In the Japanese TV drama Chef: Three Star School Lunch, Michelin three-star chef Mitsuko Hoshino uses a limited budget and ingredients to produce meals that students say are “the best.” TV viewers find their own mouths watering at the food.

More than a decade ago, Scottish schoolgirl Martha Payne wrote a blog critiquing the meals served at her school, which attracted much attention and prompted improvements. Meanwhile, English chef Jamie Oliver and former US first lady Michelle Obama have both promoted healthier school lunches. Clearly, school lunch is not just a meal, but a topic of universal concern.

School lunches for all

In 1982, Taiwan’s Ministry of Education (MOE) adopted a formal program for nutritious lunches in primary and secondary schools. After 20 years of evolution, in 2002 the School Health Act was passed, putting dietitians in control of school meals and providing for food health education.

In addition, the Council of Agriculture subsidizes schools to use ingredients produced under the certification schemes for high-quality, domestic or organic produce, or covered by the food traceability program, in their school lunches. Moreover, the MOE has adopted standards for the content of school meals and created the online Campus Food Ingredients Registration Platform, where one can see details of the meals served in ­every school. Wealthier cities and counties even provide organic vegetables and rice at least once a week.

MOE statistics show that 100% of students at Taiwan’s 3,368 primary and secondary schools have access to nutritious lunches, with students paying from NT$32 to NT$50 per meal and full subsidies provided for disadvantaged children. The rules for students suffering sudden hardship are also generous, so that students never have to go hungry.

Non-governmental groups such as the Douceur Network and the Fullfoods Foundation have joined the ranks of those working to upgrade the quality of school meals and make campus meals both nutritious and delicious.

In 2022 French YouTuber Ku made a video for his channel “Ku’s dream” showing the amazed reactions of French high-school students to a Taiwanese school meal. Many of those who tried it were effusive in their praise of the cuisine.
 

Vegetarian dishes, foreign cuisine

We visit Xiufeng Elementary School in New Taipei’s Xizhi District, the 2018 winner of the Douceur Taiwan School Lunch Competition, to learn how the school provides such delicious meals. School dietitian Yang Jui Ping leads a team of eight kitchen staff—mostly mothers or grandmothers of Xiufeng schoolkids—in making lunches for 2,098 students and faculty in 76 classes. This year only five students have not signed up for school lunches, an enrollment rate of 99.7%.

On the day of our visit, the menu includes three dishes and a soup, plus fruit. The main dish is a lean pork curry, while the side dishes include cucumber with shredded agar-agar, spinach, and miso soup. The meal is accompanied by rice with added red quinoa, and dessert is a jujube. There is also a vegetarian option. The school provides foreign-­style dishes too: for example, by switching out the potatoes in the curry for sweet potatoes and adding fermented fish sauce, the dish is transformed into authentic Vietnamese curry.

The curry is not simply a basic curry—generous amounts of turmeric and Japanese “Vermont curry sauce” are added and the ingredients are of high quality. Yang Jui Ping says that students pay NT$45 per meal, while the government adds subsidies of NT$10 for the use of domestically produced certified ingredients, giving a budget of NT$55 per meal.

Supporting children’s health

Yang takes us on a tour of the school’s “edible landscaping,” after which she hurries to a classroom to give a nutrition class. She uses a video produced by the Formosa Cancer Foundation stressing the value of fruit and vegetables in combating disease, and explains the “579 rule” for consuming “rainbow” produce (five servings a day for children, seven for adult women, and nine for adult men). The second-­grade students listen attentively to her lively teaching.

Yang says that besides being nutritious, campus meals also need to be visually appealing, fragrant, and tasty. To reduce food miles and purchase costs for ingredients, she uses large amounts of fruits and vegetables produced in areas near the school, although she also sources some items from further afield, such as through a contract with a vegetable production and marketing group in Yunlin County.

We see the students eating lunch, which the majority do with gusto. Some help themselves to seconds of rice or curry, and some even say, “I really like eating greens.”

Yang avers that health is one of the pillars of national strength, and well-prepared, nutritious food can help maintain health into old age, thereby reducing the country’s healthcare expenditures. In addition, students can learn about foreign cultures through food.
 

Campus farm

Xu Chunshan, dietitian at Kaohsiung’s Renwu Ele­mentary School, was runner-up in the 2021 Douceur school lunch competition. Located in heavily industrial Renwu District, the school laid out a vegetable garden on its campus to grow various cruciferous vegetables, which are beneficial for the lungs. They include ‘White Jade’ daikon radishes, broccoli, and arugula, along with other nutritious vegetables such as carrots.

