We certainly didn’t need the government to provide school lunches.
Nor did what we ate at my old school in Murchison make the national news.
Following a filling breakfast, a few white bread sandwiches made by Mum, with a bit of home baking and fruit was just the ticket for lunch.
Some kids brought little bottles of what Dad called lolly water (cordial made with concentrate and water and a cup or more of sugar in a half-gallon flagon). We weren’t allowed to.
I usually just drank water out of the school fountain at primary school, after the early ignominy of milk leaking through my schoolbag when I was sent with a corked bottle of it.
In winter, however, we lined up with our own enamel mugs for a ladling of hot cocoa made in the kitchen used for manual training. It was delicious. Piping hot, sweet, and, if it had developed a skin, so much the better as far as I was concerned.
I am not sure who paid for that.
When we eventually got home, at least an hour after school finished, there would be afternoon tea — usually two pieces of home baking and maybe a piece of fruit later.
I was ravenous by the time I had to feed the dogs and chooks before tea. A sneaky chomp out of a dog biscuit or two and gobbling a handful of the hens’ wheat helped. Alert the SPCA.
Dinner would be meat and three veg, always followed by a pudding, often based on preserved fruit.
If we didn’t like something, we might be told how grateful the starving millions in other parts of the world would be for our rejected morsels.
That was as close as we got to knowing anything about food insecurity. We would not have believed there was anyone in New Zealand who went without food.
Many of us might still want to believe that, but it is naive nonsense.
Many thousands of children are in households where food runs out and what food there is may be of poor quality, bought because it is cheap rather than nutritious.
The school lunch programme was introduced to partly address this issue, ensuring children in the lowest socio-economic areas got a nutritious meal in the middle of the day.
Not every child in every school which is part of the programme needs that meal necessarily but providing it to all pupils means there is no sense of shame in receiving it, and the opportunity for pupils to bond over a shared experience.
Before the government took a blowtorch to the quality of the programme, insisting a decent lunch could be provided through a centralised system for $3, communities worked with schools to develop menus and systems which suited them and met nutrition rules, while also supporting local economies.
There was some concern about wastage under the old system, but it should not have been an insurmountable problem. Nobody is yet willing to say what wastage is now, but it must be considerable.
Now, some food is so awful some children who really need it are not eating it, likely copying peers lucky enough to have other food options.
At my old school in Murchison, where there had been a great set-up, principal Andy Agnew has been one of the vocal critics of the new national programme.
His most recent concern about this debacle was last week’s discovery his pupils were eating meals contaminated with melted plastic.
The containers had been overheated so both the plastic film on the top and the sturdier plastic on the bottom had melted into the food.
Children did not notice they were eating plastic until they got to the bottom of the container.
‘‘Absolutely disgusting and dangerous’’ is how he described it.
Assistant Education Minister David Seymour has agreed this incident was unacceptable.
But he has been fobbing off other concerns, playing to head-in-the-sand tut-tutters who think parents not making lunches are slack bludgers and that a few white bread sandwiches could save the day.
He had the gall to suggest legitimate complainants were politicising the issue. This, from the man who said during the election campaign the old programme was almost criminal in a cost-of-living crisis, and he wanted it scrapped.
It is time for the Prime Minister, who tells us he is decisive, to insist this mess be resolved urgently, in a way that suits communities.
Putting Mr Seymour in charge, cynically hoping National could avoid any flak from cuts, was folly.
Now Mr Seymour has made an inedible meal of it, Mr Luxon has a chance to show leadership.
If that is too hard, perhaps he could call on Education Minister Erica Stanford for advice.
■ Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
