Progressing the Right to Food through School Meals for All

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash 

When people are in the care of a public institution - such as a public school, university, or prison - local advocates have important opportunities to draw on a human rights framework in their calls for improvements to the experience of food in these settings. Policymakers and staff have a responsibility to consider how decisions they make about food help to progress the rights of the children, youth, and adults in their care. Decisions about where and from whom food is purchased, the type and quality of food served, and how people eating and preparing this food are involved in setting these priorities are all opportunities to use a human rights approach. Each step in this process has the potential to promote or undermine the dignity, agency, and self-determination of those in institutional care, and a human rights lens can help advocates and decision-makers through difficult conversations.

At our monthly Community of Practice meeting last week, we focused on the role that public institutions play in progressing the right to food. We heard from two guest speakers:

Daniel Rosen spoke about the ways that most jails and prisons in this country are failing to respect and protect the right to food for people in their care. As Co-Founder and Director of Advocacy & Partnerships at the Coalition for Carceral Nutrition, Daniel raised concerns about the quality and quantity of food provided in many institutions, and the lack of coordination nationally to improve the standards and provision across the country. He explained that some of the key challenges for making progress are the public’s lack of awareness of what is happening in many carceral settings, and a persistent belief that incarcerated people do not deserve food that meets their nutritional, social, and cultural needs.

Jan Poppendieck, Professor Emerita of Sociology at Hunter College, City University of New York, and a Senior Faculty Fellow at the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute, then shared her insights about New York state’s recent funding of free school meals for all children statewide. She situated the state-level achievement within the incremental successes of a thirty year campaign for free school meals in New York City and encouraged participants to look for opportunities at all levels of government to make progress.

This post explores how School Meals for All policies are an important example of how to progress the right to food at a state level. 

Extending food as a right to more children in the U.S.

In May, New York became the ninth state in the country to adopt a statewide free school meal program. This means that in 2025/26, more than a quarter of all school children in the United States will attend school in a state where school meals are provided to all children, regardless of their family’s financial situation. 

At this month’s membership meeting, Jan Poppendieck, author of Free for All: Fixing School Food in America and co-convener of our Poverty, Public Policy, and Politics working group, shared her experience and insights about how we arrived at this point. She explained how it took more than thirty years to achieve universal provision for children in New York City, with many partial steps for particular groups of children secured along the way. Following this success in 2017, a campaign for a statewide commitment was catalysed in 2023 after the pandemic revealed the feasibility and benefits of providing meals to all children. In January 2025, the New York State Education Law was amended by the addition of section 915-a, providing for  statewide universal free school meals. Funding for the amendment was included in the FY 2026 Enacted Budget in May.

The relatively quick success at state-level - compared to the decades of work that were needed at the city-level - was attributed to a variety of factors: 

• Increased understanding about the impact and benefits of universal school meals, based on research from cities like NYC that had already implemented the program;

• Increased financial feasibility due to pathways created by the federal Community Eligibility Program; 

• Greater support from food service providers and advocates following the success - and then expiration - of federal waivers that permitted any school or district to serve free meals for all during the pandemic;

• Existence of statewide programs in other states, which created political pressure and convinced advocates and allies that such State level action was feasible. 

• Greater coordination by national advocates working to facilitate state campaigns and promote the sharing of strategies, legislative language, and financial analyses.

Jan emphasized that the voices of student advocates about the stigma associated with a multi-tiered system have been critically important to influencing policymakers and securing change at both city and state levels.  

She stressed that the requirement to provide breakfast and lunch to all children, at no cost to the student, was effectively “establishing a right to food for a very large group of people”. Rather than dividing children up by their families’ financial situation, the law will now protect the rights of all children and youth who attend school in New York state every day.

Photo by Isabella Fischer on Unsplash

School Meals for All and the Right to Food

The right to food is about more than simply having access to a certain number of calories. Food should be adequate (meeting our nutritional, social, and cultural needs), available (either for purchase in stores and markets or because we have the conditions to grow, harvest, and produce food for ourselves, families, and communities), accessible (both economically and physically, regardless of our circumstances), and sustainable (both for present and future generations). At the heart of this is the principle of agency and self-determination, requiring us to ensure that people most affected by decisions about food are meaningfully involved in setting the priorities. 

School Meals for All policies create the conditions to touch on every dimension of the right to food. When the whole student population is included in a school meal service, it removes stigma and improves participation in meal provision by all children. Universal provision also frees up administrative time for food service managers and staff to focus on creating and delivering an inclusive meal service that reflects the needs of all the students in that school. Examples like the Halal School Meal program in Maine show how food service staff, pupils, and families have been working together to create more inclusive school food options that enable all students to take part in school lunches. Local food purchasing targets build connections between providing nutritious meals to children while supporting local farmers and economies.  

Key takeaways 

Although the United States has not ratified the main international treaties that protect the right to food directly, we do have an obligation to ensure our laws, policies, and practices are not going against the spirit of these treaties. This means that public institutions - funded by tax dollars and employing local, state, or federal staff - are important sites for advocacy to improve decisions about how food is purchased, prepared, and experienced by staff and the people in their care. 

Policies like School Meals for All are important examples of how to progressively realize the right to food in the United States. Ultimately, constitutional guarantees recognizing the right to food, like the one established in Maine in 2021, provide even greater foundations for developing, implementing, and strengthening laws and policies that advance the right to food locally. In the meantime, advocates can draw on human rights principles and frameworks to support steps that advance access to nutritious and culturally valued food, while supporting local farmers and food producers. 

How to get involved

We encourage you to check out FRAC’s Healthy School Meals for All page to learn more about progress and active campaigns in your state. 

If you are interested in learning more about how people are using a human rights approach to transform the food system, we invite you to join our growing community of local advocates and organizations.