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More Sustainable School Meals Children barely notice when you sneak in sustainable lunches

1 June 2026

A series of dishes at a self-serve station, containing a colourful variety of vegetables and pulses

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two rows of schoolchildren eating lunch across a table.Eating habits are formed young and can last a lifetime, which suggests that school meals could be an excellent place to address nutrition and sustainability. Sweden, with universal free school meals for every child, offered a real-life laboratory in which to see the impact of school lunches that are essentially the same but designed to be healthier for the pupils and for the planet.

These were experiments in which the researchers were delighted to be rewarded with negative results. No differences in how much children ate, no difference in food waste, and no difference in satisfaction with the school lunches.

Notes

  1. The paper we discussed is Sustainable and acceptable school meals through optimization analysis: an intervention study, prompted by this comment in The Lancet: School meal programmes: improving health and equity in the European Union.
  2. Here is the transcript.
  3. I took the cover image from Swedish school lunch reform, nutrition, and lifetime income, which has some interesting information on the long-term impact of Sweden’s school meal programme.

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Eat This Podcast has been going since March 2013. That’s a long time in podcast world. In that time, it has twice been nominated for a James Beard Award, although it remains a labour of love rather than a search for glory.

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