Its a complex issue. I've been to schools in England where they would have liked to ban students bringing their own food in to school at all (mostly because of an excess of soft drinks and packaged crisps). To me, however (as someone who always had a packed lunch in Australia) there was something very 'police state' about this. It seems to really be saying that the state doesnt believe that parents are capable of bringing up their own children (not just that a few might need financial help to do so)...

There are many families where it is an issue of finance and time preventing them from making their kids healthy lunches. There are also a great many families where it is an issue of broken culture and defeated people that actually could provide nutritious meals. Of course if it's only one kid in a poor school that comes every day with simple cheap home-made food, that child risks serious ostracism.

Well if you don't even expect parents to care about what their children eat, how can you expect parents to care about education ? It boils down to the same thing.

Besides, I hear this argument often but I don't buy in the "finance" issue to get good food. Getting veggies/rice is cheap enough and can be cooked pretty fast. You don't need meat 3 times a day to be healthy. Just 60 years ago, people were eating 10 times less meat than now and they had no issue becoming smart (and probably smarter than now, seeing the extremely poor achievements of school education nowadays).

Basically lunches in School is an extension of the School system: you ensure people have to rely on you, everyday. This is toxic in so many ways. Kids never learn what it takes to prepare food, because they never see their Mom/Dad prepare food for them. It makes them value food as a commodity. It also "breaks" another link between parents and children, since you rely on a separate organization to feed your own kids, on which you have little knowledge and control.

Seriously, providing lunches at school is just a broken solution to the broken culture problem you mention. It does not fix anything, and provides comfort that it's OK to be part of that "broken culture". It just makes things worse in the end.