Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
In treating school lunches as a service rather than an investment, penny pinching risks raising costs above value.
It is the story that keeps getting regurgitated.
The revamped, slimmer, cost-cut school lunch scheme has provided a daily diet of bad news stories, and there's talk that it should be re-evaluated.
The architect of the shrunken lunch deal, associate education minister David Seymour, said suggestions that it's being run down deliberately with the aim of scrapping it are "frankly a conspiracy theory".
"Our goal is to make sure that the healthy school lunch programme works well, and works at around half the cost of the previous programme," he has said.
But we are nearly at the end of term one. Questions are being raised in Parliament over how long it's going to take to get fixed. Public health experts say we're at a tipping point, after warning signals all along the way, and it's time to take stock and do something quite different.
But with all the talk of plastic in the food, teachers having to go out and buy pies, late deliveries and endless butter chicken, are we missing the larger debate?
Is school lunch provision a service or an investment?
"I think that question separates these two models, the one that we have now and the one that originally was," says Newsroom political reporter Fox Meyer.
"Because I think if you think of this as a service, something that you're doing to meet public health thresholds or fill a bottom line, then it's a bit of a box-ticking exercise. You know, we need to have this bus that runs this route, all we need to do is have it, once it's there we can check that box.
"But if you think of this school lunch thing as an investment, and you look downstream at all of the consequences of having a well-nourished childhood, especially in school which is where you can guarantee that there is a meal ... if you think of that as an investment, you get much broader future consequences coming out of this. And I think that difference underpins the two philosophies going on here.
"One is 'we need to nourish these children in this place', and the other one is 'we just need to feed them'."
Meyer gives The Detail the statistics and study results that back up claims that feeding school children has huge paybacks in the long run, but said it's harder to measure these future gains against the headline of saving taxpayers $130 million.
"It's very easy to put an economic dollar number on costs," said Meyer. "That's a very easy number to understand.
"What's much harder to understand is the value of the thing you're getting for that cost.
"How do you even measure values like this? Especially when we know from international studies that the consequences of a well-nourished meal for a child aren't really visible until maybe five years down the line. How do you measure that when the programme isn't even five years old? Do you look in the classroom, do you look in the home, do you look in the supermarket to see what ripple effects this has had on the community?"
Meyer said it would be very cynical to suggest that the government wants to do away with school lunches entirely.
"Nobody in this debate genuinely wants to see children going hungry in the classroom - I think that's ridiculous. Nobody's that evil."
He said there are two conversations going on here.
"The first one is a debate over whether or not you think the state has a role in providing nutritious meals for kids in school. That's not the conversation we're having right now - this is not about whether or not we should be doing this.
"The conversation we're having right now is: as long as we are doing this, we need to meet the bar we've set for ourselves."
MP turned political commentator Peter Dunne is not entirely surprised that the lunch scheme has turned into a debacle, but says he had expected a slightly better outcome than we're seeing.
"I think this is now very problematic," he said. "Because the one thing the government cannot afford, having staked its reputation on making these changes, is for the whole system to fall over completely and there be no school lunches."
He said a standard universal operation across the country, instead of the former scheme where local companies were used to provide the lunches, was always going to have difficulties.
And while he understands the government's reasons for cutting costs, he said coming down from $8 to $3 per meal was always going to be a challenge, even for the best of providers.
Dunne says if there's not a significant improvement over the next week or so, the option of ripping up contracts and starting again starts to loom as the obvious only solution.
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