Sugar tax could fund school meals, says Jamie Oliver

• Jamie Oliver wants sugar tax money to fund free school lunches.
• The chef and food activist wants to help at least 800,000 additional kids.
• He helped the government tax high-sugar sodas.

The so-called sugar tax’s millions of dollars should be utilized to increase the availability of free school lunches, according to Jamie Oliver.

The chef and food activist wants to help at least 800,000 additional kids. He played a crucial role in getting the government to impose the tax on soft drinks with a high sugar content in 2018.

Oliver wants the money donated to go toward the school meals program instead of the programs that were initially designed to combat childhood obesity.

Currently, children between the ages of four and sixteen in England and Wales are only qualified for free meals if their family’s annual income is less than £7,400.

According to Oliver, the program should encompass all children residing in homes that get Universal Credit. This translates to around 800,000 kids in England alone.

When the levy was first implemented, it generated £336 million in revenue. According to Oliver, “if you look at the money raised by the sugary drinks tax, it’s not far from what’s needed” to pay for those extra meals.

He said such a move would help teachers, saying: “If you’ve got a couple of kids coming in [who are] not fed, that affects plan A, plan B and plan C of a teacher’s hour.”

“It’s like passive smoking. We’re talking about all children being affected by some of the kids maybe being disruptive or sleeping or any other kind of carnage that goes along with the poverty of hunger.”

Oliver has long advocated for bettering children’s nutrition and expanding access to and improving the quality of school lunches.

His Feed Me Better campaign from 2005 resulted in the government of England investing £280 million to address the school meals program.

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