In a large commercial kitchen in Halifax’s north end, chef Shane Gallagher sprinkled a garnish of parmesan, garlic, parsley and breadcrumbs onto the creamy broccoli pasta his team had just plated. It was a simple dish, but Mr. Gallagher – who’s worked at some of the city’s best restaurants, including Bar Kismet and Drift – added some cheffy touches: The breadcrumbs were processed from fluffy, olive-oil-rich slabs of focaccia, and the sauce’s flavour was punched up with the sweet funkiness of puréed garlic confit.
This was lost on many diners. Some took a few bites before throwing out the rest of the dish. Others refused to taste it at all.
This isn’t a knock on Mr. Gallagher’s culinary talents, but the simple reality of feeding notoriously picky elementary school students. Those thoughtfully prepared pasta dishes might have won over adults on a lunch date, but they met a much tougher audience after being packaged in plastic takeout containers, held in a warmer and then transported to a school, where they were served to kids.
Shane Gallagher helped prepare about 900 orders of broccoli pasta at Upward Mobility Kitchens in Halifax.
On that June day, about 900 orders of the broccoli pasta were ferried from Upward Mobility Kitchens, where Mr. Gallagher is the kitchen operations lead, to 10 schools across the city. Similar versions of the same meal were prepared in other commercial kitchens or school cafeterias and delivered to thousands of students across the province, as part of the Nova Scotia government’s pay-what-you-can hot lunch program, launched last fall.
Every province and territory has signed a deal with the federal government as part of the five-year, $1-billion National School Food Program announced in 2024. The program’s primary goal is to improve access to nutritious food through breakfast, snack and lunch programs to support kids’ physical and mental well-being. But it’s also meant to help reduce grocery bills for families.
Advocates have called for universal lunch programs across the country, but most provinces have taken a patchwork approach. In Manitoba, British Columbia and Ontario, some schools have daily lunch programs, while the majority offer only breakfast and snacks. So far, only Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island have launched a daily hot lunch program available to all elementary school students.
In Nova Scotia, the program was ambitious and well intentioned. It was a major departure from the cafeteria food of yesteryear, like boiled hot dogs and mystery-meat sloppy joes. Instead, it aimed to woo kids and their parents with culturally diverse and healthy meals prepared, in some cases, by professional chefs: soft chicken tacos, Tunisian chicken shawarma wraps, Acadian rappie pie, Indian butter chicken and Lebanese mujadara.
The results, as is often the case with introducing new food to kids and feeding large groups on a limited budget, were mixed.
Next week, the lunch program will kick off its second year, with a provincial budget commitment of $80-million (Nova Scotia received $12.4-million over three years from the federal program) as it expands to all middle and junior high schools. Those involved in the program – from students and parents to school staff and food service workers – agree that providing meals to hungry kids at school is a win, but last year’s mixed results make clear there’s room for improvement.
Kids skip lunch for all kinds of reasons: They forget it at home, they didn’t like what was packed, or their parents or guardians couldn’t afford to send them with anything. And so, it’s become common practice for teachers to have flats of granola bars and packs of cereal and crackers on hand to offer students who are hungry.
“At one of my schools, they would buy the bulk packages of Pizza Pockets,” said Peter Day, president of the Nova Scotia Teachers Union. Kids are “not really concerned about learning their times tables or the difference between ‘their,’ ‘they’re’ and ‘there’ when their belly’s grumbling.”
For more than a decade, there had been calls to introduce a universal lunch program in Nova Scotia: from educators, community organizations and the province’s Auditor-General, who conducted school visits across the province in 2022 and learned that some students would go the whole day without eating if they weren’t provided food at school.
When the government announced the arrival of the program last fall, it was warmly received by families across the socio-economic spectrum. The menu – consisting of 40 items – was developed by the province, with recipes distributed to providers. Some meals were prepared at schools, either by staff or outside contractors. Others were prepared in commercial kitchens and delivered to schools.
Every two weeks, families across the province were sent an e-mail notice to order the next two-week cycle of meals – they could select lunches for the full cycle, or pick and choose which of the two daily options (one of which was always vegetarian) they wanted for specific days. At checkout, they were given the option to pay the recommended $6.50 a meal, another amount or nothing – and their choice would remain confidential.
A 2022 Auditor-General’s report found some students in Nova Scotia would go the whole day without eating if they weren’t provided food at school.
In its first year, the program was available to more than 75,000 students at 256 schools. The participation rate was about 50 per cent, and 4.7 million meals were served.
The program was trying to do a lot at once: create a menu that was nutritious, easy and cost effective to execute by a range of providers, while appealing to kids and reflecting Nova Scotia’s diverse population.
When the first round of meals was delivered, parents and educators took to social media to broadcast their reviews. Some said their children loved the food, others posted photos of dried-out macaroni and cheese or a single slice of French toast to highlight how unappetizing the dishes looked or how small the portions were. Some quickly dismissed the program as a failure, while others urged patience as the system worked out its kinks.
