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.
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“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.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show both obesity and severe obesity climbed steadily following passage of the law. In fact, severe obesity in children has tripled over the last 17 years, according to authors of a recent Journal of the American Medical Association Network study who called the obesity epidemic a “public health emergency.”
While the authors say the crisis underscores the need for public health interventions, there may be a simpler solution.
Will Davis, a health economist at Mississippi State University, has studied outcomes at schools that utilize the Community Eligibility Provision, a component of the government’s 2010 anti-hunger law.
Davis’s research suggests the federal government’s food programs are resulting in negative health outcomes for children.
“My estimates suggest that attending a CEP school increases expected body mass index percentile, decreases the probability of being healthy weight, and increases the probabilities of overweight and obesity,” Davis concluded in a 2019 paper.
Proponents of free lunch programs might doubt these findings, but it’s not difficult to see why these programs might result in negative health outcomes for children.
When the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act was passed, hunger was largely a non-issue in U.S. households, with about 1 in 100 households with children reporting food insecurity for parents and adults. Compare this to the childhood obesity rate, which was roughly 17%, according to the CDC.
America’s food problem wasn’t (and isn’t) that people are starving — it’s that our diets are packed with junk and light on actual nutrition. Unfortunately, federal programs have made this problem worse, not better, at least for most families.
While school meals tend to improve dietary intake for the poorest American children, they reduce nutritional quality for children from middle- and higher-income families, the majority of whom gain access under universal free lunch programs.
It’s not hard to see why. As Manhattan Institute scholar Chris Pope recently observed, school food is almost never fresh and not particularly high quality. And given a choice, as children often do under school programs, they tend to choose less healthy options. Meanwhile, research shows many children eat two lunches: a free one and one from home or food from à la carte.
This last item I can attest to personally: My wife recently discovered our 12-year-old son was double-dipping, eating a free meal as well as taking food from the à la carte, which showed up on our bill.
Like so many progressive policies, free lunches sound like a great idea. But as Milton Friedman once observed, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Sadly, their costs go well beyond the $17 billion in aid the feds doled out last year to participating schools. These programs likely are adversely affecting the health of millions of American children. That’s a high price to pay for photo ops.
Jon Miltimore is the senior editor at the American Institute for Economic Research. Follow him on Substack.