Text by Sun Wenchang (chair of campus food safety for the National Alliance of Parents' Associations)

The original purpose of school lunch programs was to "help dual-income families who cannot deliver meals to their children, so that their children can also eat freshly cooked, delicious and nutritious meals." Unfortunately, after being buffeted by several rounds of county and city chief elections and undergoing repeated changes, the program has actually sunk to a level that leaves most people dissatisfied: students complain it tastes bad, parents worry about food safety, officials fear price increases, principals dread incidents, and vendors fear losing money. No one is a winner, which is truly baffling!

Why has it fallen this far? The root cause begins with the campaign promise of "free nutritious lunches" for county and city mayors, and it is entrenched deep in the valley of "parents shirking responsibility and relying on the government." Everyone clearly knows that nutritious lunches have long since become "un-nutritious"!

Yet reform is only discussed over and over and never actually carried out. The author has sorted out four misunderstandings:

Misunderstanding 1: A large volume means a very low price?

Therefore people blindly pursue joint procurement and prohibit price increases. In fact, if the number of lunches exceeds 2,000 servings or 3 school sites, a larger volume can no longer reduce costs. The reasons are as follows:

1. The trouble with preparing a very large volume

The delivery method for lunches is very special. In order to arrive between 11:20 and 11:50, they cannot use economical circular routes and can only use inefficient radial routes (delivering meals directly to each school), so transportation costs will not decrease.

Moreover, a large volume means a long preparation time, and bacteria easily multiply, increasing risk. For example, in September 2015, Fuzhou Rice Food, which prepared more than 70,000 servings, was reported to have mixed preservatives into plain white rice so that the rice could stay fresh for more than 4 hours after cooking.(Editor's note: Fuzhou Rice Food was later tested by the Kaohsiung City Health Bureau and, apart from legally permitted additives, no preservatives were detected)

2. Ingredient price differences cannot make things more than 20% cheaper

In the past, many ingredients were chemical products, chemical drinks and chemical seasonings, and their cost might be only 10% of the selling price. Now there are more natural ingredients. Buying by the kilogram and selling by the Taiwanese catty, the general gross margin is at most 40%, and even a 20% discount on the same product already counts as cheap.

Ingredient quality can be divided into upper, middle and lower grades (clearance goods), chilled, imported, and near-expired (expired) products. At the current price of around 40 yuan per school lunch, only inferior products can be bought.

No wonder the professional expired-food suppliers caught in the past: Mingzhexing in May 2013, Yijiaxin in June of the same year, as well as Ting Hsin oil products and operators of dead pigs and poultry, almost none of them had left nutritious lunches alone!

Misunderstanding 2: Having food waste means the portions are enough?

The reasons food waste is produced are as follows: vegetables are bitter, coarse and hard, strongly spiced, have a strange smell from being not fresh, are cold, or are mushy (because the volume is too large); schools also excessively demand larger preparation amounts. The first several items can all be summed up as "not tasty," while the last item represents waste and is not worth encouraging!

Misunderstanding 3: The lunch industry is too profitable!

Otherwise, why would so many principals be caught taking bribes? In fact, after 2006, rising prices, tender prices not being allowed to rise, and increasingly strict food safety requirements... have turned the nutritious lunch industry into a high-risk, low-return industry, and nutritious lunch operators have rapidly withered away! At present, only 15% of the original number remain.

Misunderstanding 4: Nutritious lunches are a benevolent government policy?

"Tasty, safe and nutritious" are the three items used to evaluate the quality of food service. Most current school lunches can only achieve safety and do not balance tastiness and nutrition. This is because if something goes wrong with safety, officials must step down; if it is not tasty, then fried foods, deeply processed products, or bread are provided; therefore nutrition is no longer emphasized either!

"There is no free lunch in the world." "Free" things will sooner or later exact a price, and our children are paying the price for our indifference! School lunch prices should be returned to the market mechanism, rising with prices and wages, and should no longer be over-interfered with out of political correctness.

I believe nutritious lunches should become the locomotive driving food safety forward, purchasing 4 Labels 1 Q ingredients at guaranteed prices, and making farmers willing to stay in rural areas. That is the best plan for ensuring food safety. Since farmers already receive guaranteed profits, they should reasonably share responsibility for food safety! Only by making farmers directly bear responsibility for pesticide residues can food safety receive attention throughout the entire process.

After detailed calculations based on the data the author collected, if a school lunch costs only 32 yuan per meal(in the Yunlin area it is even lower), and assuming a shift from originally using no 4 Labels 1 Q at all to using them comprehensively, nutritious lunches would need to increase by 14 yuan:

About 46 yuan per meal in elementary school and 56 yuan per meal in junior high and high school / public ownership and public operation (fruit and milk calculated separately, four dishes and one soup)
14 yuan X 185 days = 2,590 yuan per person per year

In other words, if each child adds less than 2,600 yuan per year, they can fully enjoy safe ingredients. Some counties and cities already provide some safe ingredients, so in practice it may not be necessary to raise prices by as much as 14 yuan.

In terms of policy, implementing the use of 4 Labels 1 Q ingredients in nutritious lunches is truly one of the investments with the highest cost-benefit ratio (CP value). The financial leverage provided can simultaneously start improving the quality of nutritious lunches, save the rural economic crisis, raise the food self-sufficiency rate, and rescue Taiwan's ecological environment.

Parents may as well think about it: what grade of lunch do children need? Pauper lunches, convenience store bentos, Formosa Chang, Taiwan Railway bentos, or grand hotels? At present, the government organizes school lunches, and procurement staff usually let the lowest bid win, so as to avoid legal problems later. As a result, pauper-grade lunches always win the bid!

But even famous bento shops like Formosa Chang have raised prices. When reporters asked, "Raw materials are falling now and gas is falling too, why don't you lower your prices?!" the bento shop owner replied: "In the past, ingredients could be cheap goods, but now natural good ingredients are all used, so costs have risen sharply, and therefore prices must rise!"

Your own child, raise them yourself!

Unreasonably low prices cannot buy qualified quality. The biggest reason nutritious lunch quality is less than ideal is obviously that "the price is too low."

Never again vote for candidates who advocate "free nutritious lunches" or "no price increases for nutritious lunches." When parents give up the responsibility to "raise" their children, they simultaneously give up the right to protect their children's health. "Letting children happily eat lunch and grow up healthily" is a parent's sweet burden and must never again be left to politicians to manipulate!

Lunch is not originally a school affair, nor is it a teacher's expertise. Excessively requiring schools to bear food safety responsibility has already caused many problems! Parents' associations should actively intervene, take on the bounden duty of being parents, raise prices when prices should be raised, and protect children's basic human right to "tasty, safe and nutritious" food.

The nutritious lunch revolution drives food safety and rural livelihoods. Operators: We hope parents will support it

If the nutritious lunch budget does not increase, can ingredients really be upgraded?