Kit Knightly

There is a growing international campaign to institute free school meals all around the globe. On face of it this might seem like a great idea…

but in the New Normal age nothing is ever really free.

So, let’s unpack…

The campaign is being spear-headed by the UN-backed School Meals Coalition (SMC), whose self-proclaimed goal is “free school meals for every child by 2030” (for some reason they are obsessed with that date).

The SMC already has over 80 national governments signed up to its pledge,  with over 90 “partners” (including the Rockefeller Foundation), and these numbers are only likely to grow after their presentation at the UN’s World Food Summit earlier today.

At the same time, the Coalition is getting glowing press write-ups, like this one from The Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliot:

For the scheme to work, rich countries would find around one-third of the $6bn annual cost, with the rest found by the governments of low-income countries through their budgets or though innovative financing ideas such as debt for school meals swaps, under which countries would channel the savings from debt relief into school meals programmes. At a time when aid budgets are being cut, $2bn a year is small change for donor governments and represents just one day’s worth of annual subsidies to food producers. It is a small price to pay for something that could do so much good.

This agenda has been lurking in the shadows of UK politics for a while now, with Labour Party MP Zarah Sultana first pushing FSM to all primary kids back in the winter of 2022.

It feels weird to write sceptically about this, because, as  a self-proclaimed leftist for most of my life, free school meals is exactly the kind of policy I likely would have supported without question just a few short years ago…

…but those few years were Covid years, and they’ve taught us all a lot.

Firstly, and most importantly, it’s become increasingly apparent that any policy is only as fair as the people implementing it, and only as decent as the intention behind it, and, however superficially humane  this plan might sound, the practical impact would be to hand yet more control over to the same murderous, eugenicist state that very recently killed thousands with a lie.

Secondly, a monopoly is a monopoly – whether private or state-backed – and the moment a monopoly exists the freedom to choose is dead. Freedom of choice is always the first liberty to go, but never the last.

Consider, for a moment, exactly what free school meals means in a post-covid world still reeling from a deliberately created financial crisis and in the midst of a “Great Reset” transformation.

1) The cost of living is soaring, and many parents – working parents as well as unemployed – are simply not able to afford to heat their homes or feed their children.

2) “Covid” caused a huge spike in homeschooling in countries all around the world.

3) there is an on-going campaign to “revolutionize global food systems” by promoting eating insects, GMOs and lab-grown “meat”.

Let’s trace the point where all these policies intersect.

What are we looking at?

Essentially, free school meals can be used to…

a) counter the rise in homeschooling by effectively bribing or coercing struggling parents to keep their kids in school so they can be fed

b) condition children (and their parents) into accepting eating whatever the state chooses to provide – be it ‘healthy’ GM veganism, bug-burgers or lab-grown food paste

c) this conditioning will help to normalise a more general acceptance of these “foods”

And that’s just the passive phase of control. We can assume it won’t stop there because it never does.

Maybe  free school meals will one day be tied to accepting universal basic income payments, or conditional on  your digital ID or your social credit score.

Maybe only vaccinated children will qualify for free school meals.

I’m sure you see my point.

The unfortunate truth is that we live in an era of ever-increasing  – and anti-human – corporate/state overreach.

The food might be free in the financial sense of the word,  but there will most definitely be a price to pay.