If you are what you eat, American students are in trouble…
Today in America our vulnerable communities are growing increasingly destitute, and the nation’s focus on profit and unnecessary spending has caused a steady erosion of what used to make America a great nation.
One of the clearest examples of this moral and material decline lies in a place that touches nearly every American at some point: our schools. We’ve already illustrated in past articles how lackluster and disappointing our education system has become over the past few decades; our students under-perform and our country is in dire need of skilled workers. Much of this can be attributed to the Pavlovian way we condition kids, rather than teach them in this country. We don’t foster creativity or novel thinking in our classrooms which makes it appear the country is more in the business of creating autonomous cogs that listen rather than think for themselves.
If America is simply trying to produce autonomous workers instead of thinkers, what better way to program them at the source than undermining the fuel they’re given? School lunches are the supposed fuel meant to power our children and yet, they’re abysmal. Though school lunches might not seem earth-shaking, they symbolize much of what’s broken and reveal how, despite our desire to improve, we still fail to serve students well.
The quality of these school lunches in the United States has become an international embarrassment — a disappointment not only to nutritionists, but to anyone who believes that children deserve access to healthy, nourishing food. The problem isn’t just physical health; it’s cultural. The very phrase “cafeteria food” has become shorthand for something unappetizing or low-quality. Children themselves call their school lunches “hospital food” or “prison food,” a bleak but telling reflection of how little care and dignity are associated with what they’re served. Even before diving into the nutritional science behind American school meals, one thing should already be obvious: the way we feed our children says a lot about who we’ve become as a nation — and it’s not the picture of greatness we like to claim.
In terms of nutritious value, American school lunches are woefully insufficient. Compared to other countries, what we put on our children’s plates is pitiful; it lacks the organic, vitamin-dense, nutrient-based foods necessary to sustain the learning habits of a new generation of thinkers.
An article titled Effect of Nutrition Intervention on Cognitive Development Among Malnourished Preschool Children: Randomized Controlled Trial highlights the critical link between nutrition and cognitive development. The study notes, “The genetic program that determines how each person’s brain develops is modified by the environment, including nutrition.”
This well-designed controlled trial was conducted in rural Udupi District, Karnataka, India, with preschool children aged 3 to 5. These children were moderately or severely underweight and attended Anganwadi centers with their mothers. The trial showed that nutrient-dense foods can significantly enhance a child’s development and potential, demonstrated through an intervention in which researchers educated a select group of mothers on the importance of proper nutrition.
Results were striking: the children whose mothers were taught about how to properly nourish their children —regardless of income level— were healthier on average. The study proved the link between the importance of educating parents on nutrition and ensuring children receive the proper dietary intake to foster proper development:
“A wide range of cognitive deficits has been reported in malnourished children. Malnutrition is linked to suboptimal brain development, which has a negative impact on cognitive development, educational achievement, and economic productivity later in life. During childhood, the maturation of specific brain areas is associated with the development of specific cognitive functions, such as language, reading, and memory.”
These findings are not novel. Health science has long highlighted the importance of non-processed, healthy foods for brain development. Countries like Finland, Sweden, Italy, and France have evolved their nutrition programs to reflect evidence supporting positive cognitive outcomes. This leads us to our next question: If decades of trials and studies have educated the public on proper nutrition, why isn’t it being implemented better in public schools?
Comparing An American Student’s Diet To The Rest of The World
In the U.S., the Food and Nutrition Service enforces federally mandated standards through the National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs, strengthened in recent years. However, implementation and menu quality vary widely across districts. Even with limits on added sugars and sodium, the quality of food remains far below that of other countries.
As a recent consumer of American public school lunch, I can attest that reality often falls short of standards. While regulations call for “one fruit, one vegetable, one grain, one dairy, and one protein,” in practice students often received a small can of sugared peaches, a scoop of mushy canned green beans, luke-warm toast, and a soggy chicken patty. Budget constraints clearly prioritize cost over children’s health…because you’re not getting much nutrients from those trays. Socially, students even often look down on peers who eat the school lunch regularly because it’s known to be so low-quality in execution and taste.
While a recent First Lady did attempt to improve school lunches with her “Let’s Move!” initiative and the passage of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act in 2010, following administrations began rolling back key parts of her reforms shortly after taking office—loosening nutrition standards via his USDA Secretary, Sonny Perdue.
Finland, Sweden, France, and Italy follow their respective national health guidelines, but their standards are simply higher, and their base ingredients are fresher; healthier. According to USDA Food and Nutrition Service, American school lunches in 2014–15 supplied about 11% of total calories from added sugars. Our students consume more processed foods, preservatives, and chemicals because fresh foods are largely absent.
