A non-profit child welfare group on Sunday called on the central government to introduce regulations that would ensure better quality and more transparently priced school lunches nationwide.
Citing two of its recent surveys, the Child Welfare League Foundation said that 80 percent of junior-high students in Taiwan do not eat enough at school, even when they are hungry, mainly because their school lunches are unappetizing.
One of the surveys found that 60 percent of junior-high students find their school lunches unpalatable, while 75 percent do not like the food that is usually served, the foundation said, adding that this results in a lot of waste.
Photo: Chen Chia-yi, Taipei Times
Among those who do not eat enough, 36.5 percent said they would rather go hungry than eat the school lunches, while about 40 percent said they usually fill their stomachs with snacks, water or other beverages, the foundation said.
Another survey that looked at the content of school lunches found that more than 20 percent of the 154 schools sampled serve fried food at least twice a week, while 40 percent provide meals that contain processed food products such as sausages and chicken nuggets twice a week, it said.
Those choices do not conform to the standards for school lunch content and nutrition put forth by the Health Promotion Administration, the foundation said.
The main problem is that there are no integrated national standards pertaining to school lunches, and local governments all have their own regulations, it said.
Therefore, the central government is urged to establish a specialized agency to manage school lunch affairs and introduce nationwide regulations that would mandate quality and more transparent pricing, the foundation said.
Schools should also be encouraged to set up their own kitchens to shorten lunch delivery times and thus improve food safety, it added.
The online survey of junior-high students was from May 1 to June 1, with 8,690 valid questionnaires collected, the foundation said.
The school sampling survey collected data from five elementary and two junior-high schools in each of Taiwan’s 22 cities and counties, which was entered on the Ministry of Education’s Campus Food Ingredients Registration Platform.
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