Just when you thought American capitalism couldn’t get meaner, it started snatching food away from hungry children.

The Cherry Hill school district announced last month that it was considering a new austerity program for students who can’t afford to pay their lunch bills. If you owe $10 or more, your only option is a tuna fish sandwich. If you owe $20 or more, you won’t get any food at all.



Why tuna? Peanut butter might have been even cheaper, the district’s assistant superintendent Lynn Shugars told the Philadelphia Inquirer, but “we know that our little ones would probably very happily eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches until the end of time”. What could be worse than happy kids eating at school?

Presumably, Shugars isn’t nearly as monstrous as that quote makes her out to be. She’s just operating in a system where local school districts are forced to make horrifying calculations to stay afloat. Our intensely federalized system puts pressure on municipalities with limited spending power. This at the same time that Washington spends $400bn and counting on a useless F-35 fighter jet.

Cherry Hill is no exception, either. A new Trump administration proposal would limit access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap). Changes in eligibility standards for the federal aid program that helped 40 million Americans get affordable meals last year could prevent 500,000 children from getting school lunch.

More than 12 million children in the United States already live in “food insecure” homes, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Fifty-nine percent of poor children say they have come to school hungry, and the numbers are even more striking among black and Latino students. And, of course, if these hungry children do poorly in their classes or in high-stakes standardized tests, the failure will be blamed on them being immersed in a “culture of poverty” or lacking the proper parental engagement.

The problem couldn’t be more morally urgent: children are going hungry in the richest society the world has ever seen. And the solution couldn’t be simpler: a tiny portion of our ample resources should be directed toward making sure that those children are fed. But under capitalism, especially in the United States of America, the simplest of problems have a knack of never getting solved.

In other – still capitalist, but not nearly as barbaric – countries, things are done differently. France, for instance, still charges most students for lunch, but the lunch they receive is nutritious and able to keep students going for much of the day.

The French school lunch program came into existence immediately after the second world war, when a whole generation of children were struggling to survive in a devastated country. While the United States relied on private philanthropy to help needy children, the French state stepped in to take action.

Students were guaranteed at a least one healthy meal a day. And this meal wasn’t just an Ellio’s Pizza square and some chocolate milk, it was a four-course affair. French students receive a salad starter, a hot entrée, followed by a cheese course and dessert. They have at least a half hour to slowly eat and socialize with their peers. Healthy meals are complemented by three recess periods – two short 15-minute ones and an hour-long break following lunch.

We can do this and more in the immensely rich United States of 2019. Every student (from pre-K to grade 12) should be guaranteed a healthy breakfast and lunch, as well as an after-school snack free of charge. Removing means-testing from the equation will save on administrative costs and combat stigma for those already utilizing existing programs.

This isn’t a utopian demand. New York City already provides free breakfast and lunch for all its students. For now, however, in most of the mighty United States, we starve our children, and when we do feed them we feed them food that doesn’t adequately nourish them, we prevent them from having recess periods to exercise, and we pressure them to succeed through individual grit though we know the odds are stacked against them.

The fact that this isn’t constantly questioned is a perfect example of how deep neoliberal capitalism has become ingrained in our societies. We need to demand more for American students – and we need a society that can nurture their immense potential.