Last month, the state of New Mexico in the United States became the first to legislate against lunch shaming, or the stigmatization of children who cannot pay an average of $2.35 for their school lunch. What lies behind this crisis? In Mexico, do we have stigmatization based on the snacks children bring to school?
The school cafeteria system in the United States is highly complex, as it is subsidized by the State, yet parents of public school children must contribute money so their child can eat in the school cafeteria. To date, 76% of school districts are in debt, due to families’ inability to pay the lunch fee.
However, the problem does not end there: children and adolescents who owe their fees are stigmatized in various ways. For example, they are denied access to trays with hot food and are given a brown paper bag with a cheese sandwich. Whoever receives the paper bag in the cafeteria line is singled out by their peers. Some children have a stamp placed on their hand at the checkout, indicating they owe money for lunch, supposedly as a reminder for parents. The stamp is so visible that it acts as a "scarlet letter" among classmates. In other cases, children are assigned cleaning tasks in the school to "pay" for their lunch.
In response to various voices of protest, especially regarding the moral, psychological, and emotional burden these actions place on children’s socialization, the state of New Mexico has been the first to legislate to prohibit practices that stigmatize children who cannot pay for their lunch in any way. These are the contrasts of global social inequality: the United States, one of the richest countries in the world and also one of the largest food wasters, has a school lunch system that highlights differences in access to lunch for all.
The issue of stigma attached to poverty and how it is reflected in consumption habits occurs everywhere. What children eat at school defines many aspects of who they are and where they come from; it is also the first major process of secondary socialization (after the family nucleus) where they confront different ways of eating for the first time. Consider this: in both public and private schools in Mexico, these differences are marked internally. The child who buys food every day at the school store is distinguished from those who bring snacks from home. Then there are levels: some buy cut fruit or a drink at the store, but others have enough to buy the most coveted item on the school menu every day—they are the wealthiest in their school.
We have not even discussed the competition among perfect mothers to see who prepares the healthiest snack.
What alternatives could we find regarding this? Some schools have organized collective lunches, where a parent prepares food for all students in the group at intervals, following a balanced menu plan. The problem is that this measure is only feasible to a certain extent for more privileged classes, as less protected classes have greater concerns than sending a balanced menu to all their children’s classmates, in addition to long working hours and the economic outlay required to feed an entire group. Social inequalities are undoubtedly reflected even in the way we stigmatize what we eat and how we eat.
Originally published in El Economista
— This article was originally published in Spanish by Liliana Martínez Lomelí. Translation generated with AI from the original text.