School Meals Can Teach Lessons about Climate Resilience

As of 2024, more than 5 million students in almost 12,000 schools across the country receive daily nutritious school meals, according to the School Meals Coalition. “School meals reach every student, every day, creating one of the largest institutional procurement systems in the country,” Dr. Seulgi Son, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Yonsei University, who has researched South Korea’s public procurement, tells Food Tank. “Because school meals are universal and publicly funded, they embody social equity, while simultaneously shaping demand for eco-friendly and local agricultural products.” Seoul has become a leader among several municipalities providing universal, free, and eco-friendly school lunches, serving more than 1 million students daily.

Now, the Climate-Friendly Meal Service is going a step further to align local procurement with global sustainability goals while educating students about climate change, Son tells Food Tank. The initiative incorporates Climate-Friendly Meal Days twice per month that combine plant-forward meals with nutritional planning, education, and menu diversification, Son tells Food Tank.

She says they are designed to be more holistic than earlier no-meat campaigns, which focus mainly on removing meat from menus. On Climate-Friendly Meal Days, schools experiment with a variety of low-carbon ingredients, including seasonal vegetables, legumes, tofu, mushrooms, and locally produced grains, Son says.

“The key difference is that they are framed not as dietary restrictions but as a positive ‘climate-conscious’ choice, tied to broader sustainability goals.” According to Son, nutrition teachers have long provided expertise in schools to ensure meals are nutritionally balanced and aligned with health education. They also serve as a bridge between policy goals and implementation in schools. “In the Climate-Friendly Meal Service, they will be critical in translating abstract climate goals into concrete menus and educational modules.” “When students plant, harvest, and cook with local vegetables, they can directly see the relationship between food, climate, and community,” Son tells Food Tank.

She says these experiential activities reinforce environmental education and food literacy and help embed climate awareness into students’ everyday behavior. Son shares that she was personally reminded of this when her five-year-old recently announced, “We should eat local food.” “At first, I assumed he had overheard one of my Zoom meetings, but I later learned he had picked up the idea through gardening at his kindergarten, where children grow vegetables and see them prepared into meals.” For Son, the realization emphasized the importance of these hands-on experiences.

Son’s research shows that South Korea’s success in adopting universal eco-friendly school meals has relied on both top-down policy and strong grass-roots mobilization combined with cross-sector governance. Professional expertise embedded in schools is also key. She explains that civic organizations and activists have played a critical role in achieving the adoption of universal eco-friendly school meals and, in some cases, even manage or co-manage public meal service support centers created by municipalities.

In her current research, Son is exploring how Climate-Friendly Meal Days are being implemented across schools, how nutrition teachers manage daily constraints as they work to meet policy goals, and how students internalize the program’s educational messages. She will also examine how this new framework impacts procurement opportunities for local farmers. For the food system, the goal is to demonstrate that public procurement can simultaneously advance equity, sustainability, and resilience. Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members.

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