School food. If you’re English and my age, those two small words are enough to drain the colour from your cheeks. Life in London in the 1960s was a groovy, swinging affair, but not in the sweltering, steam-wreathed kitchen of Hill House Boys’ Preparatory School. Wednesday lunch was always roast lamb and vegetables—which doesn’t sound so bad until you look at the plate more closely. The school cook—a formidable woman in a white coat and hairnet—made the mashed potatoes by heaving a sack of yellowish powder onto her shoulder, then tipping the contents into her bubbling cauldron. The soft, khaki-coloured peas were drained from a huge metal drum and tasted like zinc and mildew. The lamb came all the way from Australia to be heated and carved into slices of glistening gristle and pallid fat veined with thin streaks of meat as fibrous, grey and rank as a gamekeeper’s coat. School rules forbade us to leave the table until our plates were completely clean. So we’d roll the peas onto the floor or press them onto the underside of the table, using the stiffening mashed potato as putty. We would spit the unchewable lamb into our handkerchiefs or slip a slice inside a sock to be flushed down the lavatory later. Lunch was disgusting, but it was also nutritious in a basic way, and there was enough of it to stave off our hunger. Here in Toronto, in our dazzling modern age, there are children who aren’t so lucky.

School food is a can of worms. Pry open the subject, peep inside and you’re suddenly face to face with all sorts of political issues: the growing inequality between rich and poor; Canada’s failure to deal with child poverty; the imminent disaster of a “pizza generation,” in which childhood obesity has tripled over the past 30 years. Both obese and undernourished children grow up to be a massive drain on our health care system—in 2001, the direct health care costs of obesity alone totalled $1.6 billion. It’s stupid as well as shameful that Canada is one of the only developed countries without a federally funded nutrition program guaranteeing every child and teen at least one healthy snack or meal a day. While kids in Brazil and in villages in the Gobi Desert are fed by their respective governments, Ottawa gives our school­children little more than the finger.

While queen’s Park has never subsidized school cafeterias, the school board’s budget became even tighter in 1997, when Mike Harris cut $2 billion from Toronto’s education funding. These days, provincial money is a pathetic trickle that joins a dribble of cash from impoverished city hall to drip into the Toronto District School Board’s empty cup.

The board does what it can for the 83,000 students who rely on breakfast, snack and lunch programs to make it through the day: an average per diem of 25 cents per child in the city’s 400 elementary schools and 47 cents for each teen in Toronto’s 100 secondary schools. The trouble is that an elementary school lunch costs $1.83, and a high school lunch costs $2.95. In a typically Canadian way, the various levels of government rely on a patchwork of parents, students and charities to make up the difference. If a family has money, it’s not so bad. The problem, however, lies with the 27 per cent of children who report they don’t eat lunch. Moreover, child advocates cite that one in three children in this thriving metropolis lives below the poverty line. Often, they just go hungry.

Those Harris government cuts had another grim effect on our children. After amalgamation, the former City of Toronto board could no longer run its school cafs at a loss. Two-thirds of them across the city are now run by catering companies, and though many of them do offer healthy alternatives, profits are more easily derived from processed foods laden with fat, salt and sugar—in other words, crap.