Seoul spends NT$3.5 billion over 4 years to buy ingredients directly from producing areas and provide free nutritious lunches to schoolchildren
"Children have the right to a fair education, and nutritional lunch should be part of what the constitution guarantees." On that day, both Japan and South Korea were looking at school lunches through the lens of the "basic right to food," and had even drawn up five-year and ten-year grand plans to gradually put in place school dietitian staffing and meal delivery systems, pouring money and manpower into defending schoolchildren's nutritional lunches. And Taiwan? "Taiwan's (school) lunches are free competition," said Kao Chia-hung, co-convener of the Fubon Cultural and Educational Foundation's campus food ingredient management project, pointing out directly that getting a school lunch depends on "competition," whether competition among vendors or competition on price. Who will defend Taiwanese schoolchildren's basic right to food?
Seoul mayor releases the "Seoul Food Master Plan," with "urban-rural coexistence, public catering" as a key policy
South Korea began supplying free nutritional lunches to elementary and middle schools nationwide as early as 2003. "Seoul's previous mayor, Oh Se-hoon, stepped down precisely because he opposed promoting free nutritional lunches and lost the referendum." Hsiao Pei-chun, a columnist for Korea Food Digest, pointed out that the current Seoul mayor, Park Won-soon, then emerged in a by-election; Park Won-soon, now in his second term, went further on June 20, 2017, by proposing the "Seoul Food Master Plan," setting major policy goals including "healthy food," "food security," "urban-rural coexistence--public catering," "safe food," and "institutional foundations," and allocated 333 billion won (equivalent to NT$9.25 billion) in funding for implementation.
