DJ Bracken learned that Utah had $2.8 million in “school lunch debt”—a phrase that should not even exist!—so he called up his local school district to confirm it; the woman he spoke with did so,

And then, almost as an afterthought, she mentioned that Bluffdale Elementary — a school I had no personal connection to — had about $835 in outstanding lunch debt.

$835.

The figure hit me like one of those rare moments of absolute clarity, utterly devoid of irony or ambiguity. Eight hundred and thirty-five dollars was the cost of preventing dozens of children from experiencing that moment of public shame I couldn’t stop imagining. It was less than some monthly car payments. It was approximately what I had spent the previous month on DoorDash and impulse Amazon purchases. The grotesque disproportion between the trivial financial sum and the profound human consequence felt like a cosmic accounting error.

“Can I just… pay that?” I asked, half expecting to be told about some bureaucratic impossibility.

“Um, sure,” she said. “Let me transfer you.”

No family should be in debt because they can’t afford to pay for lunch at school, and $835 should never prevent kids from eating nutritiously. That’s beyond unacceptable—it’s outrageous.

States should pay for food for all students, equally, in the same way they pay for books, heating, and teachers.

(And yes, as I write that, I’m painfully aware of the many schools that fail to meet even that basic standard.)

In 2021 California became the first state in the nation to provide free breakfast and lunch for all K-12 students regardless of income—and without “lunch shaming”—a phrase regrettably so well-established it has a Wikipedia page.

Today, only eight states ensure universal free school meals. Meanwhile the annual national public school meal debt is approximately $262 million. Individuals and not-for-profits (like Utah Lunch Debt Relief Foundation, which Bracken founded, or All For Lunch, which supports schools nationwide) are working to eliminate this debt. I applaud the efforts, and intend to support them myself, but I find myself caught in what Bracken identifies as “the philosophical contradictions” of eliminating the debt, rather than confronting the reasons the debt exists:

On Monday, I’ll find myself arguing passionately that school lunch should be universal and free, like textbooks or desks — a basic educational supply. On Tuesday, I’ll be raising money to pay off debts in a system I just spent Monday arguing shouldn’t exist at all. The cognitive dissonance is sometimes overwhelming. Am I enabling a broken system by patching its most visible failures? Am I letting policymakers off the hook by providing a band-aid that makes the bleeding less visible?

I experience this cognitive dissonance often, but Bracken nails the harsh reality:

One particularly sleepless night, I found myself spiraling into what I’ve come to think of as “the advocacy paradox”: If I succeed completely in paying off all lunch debt, will that remove the urgency required to change the system that creates the debt in the first place? But if I don’t pay it off, actual children — not abstractions, but specific kids with specific names who like specific dinosaurs and struggle with specific math problems — will continue to experience real shame and real hunger tomorrow. The perfect threatens to become the enemy of the good, but the good threatens to become the enemy of the fundamental.

[…]

But what if the truth is that we need all of these approaches simultaneously? What if paying off a specific child’s lunch debt today doesn’t preclude advocating for a complete structural overhaul tomorrow? What if the emotional resonance of specific, concrete actions is precisely what builds the coalition necessary for systemic change?

Bracken, again:

My daughter asked me recently why I spend so many evenings on the phone talking about school lunches. I told her about the kids who get their trays taken away. Her face scrunched up in that particular way that children’s faces do when they encounter an injustice so fundamental it cannot be reconciled with their understanding of how the world should work.

“That’s stupid,” she said with 7-year-old clarity. “Why don’t they just let them eat?”

Why indeed.