Free School Meals Campaign
How free school meals turned round Finland’s health record
School
meals are free in Finland. And very good they are too.
Thirty years ago, Finland had the highest obesity rate in Europe. It also had
the highest incidence of working-age people dropping dead with heart attacks.
The government realised that the problem could not be tackled with educational
material alone.
A major public intervention was required, and one of the most important theatres
of change was school.
School meals had been free since the late 1940s. But the North Karelia Project,
as this major public intervention was known, required that they also be highly
nutritious and made, as much as possible, from locally sourced produce.
This dovetailed nicely with an initiative to downscale the nation’s vast
dairy industry, which was contributing to the heart and fat problem by loading
supermarket shelves, and therefore people’s tables, with full-fat milk
and cream and cheese.
The government paid farmers to switch to growing veg and fruit, to ease the
transition, and the nation’s eating habits began to shift.
The government was thinking long-term.
School lunches in Finland are attractive and menus are drawn up locally, not
nationally. They include dishes like lasagne and grated carrot, fish and potato
casserole, home-made pizzas and salad.
Dr Pekka Puska, director general of the National
Public Health Institute of Finland and one of the founders of the North Karelia Project, says that making
school lunches free and of such a high nutritional standard has enabled “(us)
to bring about changes in what children eat - ensuring that they eat a lot
of vegetables - and this then gets back to families.”
In 30 years, the percentage of overweight schoolchildren in Finland is down
to nearly one in ten. It’s one in three here.
The number of premature deaths amongst working age people has dropped 82 per
cent.
That didn’t happen through healthy eating helplines and a couple of Jamie
Oliver TV specials.