In the United States, school meals are provided to students from low-income families either at no cost or at a government-subsidized price. These free or subsidized meals have the potential to increase household food security, which can improve children's health and expand their educational opportunities. A study of a free school meal program in the United States found that providing free meals to elementary and middle school children in areas characterized by high food insecurity led to increased school discipline among the students.

The biggest school meal program in the United States is the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), which was created under President Harry S. Truman in 1946. Its purpose is to prevent malnutrition and provide a foundation for good nutritional health. The text of the National School Lunch Act, which established the program, called it a "measure of national security, to safeguard the health and well-being of the nation's children and to encourage domestic consumption of nutritious agricultural commodities."

The NSLP currently operates in about 100,000 public schools, nonprofit private schools, and residential care institutions. In the fiscal year 2024, it served more than 4.8 billion lunches.

Food insecurity in children Food insecurity includes both inadequate quantity and inadequate quality of food. Children need not just enough calories, but also enough nutrients for proper growth and development, and improper or stunted growth can have a variety of medical and developmental implications. Food insecurity and malnutrition will affect children's educational outcomes, family life, and overall health. It has been linked to worse development outcomes for children, such as impaired social and reading skills.

Prevalence Food insecurity has risen in recent years. Between 2007 and 2008, the rate in the U.S. increased from 11.1% to 14.6%, the largest annual increase since researchers began tracking the rate in the mid-1990s. Among households with children, food insecurity increased from 15.8% to 21% during that period.

Four million American children "experience prolonged periodic food insufficiency and hunger each year", which amounts to 8% of children under the age of 12. An additional 21% are at risk.

Implications Food insecurity affects the health and well-being of children in several ways. It is a major threat to "growth, health, cognitive, and behavioral potential", and most behavioral, emotional, and academic problems are more prevalent among hungry children than non-hungry children. Food insecurity is linked to lower math scores, trouble getting along with peers, poor health, and more frequent illness. A study by researchers at the Boston University School of Medicine found that children aged 6–11 who came from food-insecure homes had lower arithmetic scores, were more likely to have repeated a grade or seen a therapist, and had more difficulty getting along with peers than similar children in food-secure homes. Hungry children are much more likely to have clinical levels of psychosocial dysfunction, and they show more anxious, irritable, aggressive, and oppositional behaviors than peers whose families are low-income but food-secure.

In addition to academic and behavioral problems, children with inadequate diets are more prone to illnesses. Researchers have found that malnutrition leads to an array of health problems that can become chronic. Underfed children may have "extreme weight loss, stunted growth, weakened resistance to infection", and even early death. Such ailments reduce the amount of time students can spend learning at school.

These cognitive, behavioral, and physical problems are exacerbated in children who, in addition to being undernourished, are from impoverished backgrounds. Scientists now believe that "malnutrition alters intellectual development by interfering with overall health as well as the child's energy level, rate of motor development and rate of growth." Moreover, "low economic status can exacerbate all [of] these factors, placing impoverished children at particular risk for cognitive impairment later in life".

Education and food both have an effect on the "central capabilities" described by Martha Nussbaum, an American philosopher. These capabilities, which Nussbaum saw as integral to raising people above the poverty threshold, are life, bodily health, bodily integrity, sense, imagination and thought, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, other species, play, and control over one's environment (both political and material).Nussbaum, Martha Craven. 2011. Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard UP. Nutrition affects bodily health and bodily integrity, and education has broader connections to sense, imagination and thought, practical reason, and control over one's environment. Without these capabilities, according to Nussbaum, people fall into poverty traps and lack the proper opportunities to rise out of them. Government efforts such as meal programs can prevent people from falling into poverty, as well as lift them out of it.

History of school meal programs

Prior to the 1946 National School Lunch Act

Before the official establishment of the large-scale, government-funded food programs that are prevalent today in the United States, small, non-governmental programs existed. As early as the late 19th century, cities such as Boston and Philadelphia operated independent school lunch programs, with the assistance of volunteers or charities.

Until the 1930s, most school lunch programs were volunteer efforts led by teachers and mothers' clubs. These programs drew on the expertise of professional home economics. For the people who began these programs, school lunchrooms were the perfect setting in which to feed poor children and, more importantly, to teach immigrant and middle-class children the principles of nutrition and healthy eating.

