What should children eat for lunch to be more nutritious and healthy?
At lunch break, the children carry the buckets of nutritious lunches, ready to enjoy today's meal. Sweet-and-sour pork ribs, assorted shredded three vegetables, seasonal vegetables, yellow bean sprout and pork bone soup, plus the fruit or milk that comes with every meal -- these are today's dishes.
Holding their trays, the children eat with relish. Four dishes, one soup and one dessert is the basic combination of the daily nutritious lunch, with different vegetables and fruits served as the seasons change. But in this nutritious lunch that costs about 35 yuan per person per meal, where exactly the ingredients come from is something few people bother to investigate.
The disconnect between what is on the dining table and our land and farming is by no means a problem of just one day. Even in major agricultural counties such as Yilan or Changhua, the food children eat is not necessarily the radishes grown by the uncle next door, or the eggplants produced by the grandfather in the neighborhood. Perhaps because the connection between the dining table and the land has become so weak, looking at the food on the table, it is hard for us to imagine what kind of environment it grew in, and hard to care about the problems arising in those environments.
But in Taiwan, China, some people have begun to think about how to strengthen the link between ordinary people and agricultural production by changing the way they eat, and thereby come to care about overall environmental issues.
"Once I attended a seminar that focused on discussing cooperation between local production and school ingredients," said A-Bao, founder of the Yilan Small Farmers Alliance. Afterwards she received a phone call from Chen Deng-qin, the newly appointed director of the Yilan County Education Department. On the phone, Chen Deng-qin told A-Bao that he hoped to cooperate with the Small Farmers Alliance to promote the work of combining nutritious lunches with local ingredients.
Before this, A-Bao had also thought about cooperating with schools to pilot such an activity. "In Yilan there are about 50,000 junior high and elementary school students eating nutritious lunches provided by contractors. These lunches cost about 32 yuan, which also includes the contractor's labor costs and profit." A-Bao said that with such a low procurement price, it is very difficult to buy good ingredients while also paying producers a reasonable production cost. In order to combine nutritious lunches with local agriculture, A-Bao tried to contact schools, "but the schools were afraid to cooperate with us. They feared that handing the nutritious lunches over to us would become 'favoring a specific contractor,' so this plan never had a chance to be put into practice."
The Education Department's plan was an opportunity, allowing local producers to cooperate with schools, promote food education, and thereby familiarize students with the land they grow up on. In addition, with a government department taking the lead, the worry about "favoritism" was removed. Yet the "School Lunch Local Ingredient Promotion Plan," which ran for one year, did not go as smoothly as expected.
The way it was carried out was that the 101 junior high and elementary schools in Yilan proposed their own projects, planned their own on-campus food education courses, and then applied to the Education Department for funding, while the Small Farmers Alliance took the role of an advisory group to help the schools' projects proceed smoothly. "But because the schools had never encountered anything like this before, they might propose some strange content, or choose ways that were easy to carry out."
In addition, because teachers at the teaching front line already carry many duties, suddenly adding food education on top meant they had to rack their brains to design lesson plans and conduct teaching, which amounted to a considerable increase in workload. So A-Bao also encountered situations where, although the school principal strongly supported the plan, the teachers in the school pushed back strongly. Moreover, government department projects carry pressure from execution deadlines; in order to rush the reimbursement, it instead became a matter of doing things for the money.
Still, the one year of advisory group work was not entirely a negative experience. A-Bao said that at a Waldorf education school she helped advise, the parents strongly supported the idea of food education, and even jointly rented land adjacent to the school, preparing to cultivate it, while the school's meals were also cooked by parents taking turns. And many students, through lesson plans such as farming experiences, learned knowledge related to the land.
On the other hand, in promoting the combination of local ingredients with nutritious lunches, the goal was not achieved at all. A-Bao pointed out that according to the Government Procurement Act, projects worth more than 100,000 yuan must be openly tendered, so the outsourcing of nutritious lunches also had to follow such regulations. But once a contract was awarded to a contractor, whether parents, students or schools, all could only leave the decision about food entirely to the contractor, and could not compel the contractor to use local ingredients.