Lucas (left) and Sebastian (right), 14, started the lunch program in Grade 8.
Sebastian and Lucas Lowe, twin brothers in Halifax, were relieved to no longer be responsible for packing their own lunches, which most frequently were quesadillas or grilled cheese sandwiches they’d cooked the night before, along with a vegetable, fruit and salty snack.
While the program was only rolled out to elementary schools in its first year, the boys, who are 14, attend a school that goes up to Grade 8, so they were able to participate.
In October, they logged onto the website with their father and ordered daily lunches for the first two-week cycle.
There were some they loved: the bean burrito, the pizza, the macaroni and cheese, the falafel wrap. Others, such as the Tunisian chicken shawarma wrap, they didn’t like at all. The boys, raised not to waste food, would eat all or most of what they received.
But they noticed that wasn’t the case among peers. Some students would hear what the day’s meal was and, without looking at it, decide not to eat it. Lucas earned a reputation for helping himself to the pile of uneaten meals, sometimes eating two extra servings.
Their father, Chris Lowe, appreciated that the lunches were relatively nutritious. On the evenings when the boys were busy with sports, dinner was often a quick meal that wasn’t balanced, and it was a relief to know his sons had had a serving of vegetables at school.
The rejection of the food by their peers puzzled the brothers, who thought the meals classmates brought from home – buttered noodles and sandwiches – were much less appealing than the hot lunches.
“Tons of people in my class are super picky,” said Sebastian. “They just eat the same thing.”
As the year wore on, the boys would just skip ordering lunches on the days that featured dishes they didn’t particularly like and either go off campus to buy lunch or bring something from home. But for many children, that’s not an option.
Food insecurity rates among kids have been steadily rising since 2020, according to Statistics Canada. In 2023, the latest year for which data are available, 32.9 per cent of kids across the country were food insecure. In Nova Scotia, that number goes up to 38 per cent.
Every day in the summer at Family SOS, a Halifax non-profit, there are knocks on the door from kids asking for food. “Can we have ice cream?” “Can we have Cheerios?” The centre is located in Spryfield, the neighbourhood with the city’s highest child poverty rate.
Some kids come in to pick up snacks for themselves, others grab extras for siblings, says Claire Halpern, Family SOS’s executive director.
Food insecurity rates among kids have been steadily rising across the country since 2020, according to Statistics Canada.
Before the introduction of the provincial lunch program, Family SOS started a daily hot lunch service at a local school, and kids queued for it as soon as the bell rang. Some had lunch they’d brought from home but it wasn’t enough, and they’d take the pasta or stir fry on offer, too.
While school breakfast and snack programs are common, they can sometimes divide students along economic lines. Kids going early to school to have breakfast worry about how they’ll be perceived by their peers. If they arrive without a packed lunch, they can be self-conscious about asking a teacher for food. Nova Scotia’s program was designed to be universal and pay-what-you-can to lessen that stigma.
“When you have a program like this, where peers are eating together, they have similar foods, they’re talking about the food, they’re eating things that they haven’t tried before, that is a social experience in itself and it creates social bonds and social connections,” says Aimee Gasparetto, the executive director of Nourish Nova Scotia, a non-profit that works in schools and communities to improve food access for children. “They might be saying something bad about the food, but they’re saying it together.”
To her point, a hot topic of discussion among the Grade 3 students in the Dartmouth classroom Sean Sullivan supervised at lunch was the chicken ranch wrap: Did it actually contain ranch sauce? While it may have been a source of bonding, at the end of the day, many of those wraps – and plenty of other meals delivered to the school – wound up in the trash, Mr. Sullivan said.
Some kids were content with the meals and would eat them without any fuss. But others required coaxing.
“Hey, this might look a bit funny, but it’s going to taste great,” he told the ones who were hesitant.
The main issue, he said, was that the meals were often delivered in the morning and sat in the school for up to three hours before they were consumed.
“It’s not kids being served food that they don’t like, or that looks gross, or tastes not great. It’s that it’s cold,” he said.
Ms. Gasparetto’s organization worked in partnership with the government when it was developing the lunch program, and when she reviewed the feedback the province received, she noticed a pattern: There were more complaints about the temperature and general quality of food that had travelled a longer distance to reach a school compared with meals that were prepared on-site.
Last year, 64 per cent of the meals were made at schools, while 36 per cent were prepared off-site. Many urban schools – including those in Halifax and Dartmouth – don’t have kitchen facilities, so they had to rely on third parties to prepare and deliver lunches.
The meals prepared by Upward Mobility Kitchens were not delivered to any of the students or parents mentioned in this piece, but staff occasionally received feedback about the diminished quality of the food once it was served to students, and they spent much of the year tweaking recipes and adapting their system to make the food as palatable as possible for students.
“People eat with their eyes first,” says Mark Brand, the founder and chief executive of Upward Mobility Kitchens, which also prepares meals for breakfast programs, shelters and a community kitchen and cafe. “I think the challenge for us has been making sure that the food gets there looking beautiful.”
