According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), one in five children in the United States experiences food insecurity. Too often, a school meal is a child’s only guaranteed meal. At the “Nourishing People, Planet, and Our Future” summit during Climate Week NYC 2025, which Food Tank hosted in partnership with The Rockefeller Foundation, panelists spoke about how regenerative school meals can trigger positive impact across the food value chain, from farmer to eater.
“School meals are a very powerful connector. They can really connect the plate, production, and everything that comes with it,” says Aulo Gelli, Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. “For every US$1 spent [on school meals], you’ve got a US$4 return…It’s a very good investment.”
School meals are a social safety net that improves attendance, academic performance, and critical nutrition for children. With regenerative school meals, these benefits extend far beyond the classroom: Locally and regeneratively grown crops produce significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions than conventional crops by enhancing soil carbon sequestration, reducing synthetic fertilizer use, and limiting shipping distance and storage time. This supports local economies while providing more nutritious meals to children.
“It’s human dignity and respect, everyone has the right to food, but it also makes good economic sense, to develop these communities, you have to start there,” says Paul Polman, the former CEO of Unilever and co-author of Net Positive.
Anna Lappé, Executive Director of The Global Alliance for the Future of Food, says that the return on investment speaks for itself: “One of the key messages is not to think about this transition [to regenerative school meals] as a burden or cost but an investment that will pay over and over again.”
However, panelists stressed that school meal programs are at risk amid limited financial resources and a changing global climate.
“We are losing meals today, and we will be losing more meals tomorrow,” says Sara Farley, Vice President, Global Food Portfolio, The Rockefeller Foundation. “So what we’re really talking about here is how we future-proof our food system.”
Jennifer Burney, Professor of Environmental Social Sciences & Earth System Science at Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, presented data on how regenerative school meals offer a win-win opportunity for students and farmers. According to Burney, across Africa alone, 2.62 million more children could be fed in the current climate with regeneratively grown grains, and “for almost every country in the world, a switch to regenerative agriculture means higher yields.”
However, speakers emphasized the complexity of building the infrastructure to grow, transport, prepare, and serve regenerative school meals so communities can reap these benefits. According to Tufts University, one in four school meals is of poor nutritional quality, with school kitchens relying on imported foods and ultra-processed snacks. There is a need for investment in regional supply chains as well as education around preparing and serving fresh, locally grown dishes at schools.
Mariana Mazzucato, a Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London, argued for tackling these challenges the way the United States tackled reaching the moon—with deep investment and involvement across numerous government agencies and sectors.
“Imagine if the mission was to make sure that every child in the world had access to at least one, maybe two, meals a day from regenerative food, generated with local manufacturing,” says Mazzucato. “Imagine if we actually took the idea of school meals as an opportunity to do exactly what we did to go to the moon? As long as we just see school meals as part of the social safety net of the government, then it ends up being, by design, not taken seriously.”
Gerardo Martinez, Founder and Owner at Wild Kid Acres, presented a powerful case study of what’s working from Edgewater, Maryland. In 2019, Martinez bought five acres of cheap land—an “unofficial dump”—and set out to become a first-time farmer. He invested in regenerative agricultural practices and opened the farm up to the community, bringing children in to work and help build the strategic vision of the farm. Last year, the farm saw 50,000 children in total and fed the local school using donations.
Several children from Wild Kid Acres took to the stage to discuss the questions that arose once they connected with the land: “I wonder why the food in my school tastes different from the farm’s food. Why aren’t there farmers who look like me? How do we grow food ethically and still care for our planet?” And finally, “Why isn’t anyone helping the farmers?”
Panelists agreed that producing healthy school meals is an incredibly complex challenge that requires participation across sectors, significant investment, and deep systemic changes. But Adam Met, a multi-platinum, Grammy-nominated musician with AJR and Founder of Planet Reimagined, argues that significant strides could be made—especially in reaching across political aisles—with simple tweaks to language.
“The language of climate change—of 1.5 degrees, sustainability, or even something like regenerative agriculture—that is not resonating with people,” says Met. “Effective policy is just as much about the policy itself and the implementation of it as the language that we’re using when we’re talking to people on the different sides of the political sector…We need to be creating more collaboration and talking to people who disagree with us.”
Watch the full event on Food Tank’s YouTube channel.
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Photo by Ryan Rose for Food Tank.
