Sweden

One of the hottest pictures on this list comes from Stockholm, Sweden. Its author, Redditor Cool_Kalkon, told Bored Panda that their school usually serves different types of stews, complementing it with chicken or beef, but there are vegetarian options, too.

“The quality [of our lunch] is really good considering the budget they have,” Cool_Kalkon explained to us. “The food is always healthy and mostly cooked from raw ingredients in school. They even got a vegetarian alternative every day and a salad bar.” 

Cool_Kalkon said they don't know how the lunches could be improved because they’re satisfied with the food. But if they were to come up with something, they would probably “cut down on the number of stews and have a bit more variety in the menu.”

However, the Redditor pointed out that their picture doesn't represent the whole country of Sweden. “There are schools with much worse food and also schools with much better,” they said. “But, all in all, I think it’s fantastic that we are able to get a healthy meal on our plate every day without having to pay.”

Japan

On the other side of the globe, we have another Redditor, Sjbfujcfjm, representing the city of Takatsuki in Osaka Prefecture, Japan.

Their picture reveals what the country’s younger kids (2-6 years old) are having. A staff member at White Rose Kindergarten, Sjbfujcfjm told Bored Panda that “Daily lunches usually consist of a portion of meat (fish being a popular option), a vegetable, rice, soup and something sweet like an apple or orange slice or fruit jelly.”

“The quality is quite good,” the Redditor added. “All of the teachers have the option to eat the school lunch, and we do each day. We have a chef and his crew of 4-5 come in daily to prepare the meals. A few times a month, they prepare a special lunch featuring foods from a specific region of Japan.”

However, they would like to see more meals featuring food from other countries. “We sometimes have dishes or sides from China or Korea. But I’d like to see a wider variety,” Sjbfujcfjm said.

What Food Should Best School Lunches Include?

To contextualize these pictures, we can take a look at the 2021 study by the Global Child Nutrition Foundation that looked into the “food basket” — a fundamental element of any school meal program — of 139 countries.

Grains/cereals were the most common food category (served in 87% of programs), followed by oil (78%) and legumes (75%). Fruits and vegetables (63-65%) were less common, and animal-source foods were served least often—though there was a high degree of variation across income groups. Poultry, for example, was served in 69% of programs in high-income settings but just 5% of programs in low-income settings.

The gap was even larger for fruits, which were served in 97% and 22.5% of programs in high and low-income settings, respectively—a difference of 74.5 percentage points.

In high-income settings, children received an average of 8.3 different food categories, while this value dropped to 7.1, 6.5, and 5.2 in upper middle-income, lower middle-income, and low-income settings, respectively. Across regions, this value was the greatest in South Asia/East Asia/Pacific and the lowest in Sub-Saharan Africa.

What Affects School Lunches Around the World?

Across all regions and income groups, market purchases were the most common method through which school meal programs procured food.

These purchases primarily occurred in domestic markets, though 38% of programs purchased at least some food from foreign countries. In-kind contributions from foreign and domestic settings were much less common at 23% and 21%, respectively, and were primarily reported by programs operating in low-income and lower-middle-income countries.

Because of this, after inflation popped in 2022 to a level unseen in decades, many schools are now forced to spend way more to feed their students. In the US, for example, the price of a meal at elementary and secondary schools spiked by a whopping 305%.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine created an energy supply shock, contributing to higher transport costs to deliver food from farm to table. That, combined with other factors such as higher labor costs, underpin fast-rising prices throughout the food complex.

The industry is really interdependent, too. For instance, global shocks in major markets for vegetable oil — a key ingredient in margarine — drove margarine prices up by 43.8% in 2022. Prices for commodities such as soybean, palm, sunflower, and rapeseed (also known as canola) oil tend to move together, meaning a supply disruption for one tends to affect the whole group.

Hopefully, everything will get better in the near future, and school lunches around the world will rise to a new standard!