Eight years of promoting nutritious lunches, Sun Wenchang: Parents must be willing to pay

Sun Wenchang, who has fought for eight years over campus lunches, is the chief executive officer of the Campus Food Safety Group of the National Alliance of Parents' Groups. Speaking of the structural problems of nutritional lunches, he said bluntly that over the past ten years, many counties and cities launched free nutritional lunch policies, eating up part of the budget, which caused nutritional lunch fees to be unable to rise; even as finances grew more and more strained, they did not dare to change. Sun Wenchang believes that to solve the problem, parents must first educate themselves and break the myth of free nutritional lunches: "Raise your own children yourself."

Increased amounts should be honestly passed on to farmers, meeting costs to produce safe ingredients

In addition, because nutritional lunches also involve the issue of distributive justice, Sun Wenchang believes that the increased amount should be honestly passed on to farmers, so that farmers can genuinely produce safe ingredients at cost; therefore he invented a "simple traceability system," requiring vendors to sign contracts with farmers before bidding, specifying guaranteed prices, and at the same time requiring farmers to have taken related courses such as natural farming methods.

Sun Wenchang says that because farmers are ensured to benefit, schools and group meal operators should be exempted from responsibility for drug residues in ingredients; at this point the role of parents can be that of supervisors, sending people to schools every day to sample ingredients and sign for receipt. In this way, every wrong has its source and every debt has its debtor; when health authorities come to inspect, schools can immediately show proof of ingredient sources, and if ingredients have problems they can be traced.

Although Sun Wenchang's child is still in school, he thinks that caring about campus lunches will not stop after his child graduates: "Since I have taken it on, I must see it through." Next he plans to first promote simple traceability in Chiayi City, making the flow of school lunch ingredients clearer, so that the increased fees can truly benefit farmers.

(This article was funded by the Jianzhen Environmental Education Foundation for personnel expenses as a special project, but it completely does not interfere with news topic selection or interview writing, ensuring news independence.)