What do footballer Marcus Rashford, singer Zayn Malik and TV chef Jamie Oliver all have in common?
For some, they may be heartthrobs. Others might have posters of them on their wall or their biographies lining their bookshelves.
For us, we simply respect their stance on school meals.
As we celebrate National School Meals Week, we’re pausing to think about the huge benefits a school meal can have on a child. It’s more than just a tasty dish – it sets them up for life.
Charity Starts at Home
Charity Right focuses on providing school meals to children in some of the poorest nations… but as you probably already know, school meals is a big issue in the UK too.
Made worse in recent months, poverty is a growing problem in the UK, with 500,000 more children being pushed into poverty over the past five years. That takes it to 4.5 million children in the UK living in poverty – over a third of all children.
But hope isn’t lost just yet. We’re cheering on Zayn Malik and Jamie Oliver for joining the fight, but Marcus Rashford has been our hero ever since his work during the Covid lockdown in 2020. He raised over £20 million to deliver school meals to children who needed them, wrote an open letter to the UK government, set up a Child Poverty Task Force, and petitioned to expand the free school meals program to include holidays, receiving 200,000 signatures in just one day.
But what about children around the world who don’t have celebrities standing up for them?
School Meals: 3 Benefits in 1 Meal
Some kids might complain about peas and carrots dumped on their plate at school instead of pizza, but they have no idea the huge impact those vegetables and healthy eating have on their life.
It’s about far more than just their current health. Healthy school meals have three incredible benefits.
1. Physical Health
The most obvious benefit to regular school meals is that children are less likely to have nutrient deficiencies, thanks to more fruit and vegetables in their diet.
Sadly, there are too many children in the world with too little food; 25% of under-5s have stunted growth, and 52 million children are wasted. School meals are the easiest way to nip this in the bud!
2. Mental Health
You don’t usually link food with mental health, but it’s key for children’s brain development. And it’s not just how much food they eat – it’s how healthy it is; as tempting as it might be, children who eat more fast-food have lower test scores in reading and maths.
Thanks to healthy school meals, children are 34% more likely to remember what they’re taught in class. And they’re 3.4 times more likely to focus on what the teacher tells them in the first place! Who would have guessed vegetables could create our future geniuses?
3. Community
School meals benefit the kids who eat them, but what those kids then go on to achieve for the wider community is all down to the school meals they ate when they were younger.
By just offering school meals, you can see enrolment increase by 20% and children seeking more education as they get older. And this all helps them break away from the cycle of poverty; if all pupils in low-income countries had just basic reading skills, about 171 million people would avoid extreme poverty… And if everyone had secondary education, you’d see global poverty cut in half.
Governments wouldn’t have to spend so much money on healthcare either. Healthy school meals increase overall life expectancy and help to reduce the 3.1 million children who sadly lose their lives thanks to poor nutrition every year.
It’s a Win-Win
There’s no denying the huge impact healthy school meals have on children throughout the world – and you can be a part of the solution.
The theme for National School Meals Week this year is “Together we can make a difference.” And that’s never been truer. We provide healthy school meals to disadvantaged children in Yemen, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Sudan and Turkey.
We love seeing their smiling faces, their ever-improving health and the cogs turning in their mind as they learn… but we can’t do it alone.
Together we make a difference – so help us make a difference by donating here.