When we visit, teacher Wu Peijuan is in a classroom teaching students about the health impacts of airborne fine particulate matter (PM2.5). After class, teacher and students excitedly bring spades to the vegetable garden to dig up radishes. To their surprise, Xu Chunshan is there to demonstrate how to pull up the radishes by hand. He grasps one by the leaf stems and twists it twice, after which it easily comes out of the soil, making everyone burst out laughing. The children carry the harvested radishes to the kitchen for the kitchen staff to turn into radish cake.

Zhang Shumin, head of Renwu Elementary’s affiliated kindergarten, says her students spend half an hour each day tending the plants in the school vegetable garden. “One day they caught 80 snails in the garden.” Through this activity students learn how hard it is to grow food, and come to understand the value of what they consume. But most importantly they build a connection with the land.

Reforming picky eaters

Xu Chunshan is also trained in the field of catering. The menus he designs not only stress that the meals be colorful and that the flavors not clash, but also define the quantities of seasonings to be used, to ensure consistency of taste.

That day’s menu includes kung pao chicken, spinach, and mixed vegetables. The cucumber served with the kung pao chicken has been pickled in sugar so that it retains its green color when cooked, while the chicken has been marinated so it will be tender and juicy. Because many children dislike the usual mixed vegetables combination of peas, corn, and carrots, Xu replaces the starchy peas with protein-rich edamame, giving the veggies a very different texture. Some students even declare, “Mixed vegetables are my favorite!”

Xu also has special ways of dealing with “leftover kings” such as bitter melon and eggplant. He uses bitter melon to make chicken soup, and he stir-fries eggplant with minced pork, making a dish that is really appetizing.

A school lunch is not just a meal, it is part of the experience and learning process of life. Wu Peijuan says that students need to overcome their aversion to certain dishes, for example by accompanying them with rice, drinking water between mouthfuls, or taking small bites. In this way children can develop their ability to deal with challenges.
 

School lunch diplomacy

In recent years, campus meals have also become a vehicle for “people-to-people diplomacy.” The Douceur Network has promoted exchanges of lunch menus between schools in Taiwan and Japan. Takahiro Hotate, dietitian at the Minohama Gakuen school in Japan’s Ibaraki Prefecture, made meals to accompany bananas gifted by Taiwan, adapting menus designed by a Taiwanese school dietitian to serve Taiwanese-­style fried chicken, and komatsuna (Japanese mustard spinach) fried with garlic and mushrooms. He also made a variant of Chiayi’s famous turkey rice, adding carrots, beansprouts and cabbage to shredded chicken breast to create an appealing dish that the school later added to its regular menu. Japanese students responded to these offerings by declaring that Taiwanese fried chicken and bananas were extremely tasty.

Meanwhile, the school meal supply center for Numata City in Japan’s Gunma Prefecture designed authentic local dishes for Taiwanese students at Jian Guo Junior High School in Beigang, Yunlin County. The dishes included tofu rice, Japanese konjac salad, scallion and miso chicken, and Japanese-­style dough-drop soup, along with an apple and milk. After eating these meals, the Taiwanese students loudly proclaimed that the Japanese-style food tasted “a hundred times better” than their usual school lunches.

Huang Chialin, secretary-general of the Douceur Network, says that in contrast to the emphasis on presentation in Japanese and Korean cuisine, Taiwanese school lunches have more varied ingredients, while Taiwan also offers vege­tarian options and addresses the needs of poorer students. Moreover, Taiwan’s Campus Food Ingredients Registration Platform is the only website of its kind in the world.

Incentives for eco-friendly farming

Chen Jie-ting of the Agricultural Technology Research Institute says that in the past, agricultural agencies put great effort into promoting the “Three Labels and One QR Code” systems (certification labels for high-quality, domestically produced, and organic produce, and a QR Code for traceability), but with limited success. Only when the government began subsidizing the use of certified ingredients in school lunches did farmers discover the potential of the school meals market and get behind these labeling schemes, switching their production to eco-friendly methods. “The speed of change has been astonishing,” says Chen. For many farmers, the school meals policy has been a key factor in this transition.

In 2015 the United Nations announced the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and issued a list of 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Taiwan’s school meals program is relevant to several of these goals, including “Zero Hunger,” “Good Health and Well-Being,” “Reduced Inequalities,” and “Responsible Consumption and Production.” Clearly, a school lunch is more than just a meal: It is part of a chain that includes society, culture, the economy, and the environment. Most importantly, school meals have become a topic of public interest and collective citizen action.

For more pictures, please click 《Citizen Action Through Dining: School Meals and Sustainable Development》