Who Has Hijacked Our Children's School Nutrition Lunches?

Caption: The quality of nutrition lunches bears on the future competitiveness of the nation's young masters!

A string of procurement scandals and food safety incidents involving school nutrition lunches has once again drawn attention from all sectors. According to a Control Yuan investigation report, an analysis of various food poisoning cases that occurred between the 96th year of the Republic of China and June of the 99th year shows that schools accounted for nearly 20 percent of the locations where outbreaks occurred, and among the victims, students numbered as many as 6,730, accounting for nearly 50 percent!

In other words, among the victims of food poisoning in the country, one out of every two is a student. School nutrition lunches have become the most worrisome black hole in the country's food safety and hygiene management, second only to restaurants!

Source: Control Yuan investigation report, statistics from the Food and Drug Administration of the Department of Health.

Rome was not built in a day. The school nutrition lunch poisoning incidents that repeat year after year, or the outbreaks that occur whenever spot checks find that nutrition lunch ingredients contain banned pesticides or residues of veterinary drugs, reveal that from the central government to local governments, education authorities habitually declare that they will strengthen management of meal suppliers, while agricultural and health authorities ceremonially declare that they will strengthen source management and the density of spot checks on ingredients. Yet few officials are willing to change their attitude toward nutrition lunches, with the result that ingredients are reduced to commodities, the educational imagination is lost, and procurement considers only price, not value!

So who exactly has hijacked school nutrition lunches? Improper use of the Government Procurement Act and the lack of regulations related to food education are the biggest culprits depriving our children of the future in their bowls!

A Government Procurement Act with Only Ingredient Prices, No Value

The Control Yuan investigation report pointed out that the amount per serving of nutrition lunch is on the low side, at only about NT$32 to NT$35, leaving thin profits. Suppliers, seeking profit on their capital, have no choice but to pad meals with cheap dishes, and this has even led to many problems of poor ingredient quality, such as the illegal use of dead pork and inferior rice.

Reading this report, and then considering that a single rice ball paired with a designated drink at a convenience store costs NT$39, one cannot help but doubt how good the ingredients can be in a nutrition lunch of three dishes and one soup provided for less than NT$35. It is easy to imagine!

Generally, schools conduct tenders for nutrition lunch procurement mainly according to two methods stipulated in the Government Procurement Act: the most advantageous tender and the price tender. Most schools most often use the price tender, meaning that vendors compete and the lowest bidder wins.

Under such a system, the winning vendor, in order to reduce costs, will on the one hand bid aggressively for meal box business at multiple schools to achieve economies of scale and lower the average procurement cost of ingredients, and on the other hand, in order to widen the price gap and secure profit margin, will use low-priced ingredients as much as possible.

The Taiwan Indigenous College Promotion Association, which has long promoted industrial reconstruction in indigenous townships, currently supplies organic ingredients produced locally or in indigenous hometowns for use in nutrition lunches at some small schools and nurseries in New Taipei City, Hsinchu County and Xizhou Township in Changhua County. Secretary-General Jin Hui-wen observed that some ingredient suppliers that win bids by underpricing go to wholesale markets to buy cheap vegetables in order to lower purchasing costs.

She said these vegetables often look yellowed or not fresh, and generally attract no buyers, but because they are cheap, they are easily chosen by unscrupulous group meal operators as nutrition lunch ingredients. As for organic or pesticide-free vegetables, which are higher in price, unless the person in charge at a school is determined to promote organic nutrition lunches, it is very difficult to break through the industry ecology of winning bids by underpricing on price.

If the most advantageous tender were adopted instead, meaning that the winner is not decided by low price but by the service content and items proposed by vendors, submitted to a procurement evaluation committee composed of principals for selection, could the negative effects of bidding low to win be solved? The answer is probably not necessarily.

For school nutrition lunches using the most advantageous tender, the current price per serving is generally fixed at NT$45. This amount looks higher than the market rate of only NT$32 to NT$35 per meal under low-price bidding, so the ingredient quality should be better. But among the evaluation items, there is so-called scoring of the creativity or givebacks provided by vendors, most of which consist of requiring vendors to sponsor the school at sports days, or to provide raffle prizes at faculty dinners, and other services unrelated to improving nutrition lunch quality.

What is worse, according to the Control Yuan investigation report, in addition to certain handling and supervisory personnel responsible for school lunch work demanding illegal kickbacks, among the types of givebacks required, some schools actually asked nutrition lunch vendors to share the school's elevator maintenance costs, or asked operators to purchase additional school equipment.