They replaced the recommended biscuit that accompanied a soup with house-made focaccia. The French toast was initially served with raw apples and blueberries, but when they learned that the bread was getting soggy and the fruit was losing its bite, they switched to a sauce made from stewing blueberries in apple juice.
“Because we’re doing something at such a high scale and we have to send food hot and keep it hot and held, we’re kind of limited,” says Jo Jomplin, the kitchen manager at Upward Mobility Kitchens. “We’re doing as much as we can. We’re loading it up with a lot of flavour. We’re cooking as if we’d like to eat it,” they said.
To prepare bean burritos, a quilt of tortillas were filled with black beans, corn, salsa, shredded cheese and a dollop of sour cream.
On a Monday morning last June, the team was preparing Tuesday’s meal: bean burritos. Like a well-oiled machine, staff laid out a quilt of tortillas on large, stainless-steel tables. With an ice-cream scoop, Mx. Jomplin dropped filling that included black beans, corn and salsa onto each tortilla, and other staff sprinkled on shredded cheese and a dollop of sour cream before they tightly wrapped the burritos. They were stored in fridges overnight, and the next morning they were fired in the oven to warm their contents and to get a sear on the tortilla.
Ideally, these would be consumed right away: the bean filling warm, the cheese hot and melted, the tortilla still crispy. But to make these burritos at scale for 10 different schools across the city and then have them delivered ahead of lunch break made that impossible.
While Upward Mobility Kitchens is a relatively small outfit staffed by many former restaurant chefs, other providers who have been contracted to prepare school lunches include large corporations that make thousands of meals a day for hospitals, airlines and prisons.
The province says it will be doing routine compliance checks and performance reviews with providers to ensure they’re following the program’s standardized menu, nutrition guidelines and portion sizes. Among the additional schools joining the program this year, more than 70 per cent will have meals prepared on site.
As the program grows, Ms. Gasparetto anticipates schools will seek funding for equipment that will allow food to be heated or cooled, or even to build their own kitchens so meals can be prepared in-house.
Based on feedback from a survey of parents, the province says this fall they’ll introduce improved packaging and more kid-friendly menu items such as chicken nuggets and pancakes.
Up until last year, lunch planning was a headache for Emily Moslemi, a mother of five boys – three of whom are school-aged. Ms. Moslemi, who lives in Tantallon, a suburb west of Halifax, would pick up various packaged snacks as well as bread and deli meat for sandwiches, having to mix it up often enough to avoid complaints of boredom. Her eldest, Daniel, 9, demanded a hot lunch, so she’d have to find something that could be packed in an insulated container, but more often than not, she’d buy the chicken strips meal from the school cafeteria for him.
“I don’t even know if he was eating them,” she said. “But I needed to make sure there was some kind of protein he could eat for lunch.”
When the school lunch program launched last fall, she eagerly signed all three boys up for it. There were many meals they didn’t like, and she learned to stop ordering them. The boys would often bring home the uneaten remains, and she could understand why: The mini cheese pizza was an English muffin with lots of red sauce and cheese on top. The potato pancakes and fish cakes – which came with beans and mashed potatoes – “reminded me of prison food,” she said.
The province put out a survey to parents last school year, soliciting feedback on the program, and has made changes this year based on it. They’ve improved packaging and added more kid-approved items to the menu, including chicken nuggets and pancakes.
Over all, Ms. Moslemi says she loves the program. She’s surprised by how much her sons enjoyed some dishes – like chili or bean burritos – that they were fussy about eating at home.
“It’s definitely broadened their vegetable horizons,” she said.
The program has helped Ms. Moslemi’s boys embrace more vegetables.
Ms. Moslemi, who was on maternity leave last year looking after her youngest, made partial payments for the meals when the program first launched. But upon learning that most others weren’t paying anything, she stopped.
The Lowes started out making the full payment for their sons’ orders, but later in the year, as they discovered their friends with higher incomes weren’t paying at all, they switched to partial payments.
At the start of the program last fall, 37 per cent of families across the province paid for meals either partly or in full; by April, it had dropped to 12 per cent.
In an e-mail, provincial spokesperson Krista Higdon said the program is “fully publicly funded and designed to ensure every student has access to a healthy lunch, regardless of their family’s ability to pay.”
Mr. Sullivan blames the pay-what-you-can model in part for the high rates of waste he saw at his son’s school.
“It’s a tricky thing for this whole conversation around food waste,” he said. “If there’s no cost to it and you can order it every day for free, why wouldn’t you?”
As Mr. Day of the teachers’ union sees it, the success of the program shouldn’t be measured by how many of the delivered meals are eaten in full, but by how many students who arrived hungry were able to get something substantial and nutritious to eat at school.
“Bottom line, there are fewer students at school that are hungry, and that’s positive,” he said. “Are there speed bumps? Of course. You try coming up with a meal plan for tens of thousands of students across the province in different areas.”
