The authoritarian free lunch program a la Indonesia
It’s January 6th 2025, kids and teens everywhere in Indonesia return to school. One thing is different this time around though. With the finite wisdom of the 58%, these kids shall have free lunches. A brave step towards a more welfare oriented Indonesia. Parents everywhere cheer as they can save money on bringing their kids hearty home cooked meals and save up on their allowances. Kids everywhere cheer for the delicious free lunches given to them by their schools. All is happy.
But what happened today is no short of just an absolute dumpster show. All those things I wrote up there, yeah you hoped for too much. Trays of preprepared sub-standard meals are served to kids and teens K through 12, looking worse than even the worst cafeteria foods that salarymen fight for on the daily. Little tiny boxes of milk, 100ml in volume. Super tiny portions of tofu and raw vegetables alongside a bit of egg or 3 pieces of popcorn chicken, all served on an aluminum mess tray or a plastic bento box in some places. Kids everywhere dreading the look of the meals they’re being served.
Let me tell you, the looks on their faces, especially those poor children who got the absolute luck of being selected to be pointed a camera at by various TV stations all around Indonesia, it’s dreadful. It’s like they’re realizing how much they have taken their parents’ cooking for granted these days, feeling harrowed by the prospect of having to eat slop for lunch every single school day. It makes me feel for them, almost like they’re given a one way ticket towards childhood depression. One kid stated that their meals are tasteless, another described the meal as tasting weird. Overall it seems like these children are being forced against their will to eat what amounts to be slop. I’d argue something even worse than what our inmates live off of. It just feels inhumane to a certain extent.
Somehow they planned shit worse than I do
Like the problem arose with the fact that this program is just simply unintuitive for this scale. Feeding millions of kids, without any private sector collaboration, all prepared within the span of a month or two. It’s just bound to fail. Trillions of government funding set aside for this program for each day, asking help from China even to fund this absurd program. Yet in the end they only managed to budget around 10k IDR per child. My lunch today, as a working college student, was worth more than that, and it was nasi padang with a slice of egg and perkedel (mashed potato ball).
A budget of 10k IDR per child just feels so inadequate. Like the average salaryman eating their lunches at a Warteg would probably spend at least 15k IDR per day, and they are adults. These are children were talking about. Children who require diets that support their development and learning. Children who need as much food as they can get to comfortably study for a better future. Being provided less value by the government than their parents would usually provide them is just absurd. Not to mention the many ways that that 10k budget can be cut down even more behind the scenes by the caterers or the government officials looking to make a quick buck or two, a thing that almost every Indonesian knows is bound to happen sooner or later. Imagine letting the government feed your child with less food than you would personally eat on a daily basis. It’s just absurd.
Even if it all went to plan, if there is even any, two big problems still persist here. One leading to the other. First of all, children are picky eaters man. A lot of Indonesian children grew up liking or disliking certain foods, and this program with its fixed, random menus creates a problem for those in that majority who is actually picky. This is not even mentioning the amount of children who might have allergies to certain ingredients or even just straight up lactose intolerance. Like I’m no stranger to being a picky eater myself, I can’t for the life of me eat meats that have not been ground or processed. I just can’t. I can’t imagine myself being in the receiving end of these meals to the point that everyday I’d rather starve myself during the second half of the school day instead of eating those meals. And these are kids, they’re bound to have worse reactions sooner or later.
The second problem comes in the form of waste, both food waste and plastic waste. Segueing from the previous problem, mountainous amounts of food waste is bound to happen, and it’s a pity that this program will lead to such waste. I wouldn’t doubt that tons of food each day will be put to waste for a plethora of reasons, including kids who cannot eat the menu, overproduced sets of food items due to absences and the like, and potentially food spoilage and similar issues. Plastic waste would also be generated too since it seems like a good chunk of the schools participating prefer using single use plastic containers and bento boxes as the trays for serving their free lunches. It’s just wasteful.
The authoritarian spice
Along with these sub-standard meals come a secret ingredient provided straight from the days of the New Order era of Indonesia. Plain old intimidation and authoritarianism. Knowing that this program is doomed to fail and embarrass, schools took measures of ensuring the food they provide stay within the mind bubble of their students and faculty members. Some schools blatantly threaten the students with disciplinary action if they upload photos of their meals to social media, potentially causing a bad image to the school itself. This is just authoritarian, it’s orwellian almost. They provide bad, unenjoyable food, and they disallow them to complain. You will get free lunches and you will not complain. And remember who they’re enforcing this towards, the students.
Thankfully though, some parents and siblings of these students have taken the liberty of documenting the absurdly mismanaged and irresponsible program that is the Makan Siang Gratis program. And like these are students man, why are they threatening them to discourage complaining of their own rights? It’s just disingenuous and authoritarian for a country to let this happen in the first place.
Like at the very least, if you know this program is going to suck to the students, then at least rethink your plans. Take some delays and liberties to sort things out and make it more viable and actually welfare providing. Not turn into censorship of students. I can’t believe we have regressed this far since the start of the Reformation era that censorship is now a thing in schools. It’s a pity.
previously posted on Medium at https://medium.com/@fjello/spoon-fed-authority-f620df236b51
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