Beijing has pledged to provide lunch cooked in in-campus kitchens to all its primary and middle school students before the end of next year. According to the Beijing Municipal Education Commission, 1,300 on-campus kitchens had been built or renovated by the end of last year, with 366 of them being smart kitchens. The capital now has 1,236 primary schools and 661 middle schools.

The target is to provide students fresh, warm and nutritious food. The smart kitchens employ robots that can cook 200 different kinds of dishes while maintaining quality.

Having lunch in school was something unheard of in my school years, except in some boarding schools. Most students in those days either went home for lunch, or made do with steamed buns they had brought from home. Following the reform and opening-up of the late 1970s, we learnt that schools in many foreign countries were offering their students lunch -often for free. We could only be envious of our counterparts.

At the turn of the century, some Chinese schools began providing students with lunch in their canteens — a pilot project welcomed by parents as well as students. With the expansion of cities, the commuting time from home to school became longer, making it impossible for many students to have lunch at home. Worse, when both parents had to go to work, there was nobody at home to prepare lunch for the kids. As a result, a school that provided lunch had an edge over other schools when parents were selecting a school for their offspring — at least it was so when my wife and I were selecting one for our son.

School lunch thus became popular in urban areas even if students had to shell out 15-25 yuan ($2.16-$3.60) for each lunch. Since many schools did not have cooking facilities, they had to sign contracts with food providers who sent lunch boxes to the campus. The profit-seeking suppliers usually had a number of schools to cater to and would thus prepare the food hours in advance, sending cold or poor quality lunch boxes to the students.

Beijing's in-campus kitchen program aims to drive such profit-seeking suppliers off campus to ensure that every penny students spend is worth it. Similar programs are being conducted in other cities nationwide and I hope complaints about poor-quality school lunch will soon be a thing of the past.

In the country's vast rural areas, students in their nine-year compulsory education stage have been enjoying free lunch since 2011, thanks to a national nutrition improvement program. Thanks to the central authorities investing billions of yuan each year, subsidies from the local governments and support from social welfare and charity groups, more than 26 million rural students have been served simple but nutritious lunches for 15 years now. A typical lunch includes a meat dish, a vegetable dish, a bowl of egg soup and sufficient buns and rice. Local governments subsidize payment for cooking facilities and cooking staff.

Students have greatly benefited from the program. A survey of 2.27 million 15-year-old students from 71 counties shows that, between 2012 and 2020, the average height of boys increased by 10.3 centimeters and that of girls by 8 centimeters — a feat worth applauding.

Chinese are particular about food. A popular Chinese saying — zhongkou nantiao — means it's difficult to satisfy different tastes. There is no dearth of complaints about school lunch in both urban and rural areas. The complaints range from lack of variety, poor cooking skills, expired ingredients, wastage, inefficient supervision and ineffective communication between the schools and parents.

Such problems have caught the authorities' attention and have been dealt with. Some localities require principals and teachers to have the same food with the students. Regulations have been worked out to ensure cooking ingredients are purchased at reasonable prices. Special commissions have been set up to better communicate with the parents while food safety is supervised through the entire supply chain.

It may not be possible to cater to every taste but I believe that with more investment poured into the significant program and with school lunch programs being put under the scanner, school lunches in China will become more delicious and nutritious.

The author is former deputy editor-in-chief of China Daily.

kangbing@chinadaily.com.cn

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