely not an adverse childhood experience that my son will encounter during his school-aged years. In this context, I send my child to school every day grateful that he is met by a loving and nurturing environment. That care from our school district is expressed in many ways, including the fact that both he and his classmates are all guaranteed the food they need to fuel their growing bodies and minds. The Universal School Meals Program Act of 2021 was recently introduced as a bill in Congress. Since the early days of the pandemic, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has offered free meals to all public-school students, which will continue through the 2021-22 school year. If passed, this Act will make it permanent for every school-age child to get free meals at school, leveling the playing field and ensuring that all children are able to learn, play, and thrive. Our school children’s nutrition must be a top priority. Of course, no program is ever perfect. A universal school meal effort, while momentous, is one piece of a larger purpose of what it means to care for each other. Still, I wonder, how can we reconsider the ways that we measure “good” or “effective” programs in this country and in our communities. I’ve begun to ask myself what it might look like, as we commit to the larger work towards justice, to simultaneously do the least amount of harm in our commitment to the next generation, to our children. I believe that if we ask ourselves these questions we would come to agree that universal school meals are a “fundamental dignity for our children,” to borrow the words from this excellent Op-Ed piece recently published in CivilEats.

Healthy students are better learners, and school meals provide the nutrition children need to be successful in school.

Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Tufts University recently found that between the 2003 and 2017 school years, the diet quality of school foods improved equitably, and the food that U.S. children received at school had the “highest mean diet quality of any major food source.” When children don’t have access to healthy meals, hunger and malnutrition can take a toll on their overall health, mental well-being, and success in school. Healthy school meals prepare students to both enter the workforce and to become caring members of society. To expose my bias, I am also an advocate of universal school meals because this program would further eliminate the crushing unpaid school meal debt reported by 75% of U.S. school districts and end the consequential practice of refusing meals to students with unpaid meal charges. The Universal School Meals Program Act of 2021 would help to remove this burden from underfunded districts and simultaneously promote equity between school districts and states, strengthening our education system more broadly.

What’s more, school meals stimulate the local economy, drive local food purchases from farmers, and create jobs in school nutrition and food production.

More school meals served would result in improved school production and service facilities, which would generate job growth in foodservice equipment manufacturing, facility engineering, construction, and maintenance. Increasing the number of students that eat school meals would be a victory for the whole community.

As restrictions start to ease and we navigate how a new “normal” looks in this country, it’s always appropriate to take stock of what we’ve learned. And in this moment, we must remember to reckon with what many have known all along, the reality that opportunity is not equally shared within our country and that the burden of proof of trustworthiness falls most heavily on our most vulnerable neighbors. We must now ask ourselves how to move forward with integrity and how to extend dignity to our students as they re-enter our nation’s schools. For over twenty years, nutrition advocates have urged the federal government to provide free school meals to all students, regardless of income. Today, our best chance to achieve this goal has arrived. However, this bill may not pass unless enough people make their voices heard and show Congress that the public supports this program. Now is the time to invest in nutrition and put healthy meals within easy reach for every child to safeguard their health and academic success.