This town offers children free lunches on the playgrounds throughout the summer
Just when I thought Scandinavia couldn’t be more advanced, I came across a tweet that mentioned Helsinki, Finland’s summer playground dining program. Curiosity woke up immediately, I went into an exploratory rabbit hole to find out what it was. It turns out that’s exactly what its name suggests – a program that runs from June to August and feeds kids hot, free outdoor meals on playgrounds around town.
This significant tradition has continued for 80 years. As explained on the city’s website, public food distribution began in 1942, “in the midst of a war in which food shortages plagued most Helsinki residents. The city wanted to provide children with at least one hot meal a day.”
Even today, these playground meals make life easier for families. All children under the age of 16 are entitled to food as long as they arrive with an empty container and a fork or spoon – no parental supervision is required. (Drinks must also be brought from home.) Meals are served every weekday at noon in about 40 playgrounds around Helsinki. There are hundreds of children involved, and one playground in Orava feeds 100-200 children daily.
Eija Sormunen is one of the playground supervisors told HBL (translated from Finnish), “During the summer holidays, many school-age children come here to spend time and eat food while their parents are at work.” This amazed me, as did the comment added to the original tweet that warned me about tradition. William Doyle wrote, “Free / affordable playground day care allows parents to work. A super safe city full of 9-10 year olds alone. More than amazing.”
This hits so many Treehugger buttons that I don’t know where to start. I have long advocated greater independence for children, allowing them to move more freely in their home area and play actively with friends. But this requires parents to let their children go, give them the tools to take care of themselves, and trust that they will be able to handle the situations that arise. I’ve been complaining for a long time lack of support system which allows parents to do this.
However, the publicly funded lunch program will completely change the game. Not only can you be sure that your 9-year-old isn’t cooking (which is a little stressful if you’re not supervised at home), but you can also be sure that another adult (lunch provider) is keeping an eye on and that other children gather in the parks. Security is in the numbers.
Prioritizing healthy, nutritious meals – the HBL article has an example of children’s eating bowls of hot salmon soup – excites me, too. All too often, children are left to live with over-packaged snacks that parents find safe, instead of eating the hearty homemade meals their bodies need to grow – and developing varied flavors that are receptive to full-bodied flavors and seasonal ingredients. As stated on the city’s website, “This year’s menu features more traditional everyday dishes as well as vegetarian and vegan-friendly food to suit customers.”
The fact that everything is presumably waste-free and the child makes their own portion is also wonderfully refreshing. No stacks of dirty disposable bowls and disposable plastic spoons that are thrown away by the thousands every day – no, these children are supposed to be responsible enough to handle their own dishes. I guess they’ll wash them at home too.
This tradition solves the eternal dilemma of parents visiting the park about how to feed their children when they inevitably become hungry. When my kids were little, I was always awful packing snacks, and our trips often turned into frustrating trips that were sabotaged by hunger. Standing in the park sharing a warm lunch would have changed the game: one concern less and a profound incentive to go out every day.
One of the parents, a British man living in Helsinki, wrote to The Guardian in 2019, which describes how useful the Meal Program is for families regardless of their socioeconomic level. “This service is not specifically for the benefit of low-income parents, but rather as a leveler that brings all parents together regardless of other factors. It can be seen in many ways parallel to baby boxes that so many other nations around the world seem to be interested in.” He said he and his wife often take their children to parks that are well-equipped and maintained, “allowing children to play and make new friends while socializing with other parents.”
Sounds idyllic. But I keep coming back to this heart-warming vision a a lonely free-range child, hang out at home with their parents at work, able to run to the nearest park to enjoy a delicious lunch, visit with friends and play briskly for a few hours before returning home whenever they are ready. This is a society that is clearly designed and engineered for children, recognizing their inherent ability to treat them as equal citizens, which they deserve to be, rather than having to suffer from unpleasant afterthought until they become hard-working working adults.
I wish we could take a page from the book of Helsinki and create something similar here in Canada and the United States, but I’m afraid it will never work. Parents are not afraid to let their children out. They are afraid of what would happen and find themselves in trouble for promoting independence. The kids themselves are sensitive, picky, and are likely to get their noses into salmon soup – wouldn’t return for three servings, as one little boy described in the HBL story. Food allergies and possible burns and suffocation and it is good to know for what purpose exceptions should be signed. So the idea would die before it came true – and once again the children are the ones who suffer from it, signing up for boring but expensive summer activities that structure every activity for safety and are never allowed to just be.
Am I bitter? Maybe a little. I grieve for the many North American children who cannot enjoy the freedom that these Finnish children enjoy. We do a huge bear service for our kids by keeping them at home, and if something as small as a free playground lunch service can change that, we should fight our fingernails and teeth to make it happen here.