School meal
meal provided to students at school
A school meal (whether it is a breakfast, lunch, or evening meal) is a meal provided to students and sometimes teachers at a school, typically in the middle or beginning of the school day. Countries around the world offer various kinds of school meal programs, and altogether, these are among the world's largest social safety nets. An estimated 380 million school children around the world receive meals (or snacks or take-home rations) at their respective schools. The extent of school feeding coverage varies from country to country, and as of 2020, the aggregate coverage rate worldwide is estimated to be 27% (and 40% specifically for primary school-age children).
The objectives and benefits of school meals vary. In developing countries, school meals provide food security at times of crisis and help children to become healthy and productive adults, thus helping to break the cycle of poverty and hunger. They can address micronutrient deficiencies by serving diverse foods or including fortified foods. They also serve as an incentive to send children to school and continue their education, and they can be leveraged specifically to reduce barriers to schooling for girls. When school meals are targeted toward low-income or vulnerable children, they serve as a social safety net. Especially in developed countries, school meals are structured to encourage healthy eating habits.
“School meal” enters the record as meal provided to students at school. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what School, meal and provided can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“School meal” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, School, meal and provided provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1195832. The Library of Congress control number is sh85118299. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2020.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “School meal” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.