Visions for a Robust Canadian National School Lunch Policy: Lessons from Brazil

Abstract

What can Canada learn from Brazil's Programa Nacional de Alimentação Escolar (PNAE) to build a stronger, more equitable National School Food Program (NSFP)? This paper argues that well-intentioned national programs can still reproduce colonial and inequitable logics if they aren't designed with care. Using a threefold theoretical framework – policy transfer and lessondrawing theory (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000; Rose, 1991) and food sovereignty theory (Wittman, Desmarais, & Wiebe, 2010; Holt-Giménez et al., 2012; Coté, 2016), held throughout by a decolonial critique of extractive knowledge transfer (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2012) – this paper compares Brazil's PNAE, a decades-long, rights-based, and universally accessible program, with Canada's newly emerging NSFP. PNAE is treated here not as a blueprint but as a source of transferable design principles, deliberately reversing the usual assumption that policy expertise flows from the Global North to the Global South. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with nine food policy advocates, dietitians, educators, and researchers across five Canadian provinces, along with a comparative literature review, this study identifies eight recurring themes – funding, governance and accountability, universality, procurement, cultural relevance, community authority, food literacy, and political durability – that shape both the promise and the limits of Canada's program as it stands. The findings suggest the NSFP currently reflects a politics of aspiration rather than obligation, and that PNAE's most instructive lessons aren't technical but structural: legal enshrinement of the right to food, mandated local procurement, community governance with real authority, and integration with broader social protection. This paper contributes to a still developing literature on Global South-to-North policy learning in school food systems.