Nordic countries prioritize freshly prepared, minimally processed meals with balanced plates, aligning with the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations. These structural features lead to higher average meal quality. Guidance for sodium and sugar exists but is applied flexibly through menu planning or per-calorie guidance rather than rigid national caps, allowing schools to emphasize high-quality, wholesome food.
Italy and France surpass the U.S. in feeding their youth. Both combine national nutrition regulations with local implementation, ensuring students eat fresh, locally sourced food. Italy emphasizes Mediterranean diet principles — fruit, lean protein, healthy fats — alongside strong municipal oversight of canteen programs. France’s canteen system is a large-scale food quality program with explicit nutritional and sustainability targets. Students enjoy multi-course lunches prepared from scratch with seasonal, locally sourced ingredients, learning moderation and appreciation of food.
This raises a larger question: what kind of effects are our non-nutritious meals already having on students’ academic performance? It only makes sense that poor nutritional quality in American school lunches wouldn’t just be a health issue but a philosophical one.
When students are routinely served meals high in sodium, sugar, and ultra-processed ingredients, they experience sharper energy crashes, poorer concentration, and reduced cognitive endurance throughout the school day. Studies consistently show that children who eat nutrient-dense, balanced meals perform better on standardized tests, retain information more effectively, and exhibit fewer behavioral disruptions in class. In contrast, diets dominated by processed, low-quality foods are associated with higher rates of absenteeism, sluggish executive functioning, and notably lower test scores.
There are many studies available that illustrate the connection between nutrition and academic performance; one that stands out is from the National Bureau of Economic Research. In a paper titled, School Lunch Quality and Academic Performance, the authors aimed to prove whether offering healthier lunches affects student achievement as measured by test scores. They executed their study with a sample size including all California public schools over a five-year period.
Taking advantage of a school vendor program with frequent turnover, tests were performed to determine whether healthier vendors of school lunch had a positive effect on student’s test scores. Students at schools that contract with a healthy school lunch vendor were found to score higher on CA state achievement tests. Even this one example makes it clear that less-processed foods equals more brain power.
Another study, Health Behaviour and Academic Achievement in Icelandic School Children, studied over 5,810 school students, tracking their diet compared to their performance in school and concluded:
“…Children and adolescents whose diets are nutritious and whose participation in physical activity is high tend to perform better on various measures of cognitive performance and academic achievement.”
Put simply: when the fuel is garbage, the performance follows and America’s school lunch standards are leaving students cognitively underpowered before they even open their textbooks.
Is America Fostering Creators or Automatons?
In our past article, The Decline of American Education, we argued that American schooling has shifted toward a kind of Pavlovian model, where students are conditioned to respond to stimuli rather than taught to think critically. Compared to other countries, our students put this on display with generally lower average testing scores than the Nordic countries, France, Italy, Germany, and more. If stimulus-response is truly the direction of our education system, it aligns uncomfortably well with the impaired cognitive development that poor-quality school nutrition can produce.
Feeding our students “brain food” from early ages would help our country’s next generation develop into the innovative, forward-thinking leaders we need—young minds capable of driving American progress, creativity, and global competitiveness well into the future. But sadly, America isn’t playing the long game and instead we are thinking about saving a dollar over investing in the brains of our future.
If we truly wanted our students to think critically, perform competitively, and innovate globally, we wouldn’t fuel them with the nutritional equivalent of sludge. Our refusal to invest in real, brain-building school meals makes it hard to believe this is an accident — it looks a lot more like a system comfortable keeping kids underperforming, compliant, and easy to manage.
The persistent reluctance of policymakers to meaningfully fund nutritious school meals raises an unsettling possibility: that fostering fully developed, critically thinking young minds is not a priority. Instead, it appears easier to steer society toward dependence on their preferred technologies—AI included—rather than empowering citizens through robust nutrition and education.
There is clear and growing evidence that nutritionally deficient school lunches directly correlate with lower academic performance, let alone health and obesity complications. When students lack consistent access to balanced, nutrient-dense meals, their cognitive function, attention span, memory retention, and overall executive functioning decline —all of which are core components of learning.
With international benchmarks like the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) exams making this pattern impossible to ignore: countries such as Finland, Sweden, France, and Italy, all of which invest heavily in high-quality, minimally processed school meals, routinely score far above the United States in reading, math, and science. While nutrition is obviously not the only factor, it is a foundational one, further indicating that it’s the nations prioritizing healthy student diets over constant profit margins that are producing more prepared, educated, well-rounded graduates, capable of creating something new.
While nutrition is not the only factor, it is a foundational one — and the countries that prioritize healthy student diets over endless profit margins are the ones producing individuals who are more prepared, more intellectually agile, and more capable of meaningful innovation.
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