The Hidden Costs of 'Free' School Lunches
Free lunch programs are adversely affecting the health of millions of American children. That’s a high price to pay for photo ops.
Earlier this month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) visited a Long Island elementary school to mark the launch of the state’s Universal School Meals Program.
The program, part of Hochul’s affordability agenda, will offer free breakfast and lunch to all 2.7 million public school students, reducing child hunger and saving families an estimated $165 per student each month.
“The Universal School Meals Program puts money back in New Yorkers’ pockets by providing every child with free breakfast and lunch in school, no questions asked,” Hochul said. “No kid should go hungry in the classroom.”
New York’s move toward free food for students is part of a larger nationwide trend over the last decade. Between 2014 and 2023, the share of schools offering free lunch to every student jumped from 14% to 60%. Nine states now offer free school meals for students in full-time education.
In some ways, the trend makes sense. Nobody wants to see a child go hungry, and there’s obvious political appeal. People love “free” stuff, and programs like this give politicians plenty of chances for eye-catching photo-ops with schoolchildren.
Yet while free food programs have their perks, they also come with serious trade-offs.
First, the programs aren’t actually free. My home state of Minnesota passed a law that offered free breakfast and lunch for all schools that wanted to participate in the program. The price tag was an estimated $400 million over the first two years.
The reality is, universal lunch programs aren’t free; they are expensive, and they crowd out other funding priorities.
Yet states are incentivized to offer free food to children through federal programs that have expanded mightily since the passage of the National School Lunch Act of 1946, which was designed to offer free or reduced-price lunch to children at or near the poverty line.
These poverty constraints were lifted with the passage of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, a 2010 law designed to reduce childhood obesity while expanding food access to non-poor students by incentivizing states to offer free lunches with generous federal subsidies.
Did the law achieve these results? Hardly. In fact, the opposite happened.
