I agree with you that the cost of lunch food adds up and is more than the cost of accounting. Substantial is a subjective word but true if looking at the number by itself, and feeding 2 million kids in NY state will obviously be a big number compared to most people’s salaries, which is why it seems substantial. But it’s still a small fraction of the cost of education, and food is a single line item in a much much bigger budget. We can’t actually separate the lunch costs, when you include the cafeteria. It seems very strange that we don’t ask families to pay for books or bus rides but do ask them to pay for lunch. It very much feels like a conscious choice to ensure the poor kids are identified.
There was a scandal in the neighborhood I live in because one school tired of lunch debt was making the hot lunches, letting the kids pick them up, and then taking them away and throwing them in the trash, to make a big show of parents not paying their lunch bills. That saved no dollars and punished the children for what the parents did, poor children disproportionately. Even though most of the kids’ families could afford the lunches, that’s just a shitty thing to do.
The cost actually is small, in the big picture. The truth is that the U.S. can easily afford to pay not just for lunch but for all of education, both elementary and higher education, and it pays for itself many times over, if we look at the extra income tax people with degrees pay over people who don’t have any higher education. We are choosing to not give our kids college degrees by default, and we are choosing to withhold hot lunches from elementary school kids, and it is not because it costs a lot, it would be trivial to fund (and we already proved that during COVID.) It’s because we have politics and a social belief system that is allergic to the idea of free lunch, regardless of the costs.