Want to Improve American Childhood? Start With School Lunch.

We are what we eat, and we are *how* we eat.

It’s the end of August, which means that US kids are headed back to school. If those kids go to public school in a state like Tim Walz’s Minnesota, they may enjoy the basic benefit of being able to eat free breakfast and lunch. If not, they may incur “school lunch debt” simply for eating — money they owe, or have to work off.

The concept of school lunch debt is absurd and cruel for a thousand different reasons, and free school meals is a no-brainer policy for a thousand more: Kids need food if they’re going to learn, and singling poor kids out for free meals does more harm than good.

But what kids eat, and how they eat it, is just as important for learning, social connection, and human flourishing. I realize that, in a country where we don’t even feed many of our children, a proposal that we not feed them crap and give them time to eat healthy meals together might sound obscenely idealistic. But so much of what parents and legislators worry about — learning loss, student focus, loneliness, too much screen time, behavioral problems, childhood obesity, diet-related illness — is dealt with in the lunchroom as much as the classroom.

There is no single solution here. But one strategy is simple and obvious: Feed kids whole, wholesome foods. Serve them as a group. Give them time to eat communally without distraction.

The merits of serving healthy food in school should be self-evident. Most American kids are not eating healthy diets at home. School could be one place they get regular nutritious meals. But it’s not just nutritional content that matters. It’s the meaning, values, and connection that come with eating. Eating is often (or should be) pleasurable; many of our traditions involve specific foods or treats, and revolve around eating in groups of loved ones. Eating can (and should) be connective. Arthur Brooks has a great piece in the Atlantic this week about how eating with family and friends is related to greater happiness and better mental health (and eating nutritious food can improve mood, while junk food worsens it). That togetherness really is key: To put it into oversimplified shorthand, the happiest people rarely eat alone. Sitting down for meals at set times, rather than eating on the go or grabbing random snacks or nibbling throughout the day whenever one is bored or having a craving, is a much healthier and more pleasurable way to live, physically and emotionally.

In school, we teach our kids to do the opposite.

The typical lunch period in a US school is 30 minutes. For elementary schoolers, it’s even shorter. That means students have just half an hour to get from class to the lunchroom, get their lunch, wolf it down, and get on to the next class. This is a very American way of eating — lots of American workers also only have 30 minutes or less to eat lunch — but a deeply dysfunctional one. Even schools that ban cell phones in class often let students use them during lunch hours, meaning that lunch breaks are full of kids scarfing ultraprocessed foods while they stare at their screens.

This is a recipe for extremely poor health, both mental and physical. It strips young people of the exact kind of unstructured social time they need to develop basic interpersonal skills. It sets them up to consider what they eat and how they eat to be generally unimportant — ways to simply quell hunger, rather than key components of health and means of full participation in society.

And it sets these habits up for life. While more than three-quarters of Americans over 50 said they had a meal with their families every day growing up, far fewer Americans 18-49 say the same. And there’s a huge class divide at play, which was not the case for the over-50 set: While 61% of Americans under 50 with post-graduate degrees say they enjoyed daily family meals, just 38% of those without high school degrees said the same.

This is particularly bad for young people. While 84% of Gen Xers report having regular family meals growing up, just 38% of Gen Zers did.

This isn’t because parents have gotten lazier. I suspect it’s because parents have gotten busier (this is bolstered by the fact that kids in single-parent households are a lot less likely to have regular family meals than kids in two-parent ones). If parents are on a shift through dinner hour, a family dinner isn’t going to happen. Schools obviously cannot fix all of the challenges that American families face. But they can try to fill some of the gaps. Time to connect with other people over a shared meal is a benefit that the children of the better-off and better-educated tend to enjoy, and that those of the struggling do not. School lunch can’t give kids time to sit down with their parents for dinner. But it can allow them to sit down with their classmates for lunch — to talk, to laugh, and, if the school doesn’t allow cellphones in the lunchroom (which they shouldn’t), to have their eyes off of a screen and on other humans. Imagine American kids having this from kindergarten on: All of the kids in class sitting down at once, all eating a healthy and freshly-made meal (not something shipped in from a huge food company and heated up in industrial ovens), actually talking to each other.

This is how kids eat in schools all over the world, and especially in wealthy and developed countries. It’s America that’s an outlier here.