When a photo went viral on Vietnamese social media, a crisis of trust about "nutritious meal for students" was completely ignited-in the picture, a student lunch priced at 25,000 VND (about RMB 7.5 yuan) only consisted of white rice, 3 meatballs, a boiled egg, a side dish suspected of peanut salt and a small amount of soup. Instant fryer in the comment area: "You can't even buy a good piece of meat at this price in the vegetable market!" "It's the time for primary school students to grow up. Can such a meal be nutritious?" The source of this photo is the student lunch (bữ aăn bán trú) at Trư ờ Tiể u ọ c ố 1 Ba Đ ồn in Quang Tri Province, Vietnam on October 6.
Starting from the school’s food supply model: starting on September 22, this year, the school worked with individual to provide lunch services for 624 students from 1st to 5th grade, each priced at 25,000 Vietnamese shields. Parents paid directly to the supplier weekly or monthly, the school did not touch the funds, and was only responsible for supervision – established a daily menu supervision group, requiring students to eat at 10:30 in the classroom (one dish per day), if the director found that the meal was insufficient and needed timely feedback.
A package of 25,000 Vietnamese shields includes white rice, an egg, a few pieces of fish cakes and a few pieces of fish.The salt grains.
The key shift occurred at noon on October 6th. On the same day, parents sent photos of children's lunch to social platforms, instantly triggering a hot talk. In the dish in the photo, three sliced slices of meat dried, one boiled egg alone lying side by side, the so-called "supplements" are more like randomly sown a bit of smoothed peanut salt, and soup is less miserable. The netizens calculated a bill: according to the Vietnamese market price, 250,000 Vietnamese shields can buy at least half a kilo of pork or a few fresh eggs, but the meat bulbs and eggs in this meal are obviously insufficient, and the supplements can not talk about nutritional supplements.
In the face of the public opinion storm, Chen Thi Minh Thủy, the president of the school, apologized for the first time. She acknowledged in an open letter to her parents that the online photo was indeed the school’s lunch day, and recovered the incident: the supplier explained that because of the recent storm of African swine fever (dịch tả lợn châu Phi) overlap the effects of the typhoon, the food supply tension, the original menu of Chen Thi Minh (bí xào tỏi) due to delay in transportation could not be delivered on time, temporarily replaced with peanut salt, which is our management mistake.
What makes parents pay more attention to is the follow-up measures. The school promises to strengthen supervision. In the future, photos of each meal will be taken and sent to the class group, and the class teacher will forward them to the parents group to ensure the transparency of meals. "We can't let parents just listen to explanations, but also let them see actual actions," school staff said. At the same time, the Batunfang People's Committee (UBND phư ờ ng Ba Đ ồ n) also intervened in the investigation, requiring the school to submit a detailed report, comprehensively review the meal supply process, and strictly control every link from ingredient procurement, transportation to distribution to ensure the safety and nutrition of students' meals.
The event, which appears to be just a little bit of a “feeding insufficiency”, actually exposes the deep questions in student nutrition meal management: when schools outsource meal services to individual, how to ensure that suppliers do not reduce the quality in order to compress the cost? when parents can not directly participate in the meal supply process, can the school’s supervision mechanism really come into effect? more importantly, students are in a critical period of growth and development, a nutritionally balanced lunch is not only filling the hunger, but also an investment in the future – if even the most basic “eat well” can not be done, what about the quality of education?
On October 6th, a meal of 25,000 Vietnamese shields included white rice, half an egg, 3 pieces of fish cakes, peanut grains and soup.
To be sure, the school's quick response and sincere apology are worthy of recognition, but the key to solving the problem is more than "apology". How to establish stricter supplier screening criteria? How to make parents really participate in feeding supervision? How to improve transparency through technical means (such as real-time monitoring of kitchens and disclosing the source of ingredients)? These are all questions that need to be thought deeply.
For the majority of parents, children's health always comes first. A qualified campus lunch should be a warm care, rather than a "make do" perfunctory. I hope this incident can be an opportunity to promote the upgrading of students' nutritious meal management-after all, what we want is not only to "eat enough", but also to "eat well" and "eat healthily".