In addition, according to regulations, school administrative personnel and homeroom teachers still have to pay when eating nutrition lunches, but some schools "technically" require operators to absorb the cost entirely. Operators can only swallow their anger and pass on the cost, in order to cope with the illegal demands fabricated under all sorts of pretexts by school handling and supervisory personnel, causing nutrition lunch quality to deteriorate, and students end up as innocent victims.

Public Tendering Means Transparency?

From the recent string of nutrition lunch procurement scandals, it can be seen that the focus of investigation by prosecutorial and investigative authorities is whether school-related personnel took bribes, distorted the provisions of the Government Procurement Act regarding price tenders or most advantageous tenders during the procurement process, and violated the principles that tender or evaluation processes should be open, transparent and fair.

In fact, what also needs to be open and transparent should be the mechanism for supervising the true sources of ingredients, as well as giving students or parents who pay nutrition lunch fees the right to participate in the nutrition lunch evaluation process.

Wu Yin-ning, who serves as chief secretary at the Xizhou Township Office in Changhua County, found while promoting reform in the procurement of locally sourced ingredients for nursery nutrition lunches in the township that, from the central kitchen of the group meal operator to the classroom dining table, the vast majority of teachers or students cannot grasp the source and quality of ingredients. Even if operators produce verification materials such as CAS or SGS, does that necessarily mean they meet "product traceability"? What is more, in the past there were indeed cases in which operators used forged certificates and passed off inferior products as genuine.

Wu Yin-ning said this is also why she wanted to incorporate the concept of "local production, local consumption" into the procurement of ingredients for nursery nutrition lunches. Besides giving children a chance to know that the food they eat comes from their hometown, more importantly, once a problem is found with an ingredient, the producer can be traced immediately, the problem understood, and a response made in real time.

Xie Guo-qing, chairman of the National Alliance of Parents' Associations, pointed out that nutrition lunches bear on children's health, but when selecting nutrition lunch vendors, parents cannot participate in the operation of the school's nutrition lunch committee, because the Public Construction Commission says selection must be evaluated by experts. As a result, in the nutrition lunch corruption scandals that recently broke out, even experts were implicated.

Lu Chao-fu, chairman of the Taoyuan County Association of Parents' Association Presidents, also said that two years ago he proposed to the Ministry of Education that parent representatives be allowed to participate as committee members in nutrition lunch procurement cases, but the Ministry of Education replied that the Public Construction Commission did not permit it and that parents must be excluded.

Xie Guo-qing called on the Ministry of Education to revise the relevant regulations on committees so that parents can directly supervise the selection of nutrition lunches. At the very least, finances should be transparent so everyone knows where the money is spent.

Nutrition Lunch Is Not Just a Commodity, It Should Also Be Part of Education

In July 2005, Japanese authorities published the "Basic Act on Shokuiku" (Food Education), and designated June each year as Food Education Month, with the goal of cultivating citizens with correct dietary knowledge, the ability to choose food, and the practice of a sound dietary life. Besides declaring food education a movement for all citizens, it was also incorporated into educational guidelines, in the hope that children could learn from an early age the ability to manage their own dietary lives.

Under this basic act, schools must add dietary education courses, extending the concept of food education to the places where food is produced. Thus rural production environments, the safety, hygiene and nutrition of agricultural products, and diet-related culture, knowledge, living habits and food safety all became focal points of attention.

By contrast, in Taiwan, the procurement of ingredients for nutrition lunches is treated merely as a commodity transaction, and the content of nutrition lunches remains stuck at the nutritional level. Apart from promulgating the "Food Content and Nutritional Standards for School Lunches," which recommends what nutrition lunches should contain and their nutrition, regarding ingredients, there is only the price thinking under the Government Procurement Act.

Therefore, we treat nutrition lunch ingredients the same as building materials for public works. Rice, vegetables and meat are weighed on the same scale as rebar, cement and sand and gravel. This scale measures only price, not value, let alone the culture, knowledge, living habits and food safety endowed behind ingredient production that could be seen through education.

Are our children growing up eating reinforced concrete? Of course the answer is no, but our thinking about nutrition lunches absolutely cannot remain at the stage of "concrete" in the head: only price, no value; only a commodity, lacking substance. Only by endowing domestic nutrition lunches with more of a spirit similar to Japan's Basic Act on Shokuiku may we find the fundamental way to solve the endless stream of school food poisoning incidents.

Recommended Reading

Control Yuan investigation report on food poisoning incidents involving nutrition lunches

Chen Jian-hong–Summary of Japan's "Basic Act on Shokuiku"