In addition, small farmers are not large-scale producers. If a contractor cooperated with small farmers, it might increase administrative trouble. "When a contractor works with a fixed supplier, it only needs one phone call to get the quantity of ingredients it needs. But if it works with small farmers, it might have to make five or six phone calls before it can obtain the needed ingredients. For the contractor, this amounts to added administrative procedures." Not to mention that choosing better ingredients would raise the cost of nutritious lunches, and the first to be affected would be disadvantaged families.
"Because in this plan the small farmers participated as an advisory group, and the part about local ingredients supplying nutritious lunches was not implemented at all, not one cent of the 8 million yuan plan funding was used directly to support local production."
Chen Deng-qin, director of the Yilan Education Department, which promoted this plan, said that nutritious lunches have the nature of social welfare, obtaining relatively cheap ingredients through bulk purchasing and using volume to control price. "If we did not rely on efficient procurement and obtain good discounts to carry out the nutritious lunch policy, local government spending would collapse."
But when students experience the hardship of agricultural production in farming courses and understand that agricultural costs are not as cheap as imagined, yet what is on the dining table is still a meal costing 35 yuan, how to bridge this gap becomes a problem that food education cannot avoid facing.
Chen Deng-qin said that combining nutritious lunches with local ingredients is indeed difficult in practice, so the Education Department could only start from the "education" aspect, and could not change from the "consumption" habit. The Education Department could only use incentives to encourage contractors to use more healthy or local ingredients.
Looking back on a year of cooperation, A-Bao believed that "the plan was too big" might be one of the problems preventing smooth promotion, and a similar attempt was also underway in Xizhou Township, Changhua. Although similar in content, the Xizhou version of combining local ingredients with nutritious lunches, much reduced in scale, achieved initial success after a one-semester pilot.
Jin Hui-wen, secretary-general of the Taiwan Indigenous Peoples College Promotion Association, who participated in the Xizhou Township Office's "Local Ingredient Supply Plan for Nursery Schools," said that the new township chief of Xizhou, Huang Sheng-lu, made this plan part of his campaign platform and actively promoted it after taking office. The township office used a restricted tender procedure. Unlike ordinary tenders where the lowest bidder wins, restricted tendering required bidding contractors to explain items such as the source of ingredients, and then a suitable team was selected to win the contract through evaluation.
Before bidding, Jin Hui-wen sought out local farmers practicing safe agriculture, and after communication reached a cooperation agreement to prepare lunch ingredients for 9 public nursery schools and 350 children in Xizhou Township.
Because the quantity used was not large, for farmers accustomed to hauling their products to hypermarkets for wholesale, it was a completely different sales experience. "And our price is not high, so the farmers are essentially selling to us at a loss. But everyone was very enthusiastic. Knowing it was for the children in their own township, they were all very willing to support it," Jin Hui-wen said. Even a local farmer who produced champion rice would set aside a portion for the children in advance.
However, because Jin Hui-wen chose only farmers practicing safe production, and such farmers are not a high proportion of the whole Changhua area, the items of agricultural products that could be chosen were limited. As a result, some parents felt that what they ate every day did not seem to change much. In addition, because nutritious lunches in the past often included some processed foods, at the beginning, when meals were switched to a nutrition-oriented approach with no processed products at all, the children were somewhat unused to it.
Jin Hui-wen said that because the demand from the current 350 students was not large, it still could not reach the scale of contract farming with producers. And to avoid increasing the cost of nutritious lunches, even at a loss they could only absorb the deficit themselves. So if the tender could be carried out again next semester, they hoped to balance income and expenditure through fundraising.
At present the Changhua Township Office intends to continue carrying out this plan, and on the Yilan side, Chen Deng-qin also stressed that he would continue to raise funds to support the promotion of food education. The first-stage attempt made both sides encounter some obstacles, and also accumulated a lot of experience.
Schools supporting agriculture can give agricultural production a stable supply target, avoiding the direct impact of market fluctuations, and can also spare farmers from having to keep costs down and produce in large quantities, using too many agricultural chemicals that harm the land. On the other hand, "we hope that through one child, we can influence one family to look anew at food, agricultural production and the environment."
The intervention of the public sector lowered the obstacles to cooperation between schools and small farmers. But how to have the public sector subsidize prices, reduce the impact of rising nutritious lunch costs, and implement school support for local production, so that small farmers receive substantive subsidies and children eat good food at school, is a question that must be considered before the plan can continue.