To be fair to our politicians regards the controversies swirling over the quality and reliability of school lunches, the guilty party which started the fiasco was certainly not Labour, nor National, nor ACT. It was NZ Treasury false and misleading "advice". Midway through 2023, just before Labour lost office, Radio NZ headlines blared, "Treasury does not support free school lunches .. Finance Minister Robertson said evaluations showed the program had no effect on attendance & provided little benefit for Māori students .. Evaluations found no impact on attendance & ākonga Māori, who make up 48 percent of students receiving the program, have not benefited on most metrics, such as paying attention in class, health, and mental wellbeing (with mental wellbeing worse off for those in the program)."
Identifying the causal impact of quality school lunches on such outcomes is a very difficult econometric problem. It has been the subject of international studies & debates for nearly 100 years. School meal programs were introduced in America by President Truman in 1946. Working out their effect has been fraught since its usually poor, disadvantaged children who've been selected for the programs. Consequently should you correlate the likes of school attendance, grades, obesity and those kinds of outcomes on participation in lunch programs, it may even appear that such programs are associated with worse outcomes. The problem is so hard that modern attempts to work out whether meal programs are worthwhile have titles like, "The impact of the National School Lunch Program on Child Health: A nonparametric bounds analysis" which is in the highly regarded Journal of Econometrics. That article starts out by saying, "Children [partaking in] the National School Lunch Program tend to have worse health outcomes on average than children who do not participate .. Whether [this] reflects causal impacts of the program has become a matter of considerable debate among researchers and policymakers". Even that paper's findings are somewhat ambiguous.
My view is that it was a mistake for the NZ Treasury to pretend it had worked out the effect of quality school lunches on children's educational & health outcomes, when no-one else in the world has done so. It should've never stated that across a range of metrics, there are no effects. Just because Treasury, using a wonky statistical methodology, could not find them, does not mean they do not exist. Instead Treasury should've backed off making any assertions, and been modest. The Treasury threw NZ's debate on school lunches into chaos. All we know for certain is that healthy public school lunch programs are intensely political. Just last week US Republicans in Congress took aim at ending meal programs that provide funding for schools to buy healthy food from local farmers. Such programs had been championed by Michelle Obama, former President Obama's wife, when he was in office. Treasury should have had the honesty to say that it had no clue whether providing high quality lunches would turn out to be - over the next 50 years - a "social investment" that would improve the outcomes for children who ate them. The Treasury never had the data.