During the Great Depression, the numbers of hungry children seeking food overwhelmed lunchrooms. Thus, local programs began to look to state governments, and then the national government, for resources. The national government began providing funding for school lunches on a small scale as early as 1932. This funding originated from New Deal agencies such as the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and the Civil Works Administration. The federal government monitored supplies from commercial farmers and purchased surplus commodities. Schools served as an outlet for federal commodity donations. In 1935, the programs expanded through the Works Progress Administration and the National Youth Administration, both of which provided labor for school cafeterias. During World War II, the War Food Administration (1943–45) helped create school lunch programs.

Eventually, the New Deal policies began to dissolve, and farm surpluses decreased. However, there was still a desire to keep school lunch programs in place, so federal cash assistance began to be appropriated on a year-to-year basis, and the National School Lunch Program was developed.

1946–2000 The United States Congress passed the National School Lunch Act in 1946.

By the end of its first year, the National School Lunch Program had helped 7.1 million children. However, from the start, the program linked children's nutrition to the priorities of agricultural and food interests, and to the agenda of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). In these early years, the program provided substantial welfare to commercial farmers as an outlet for surplus commodities, but provided few free meals to poor children and fed a relatively small number of schoolchildren.

In the 1960s, a group of mainstream national women's organizations began focusing on the shortcomings of the NSLP. The evidence they presented became crucial to Congressional debates on race and poverty. In 1962, Congress amended the NSLP, changing it from a distributor of state-regulated grant aid to a permanently funded meal reimbursement program. In 1969, President Richard Nixon pushed Congress to provide funding for school lunches beyond the reimbursement program, declaring, "The time has come to end hunger in America."

In between, in 1966, Congress passed the Child Nutrition Act, which stated that educational progress was an objective of school meal programs. The bill, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, created the federally subsidized School Breakfast Program (SBP), which supplemented the existing lunch program by providing low-cost or free breakfasts to students at public and nonprofit private schools. It also created the Summer Food Service Program and established National School Lunch Week.

By the end of the 1970s, many advocates saw privatization as the only way to keep school lunch programs going. Fast food from private companies began to be served in cafeterias, rather than more nutritious meals.

In 1994, a number of changes were made to the NSLP, primarily to standardize the nutritional quality of school meals. Dietary guidelines were proposed to take effect in 1996, and the USDA launched the Healthy School Meals Initiative to improve nutritional education for school-age children.

By the end of the 20th century, the NSLP was the nation's second-largest domestic food program, after the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (more commonly known as food stamps).

Early 21st century In 2004, as the childhood obesity crisis came into national focus, the USDA urged school districts to establish wellness policies and initiatives tailored to local needs. The USDA regulations were intended to strengthen nutritional education nationwide while giving schools the autonomy to decide what types of foods could be sold in their cafeterias and vending machines.

In 2007, the USDA hired the Institute of Medicine (IOM; now the National Academy of Medicine) to develop recommendations for "bringing school food up-to-date with current science". Dr. Virginia Stallings, a pediatric gastroenterologist at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia who led the IOM team, concluded, "Since the school meal programs were last updated, we've gained the greater understanding of children's nutritional needs and the dietary factors that contribute to obesity, heart disease, and other chronic health problems."

In 2010, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act made the most sweeping changes in the history of the NSLP, putting vending-machine snacks and à la carte menu items under federal regulation for the first time. Championed by First Lady Michelle Obama and directed by the USDA, the law established guidelines requiring more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains in school meals. The guidelines, which took effect in the 2012–13 school year, also limited sodium, fat, and caloric intake based on students' ages.

Most students benefited from the NSLP, even if they did not receive free lunches, because the program also subsidized full-price meals in the majority of U.S. schools.

COVID-19 pandemic and universal eligibility

When the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States began in spring 2020, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act provided supplemental school lunch funding and allowed the USDA to waive requirements such as serving on school campuses, the number of meals per student per day, and eligibility restrictions. Permission was extended by the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 in December 2020, and further by the American Rescue Plan Act, with USDA eventually allowing universal meals for the entire 2021-2022 school year. The subsidies were voluntary; about 90% of U.S. school districts participated with free lunch for all students.